Employee engagement

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT has become a mainstream concept throughout organizations, including corporate boardrooms. The rise of digital transformation as a strategy and the emergence of the millennial generations gave it much prominence in the recent years.

But the first use of the term occurred in a

1990

Academy of Management Journal article of William A. Kahn about the psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work which examined the conditions at work that contribute to engagement and disengagement. His finding showed that the individual and contextual sources of meaningfulness, safety, and availability had a significant impact on engagement.

It garnered speed and awareness during the internet growth of the 2000’s which facilitated employee communications through email and mobile phones. This era of employee mobility and virtual work necessitated the need for organizations to engage employees better. After a decade, tons of research had established the business case evidence on employee engagement with the business benefits of performance, safety, profits, retention, and wellbeing, among others.

In recent years with technological advances, many human resource practitioners thought that they can determine employee engagement by just conducting SurveyMonkey surveys across the organization. Everyone seemed to have a new survey and a new definition of engagement.

Until now, practitioners and researches seem to have no common definition of what employee engagement is.

REYNALDO C. LUGTU, JR. is President & CEO of Hungry Workhorse Consulting, a digital and culture transformation firm. He is the Chairman of the Information and Communications Technology Committee of the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines.He teaches strategic management in the MBA Program of De La Salle University. The author may be emailed at rey.lugtu@ hungryworkhorse.com