In the last decade, employee engagement has been one of the popular Human Resources (HR) topics in the limelight. Many organisations have strived to create an engaged working environment for its employees through the implementation of various initiatives, such as employee engagement activities.
During my work attachment, I was part of the team that oversees the development of the organisation’s employee engagement activities. Based on observation, responses for certain activities can be rather lukewarm and it seem that not many of employees are receptive to the activities introduced despite continual efforts in promoting the activities.
This had allowed me to understand that approaches in enhancing employee engagement are easier said than done; reason being efforts and time invested does not warrant necessarily success in the employee engagement. At the same time, such situation inspired me to investigate further on the factors that influence employees’ decision in the participation of employee engagement activities. Hence, this explained the birth of my applied project topic.
From this applied project, I had found out that reasons such as work environment characteristics (i.e. social support), mandatory attendance, fulfilment of esteem needs and situational constraints (i.e. tight deadlines and overwhelming workloads) contributed to the choice of participation in employee engagement activities. Consequently, these reasons will serve as the drivers to employee engagement. Such findings were in contrary to what I had believed to be the reasons in individual’s choice of participation in employee engagement activities. Prior to this, I had thought that the types of activities (i.e. D&D or sport days) would be one of the reasons.
Other than that, I also had the misconception that employee engagement is all about employee engagement activities. But through this applied project, I understood that employee engagement goes beyond having activities. Efforts from every stakeholder (e.g. managers, HR personnel or co-workers) in the organisation are necessary in driving employee engagement. Among this group of stakeholders, it is undeniable that managers play the most significant part in driving employee engagement since they are the direct report of the employees and would be in contact with the employees most of the time. This established the fact that the manager’s role is crucial in employee engagement. To determine whether employees are considered as engaged or not, it would be dependent on the manager’s leadership, actions and the ability in creating a harmonious working environment.
All these new insights that I gained from the applied project had concluded that the knowledge I had about employee engagement was rather superficial prior to the commencement of applied project. I am glad that through this assignment, I managed to get a greater insights and richer information about employee engagement from the interviews I conducted with my participants.
Another takeaway I had from this applied project was the experience in doing a qualitative research. I went ahead with qualitative research without much prior experience as I know that this method will help me get the most information for my research topic. I would not deny that I faced numerous setbacks along the process. Nonetheless, I overcome them through discussion with my classmates and mentor as well as finding out more about it online. Since qualitative research also involved interviewing participants, I managed to polish my communication skill and confidence.
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