Analysis of Employee Engagement within Organization

Question

Task: The organisation has hired you as an external management consultant to help them analyse employee motivation and provide solutions to the following situation:
During the COVID-19 pandemic many employees started working from home, many for the first time. However, working from home is not always easy, and employees may need additional support. During this transition, a medium sized accounting organisation completed a survey on employee satisfaction and found out that majority of the employees are not motivated to work as a result of a range of pressures and challenges they are facing. The key work-related reason for their lack of motivation includes poor management. Working from home can exacerbate this issue. What can be done to resolve this issue and improve employee motivation? Put yourself in a role of a consultant, and write a report outline on the following:

• Introduction: Discuss relationship between employee engagement, employee needs and their behaviours. You are expected to draw your arguments from the academic literature on this topic.
• Identify and discuss min two and max three organisational constraints employees in the scenario may encounter when working from home and how this may impact their self-efficacy, a personal resource that helps people deal with adversity.
• Analyse and evaluate employee motivation in the scenario using one of the following theories of motivation: a) Vroom’s expectancy theory or b) Adam’s equity theory. Explain how the chosen theory is/(not) relevant to the scenario (strengths and limitations of a theory depend on the context where it is being applied).
• Based on your analysis and additional assumptions made about the scenario, explain any three relevant extrinsic and/or intrinsic motivators of your choice that could motivate employees in the given scenario.
• Conclude with explaining the implications of your findings for the employer.

Answer

Introduction:
Employee motivation is the impact of the social and emotional relationship workers feel about the job they do. The employee engagement soon becomes one of the most significant measurements of job satisfaction. Today's employees search for anything than a career for nine to five. They want to participate, be passionate about the organization for which they serve and devote themselves to their colleagues. Employee engagement seems to be that is how excited people are about their careers, loyal to the organization and committed to the organization. The commitment of employees does not equal the happiness of their employees. According to the management of the company named Sage group plc mostly on the base level will employee happiness be evaluated. Satisfied workers are generally not going forward or further. They normally stay there, but they don't go the beyond that. Employee welfare assesses many aspects of the career of an employee, including how effectively they deal with uncertainty or whether they achieve their potential. Resources will enhance employee participation by providing support to maximize employee welfare. The impact of work from home culture on the employees has been a critical scenario these days. So, the different aspects of this situation have to be analyzed with different point of views. The impact of employee engagement in organization and employee motivation has been discussed further in this report.

Discussion:
Analysis on employee engagement and behavior:
Small commitment can be affected by a number of reasons, among which managers lack respect, inadequate contact with companies and not in line with the organization's strategy. It is apparent, when committed workers result in longer term job satisfaction, higher turnover rates and better job efficiency, corporate executives must start to regard employee participation as a strategic business goal (Mone et al., 2018). Committed workers peer at the whole organization to consider how they integrate in.

This would improve the decision-making process. The motivation of employees is essential in every organization, and if workers are not happy with their work, they lack passion for their position day by day and the development of their businesses. If workers work and are happy with their role, they relate better with the employer and are also more able to deliver better work, which helps both the business and the client. Highly committed workers take a very positive view of their workplace (Locke &Schattke, 2019). As workers are in touch with their teams, enjoy their work and feel good about the business, they really would like to continue and to do something to help the company prosper. Employees who are moderately involved see their organization. They enjoy their business, but they see process improvements. These workers are less expected to be demanding and failing to carry out further tasks. There's something that keeps them from full commitment about the company or their work. Organizations of committed employees compete well. They are receiving more per share and rebound faster from recessions and financial losses. In terms of growth and creativity, commitment is a major differentiator. The rate of success of committed organizations is double that of less engaged ones. Workers who are active get more engaged and work much harder while employees with disengagement are expected to do just as little as possible. This applies to multi-industry organizations, including medical organizations. Managing employee participation is an important part of maintaining a high productivity level in a company. It can be guaranteed that they are not as active as they should if workers are not interested in the company and pleased at their job (Kuvaas et al., 2017). It is difficult for enterprise to compare levels of commitment and efficiency. The central problems of employee participation are also missed by enterprises when executives believe that their commitment is specifically connected to salary and conditions. Most leaders quit the business because of the lack of promotions or the attraction of better jobs elsewhere (Ryan &Deci, 2020). Employee involvement is a field normally driven by an internal coordination function or a staff functions in certain companies. The involvement of people should be seen from a perceptual, emotional and behavioral point of view. The cognitive factor centers on the understanding and expectations of workers about the organization, their representatives and workplace circumstances (Gerhart& Fang, 2015). The emotional factor is whether the employee's outlook towards the company and its executives is constructive or negative. The cognitive element influences the interpersonal perspective. The behavioral element of commitment encourages the employee to make their discretionary effort useful for the job, which gives the company added value. The marginal effort increases if workers are engaged. Employees continue to go over their basic work conditions. In directing motivation and commitment in the right way, leaders and administrators influence workforce participation with many company results. It also helps in productivity increase and in maintaining quality of the work.

Impact of organizational constraints:
Organizational limitations are characterized as facets of the current working environment that prevent motivation and skills from evolving into successful results. Highly employee-engaged organizations, with the added side benefit of cleaner, happier and low austerity and decreased sale workers, gain a strong level of consumer loyalty and high quality, operating performance as well as productivity (Bear et al., 2017). The engagement of employees to achieve major project completion measures like production efficiency and safety serves a vital role in the construction sector. Managers mould their actions to represent the success assessment and incentive structure of the organization, to cooperate with formal rules of the company and to follow time limits established organizationally (Legault, 2016). Earlier corporate decisions are also a precedent for restricting new decisions. The confidence in self-efficacy affects the duration of staff work in demanding activities. Highly self-efficient employees will remain in hardship for longer as they're surer that their mission will be learned and executed effectively. The constraint that can be observed for the work from home scenario is heavy workload. For the work from home policy, the time schedule management has become a big concern for the employees as well as the organization (Kaliannan&Adjovu, 2015). For the employees it may be difficult to balance the work life and their personal work while working from home. Another issue that can be considered is problem in communication with the team. Employee interaction is very much important an organization to run their projects successfully. It is also impossible to get tasks completed with the abundance of notifications, updates and conversations from different colleagues on many networks. Lagging of Internet and networking is problematic and often stopped, meaning synchronous correspondence (Kang & Sung, 2017). So technology constraint is also one of the issues that can be focused on. The key technological challenge companies have to cope with working remotely is poor home internet connection. These can hamper the productivity as well as the quality of the work.

Analysis of the application of Adam’s equity theory of motivation:
Adams' Equity theory asserts for an equal balance of employee contributions such as hard work, experience, approval, passion, etc. and also calls about the outputs of the employees like salary, recognition, incentives and benefits etc. Adams equity-motivation theory suggests that people must realize that incentives for their efforts are all well and equal to those won by their coworkers to be inspired (L?z?roiu, 2015). If they believe like the incentives are unfair, they are troubled and that they are trying to adjust it and build a feeling of justice. A number of distinct variables may be considered as inputs. Time, knowledge, previous experience, effort, dedication, hard work, creativity, flexibility, motivation, excitement, adaptability, patience, support for the others, and confidence and readiness to obey leaders. The various workers are treated individually and wrongly, leading to bad relations and damaging many people's morale. Over both, everyone deserved equal treatment. If not, workers would be frustrated, and they will show up in many ways (Ryan, 2016). As per the hypothesis, achieving this equal balance ensures a strong and fruitful partnership with the worker, thus satisfying and motivating workers in the ultimate outcome. Inputs could be understood as what an employee does with an organization to accomplish an objective. This is the contribution of the employee to the company. The time a person spends working should be the first point to mention. By working and carrying out their duties, workers make an effort daily basis. This is the simplest input standard. Employees are skilled and experienced in doing their tasks. By preparation and experience, they acquired those skills. Without practice, employees cannot use their skills well. This is why knowledge is seen as very important and extraordinary feedback (Chandani et al., 2016). Employees maintain that they are part of the community and thus of the entire organization by treating one another with empathy.

Agreement is part of this, too. Employees may encourage reciprocal understanding by acknowledging and respecting the behavior of everyone else. If people think something unjust, they are looking to make things right. Maybe the real contribution number can be modified or the assumption that the contribution amount can be modified by adapting the values on the perspectives of various people. This adjustment mechanism is often referred to as perceptual distortion. As per the company Sage group plc, they are trying to do their best in this situation. For the work from home process, they should maintain a proper time schedule for better communication. More they can do is to organize different virtual discussion sessions and programs to motivate the employees and the management should put more effort in the reward process of the employees for their cooperation and hard work (Lloyd &Mertens, 2018). For the better performance the company Sage group plc should put more effort in applying this theory in their management of employees. They should identify the hard work of the employees even in work from home situation. Also a reward option should be implemented in order to motivate the employees for their good work which will help them to integrate their work process and they will be happy for the cooperation of the organization (Ross &Kapitan, 2018). Leaders and administrators should work diligently to ensure that they are fair while treating their workers and deal with the real relationship between sacrifices and compensation. They should stop favorites, equate workers to benchmarks, grant persons equal opportunity to show their skills and have equally well-founded recognition. They ought to see to it that they ask out and counter problematic behaviors, as this does not help them to feel unjust. The management should put more effort in building good relationship among the employees and there should be flexibility according to the project requirement for the better performance of the employees. It will also help to maintain the quality of their work. It is really essential for the workers to find equal and equitable care (Al Mehrzi& Singh, 2016). They still compare their contributions to both the input and performance of their colleagues, working for justice, and the incentives they have for this. Despite this reality, workers are mindful that various forms of commitment and expertise are needed at various levels and are thus differently compensated. Nevertheless, workers do not believe like they are doing the same attempt to achieve higher standards as peers without receiving the same pay. This suggests that in addition to hold everyone comfortable, duties are assigned to lower ranking workers.

Recommendations:
Encouraging proper interaction with the employees will provide a positive link between the organization and the staff. The concern with disengaged workers is that they don't feel responsible for the enterprise for which they operate because they don't really have any concern. Committed staff knows they are a member of the organization for which they serve and that they do not want to abandon it. A big advantage of staff being committed is that they have been obedient and therefore serve as business ambassadors. Employees start identifying themselves with the vision, ideals and priorities of the organization with proper contact (Eldor&Vigoda-Gadot, 2017). They would be motivated to do well and get more involved in any area of the work. The organization Sage group plc should review the performance of the employees frequently and they can initiate different discussion sessions with their employees to understand their issues and other activities. Goals allow each team to consider the commitment of each person to the progress of their organization. If the workers feel comfortable at work, they work much harder and if they strive effectively more quality work is produced, which ultimately indicates a happier customer (Saks, 2019). This is such an easy way to raise the viability of the business, but too many companies look outwards rather than inward. No organization will prosper without a stable basis and a dedicated team will be the only way to make sure that this strong base. An ongoing feedback atmosphere will accelerate progress for the employee, team and company. Leaders and management require good insight into the talent base of the organization, to promote and improve skills, in order for them to make educated choices on maintaining and developing key talent (Mann & Harter, 2016). Employees with commitment will perform easier, harder and better because they enjoy everything they do. They are more likely to do everything better when they are involved in and related to what they're doing. In addition, when workers are committed and are handled well by their employers, they are responsible to make the utmost efforts in order to respond positively this respect. To resolve the issues faced by the employees for the remote working process, they can maintain a particular time schedule to complete their tasks and also can use the reminder option for the meetings and all (Kumar &Pansari, 2015). It will help them to maintain a healthy time management to ease their work. Management should keep a healthy communication among the employees and should have discussion sessions to reach to each employee. Extrinsic motivation applies to external recompense induced behavior. Such rewards may be real, like money or promotions, or inviolable, like recognition or glory. Unlike the inherent motivation that exists in the organism, external motivation is concentrated exclusively on external incentives. Extrinsic motivation can be effective in encouraging employee motivation which is very much important for any organization. The company Sage group plc can implement public recognition of the employees to motivate them for good work. Also there should be good social status for the promotion and higher post (Sun &Bunchapattanasakda, 2019). The incentive policy is a good approach to motivate the employees and bonus for their extra effort to the work will also help them to work more efficiently for the projects in the work from home situation as well.

Conclusion:
Hence, from the report it is observed that employee engagement plays an important role in the growth of the organization. In the work from home scenario it is very much important to maintain the productivity and quality of the work. So, employees should be motivated to work according to the requirements. There should be paid more attention towards proper communication and time scheduling for the smooth work process. Employees should be motivated through different policies like incentives, social recognition and all. Sage group plc is doing well in their work and they should pay more attention to motivate their employees for the better delivery of their work which will help in the growth of the employees as well as the organization.

Reference:
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