Recent research suggests that high-involvement work practices can develop the positive beliefs and attitudes associated with employee engagement, and that these practices can generate the kinds of discretionary behaviours that lead to enhanced performance. Simply put, employees who conceive design and implement workplace and process changes are engaged employees.
Employee engagement can be critically important to competitiveness in the contemporary business environment. Employee engagement has three related components: a cognitive, an emotional, and a behavioural aspect. The cognitive aspect of employee engagement concerns employees’ beliefs about the organisation, its leaders, and working conditions.
The emotional aspect concerns how employees feel about each of those three factors and whether they have positive or negative attitudes toward the organisation and its leaders. The behavioural aspect of employee engagement is the value-added component for the organisation and consists of the discretionary effort engaged employees bring to their work in the form of extra time, brainpower and energy devoted to the task and the firm.
Recent research suggests that high-involvement work practices can develop the positive beliefs and attitudes associated with employee engagement, and that these practices can generate the kinds of discretionary behaviours that lead to enhanced performance.
Numerous authors have developed a long list of management practices for generating high involvement and high performance among employees. These range from selecting the right people for the organisation to a commitment to training and skill development, team based work organisation, job security, and incentive-based pay. Training programmes can be developed for current and future skills, technical and interpersonal skills, new hires and experienced employees. With all of the choices, developing a coherent set of high-involvement work practices that are consistent across the organisation and reinforce each other is a non trivial challenge for all managers.
Organisational effectiveness scholar Edward Lawler and his colleagues identified four interlocking principles for building a high-involvement work system that help to ensure that the system will be effective and that the various practices will work together to have a positive impact on employee engagement.
Power means that employees have the power to make decisions that are important to their performance and to the quality of their working lives. Power can mean a relatively low level of influence, as in providing input into decisions made by others or it can mean having final authority and accountability for decisions and their outcomes. Involvement is maximised when the highest possible level of power is pushed down to the employees that have to carry out the decisions. Creating forums for employees to develop and share ideas for improving firm performance can be effective, but only when good ideas from employees actually get used.
Information means data, including information on the quantity and quality of business unit output, costs, revenues, profitability, and customer reactions. A major challenge for managers developing a high-involvement work system is to create an information system that provides employees with data that is timely and relevant to their particular work process, that they can influence personally by either expending or withholding effort, and that they can understand.
The more transparent managers can make the firm’s operations, the more effectively employees can contribute to the firm’s success. Transparency is important because it helps employees see the link between their actions and the performance of the firm, thereby enhancing the cognitive aspect of engagement.
Knowledge, or employee skills and abilities, can be distinguished from information, which is the data employees use to make decisions and take action. Improving employees’ knowledge means a commitment to training and development. The training investments are essential in a high- involvement organization because when employees are making important workplace decisions, it is important that they have the skills and abilities to make the right decisions.
The rewards component of the high-involvement equation means rewarding employees for expending discretionary effort to enhance organisational performance. A key element in the high-involvement equation, rewards for performance ensure that employees use their power, information and knowledge for the good of the firm.
Culled from Alison M. Konrad’s engaging employees through high-involvement work practices
