Employee engagement

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Employee engagement is a fundamental concept in the effort to understand and describe, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the relationship between an organization and its employees. An "engaged employee" is defined as one who is fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work and so takes positive action to further the organization's reputation and interests. An engaged employee has a positive attitude towards the organization and its values.^[1] In contrast, a disengaged employee may range from someone doing the bare minimum at work (aka 'coasting'), up to an employee who is actively damaging the company's work output and reputation.^[2]

An organization with "high" employee engagement might therefore be expected to outperform those with "low" employee engagement.

Employee engagement first appeared as a concept in management theory in the 1990s,^[3] becoming widespread in management practice in the 2000s, but it remains contested. Despite academic critiques, employee engagement practices are well established in the management of human resources and of internal communications.

Employee engagement today has become synonymous with terms like 'employee experience' and 'employee satisfaction', although satisfaction is a different concept. Whereas engagement refers to work motivation, satisfaction is an employee's attitude about the job--whether they like it or not. The relevance is much more due to the vast majority of new generation professionals in the workforce who have a higher propensity to be 'distracted' and 'disengaged' at work. A recent survey by StaffConnect suggests that an overwhelming number of enterprise organizations today (74.24%) were planning to improve employee experience in 2018.^[4]