Employee Engagement Amidst Work From Home

The concept of employee engagement was explored by William Kahn in 1990 in the management theory. Employee engagement describes how much the employees are engaged with the organization. It defines the nature of the relationship between the employees and the organization. The performance of an organization is also dependent on how much each employee is engaged in any given task.  

Employee engagement is beneficial in many ways like increased productivity, a rise in profitability, a decrease in absenteeism, customer satisfaction, and many more.

Employee engagement in this Situation

There are certain situations in which it is very difficult to engage employees just like the current scenario of the world facing pandemic “COVID19”. This pandemic disrupted the whole structure of the organization and every organization has to change their working style and change the culture and environment too. 

In this situation, the employee engagement is very difficult because employees are working from remote locations and with inter-dependence between the organizations, employee productivity stands to suffer. 

Such a situation has emerged after Second World War which has compelled employees to make this exponential use of technology for doing work from home. The challenge which work from home has posit for employees seeing that productivity stands challenged is employees as individual are in their comfort zone, following no office like work schedule due to this lockdown. Organizations are facing these teething problems from employees as they have never been exposed to perform in situations like this. Working and performing in this situation is not different than a house arrest and is quite uncomfortable for all especially for employees who are performing their duties on work from home mode. 

In This Situation The Employee May be Engaged With the Following Ways:

These are certain steps that could help to engage employees with the organization and also feel motivated. When the organizations are open and employees are gathering at one place, the environment to achieve the task is entirely a different ball game as compared to ‘work from home’. 

• The employer must be communicating to the employees on a daily basis to take the report the work they have done.
• Taking some steps that keep the employees safe and healthy.
• Do not make workplace policy to be followed rigidly.
• Provide some sort of technical aids which help the employees do their task. 
• Provide some platform where they could easily communicate.

This scenario may equip the employee with a skill or ability to answer how the work is done without going to the organization and it also could develop new theories and concepts which might help organizations and employees to switch to alternative modes of working.

So, at last, it is needless to say that employee engagement is very important for the success of the organization and they both should go hand in hand.

Written By:- Dr. Sahil Malik, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Management Studies, MRIIRS

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