Management holds key to employee engagement | HR Magazine | Find Articles at BNET

Finding and keeping the right people with the right skills presents a major challenge for organizations. Engaging those people to voluntarily deliver maximum effort in key strategic areas adds another dimension to the challenge.

Achieving success requires the active and willing participation of the organization's workforce. However, a new survey finds that only one in seven employees worldwide is fully engaged with their work. There is a vast, largely untapped reserve of employee performance potential.

How can organizations engage workers and tap into this reserve? You can't order people to generate new ideas or to be more cost-conscious or more productive. Employees need to care about their organization and be committed to its success.

The Global Workforce Study, by consultancy Towers Perrin, found that while many people are eager to contribute more at work, the actions of their managers and culture of their organizations--with HR professionals playing a major role--may discourage them from doing so.

Some of the study's findings challenge commonly accepted workplace assumptions. For example, conventional wisdom holds that some people are natural self-motivators and others aren't--that's the way it is, and nothing can change it. The survey found otherwise--that people's engagement with their work is directly affected by their experience within their organizations.

Management holds key to employee engagement | HR Magazine | Find Articles at BNET