Employee engagement is a management technique in which the leaders of an institution invite and consider the contribution of their employees when making decisions (Macey and Schneider, 2008). Employee engagement is essential in many modern workplaces, since the managers may be unaware of some of the challenges their teams encounter regularly. Therefore, employee engagement is slowly becoming a critical aspect of successful management. The failure to engage employees can have catastrophic effects on the morale and performance of the employees. For example, if the employees do not have an avenue to raise concerns about incidents of bullying, harassment, or abuse, the perpetrators of such unethical practices might have the licenses to continue antagonizing their colleagues. Employee engagement, therefore, is necessary to keep away such cases of unfair treatment at the workplace.
In a hospital setup, nurses work under the supervision of a medical doctor. The doctor works autonomously in providing the guidelines on the treatment procedures (Krogstad, Hofoss, and Hjortdahl, 2004). Therefore, if the doctor chooses to overwork their nursing team, the management might not become aware of it if the nurses do not get a chance to express their grievances. They may end up working unnecessarily long hours without due compensation. Similarly, the doctors can exploit their autonomy to abuse the nurses, physically, verbally, or even sexually. Weak communication structures would make it difficult for such a nurse to report such a case. The same applies to instances of bullying.
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An organization’s management, therefore, has a critical role to play in ensuring that such incidents do not happen. Employee engagement could prove to be an essential tool for them. For example, through open discussions, the managers can inquire from their employees about their preferred work structures and schedules. The employees would then provide insights about how they believe they can be the most efficient. The management would then create policies based on the employees’ input. Therefore, any mid-level managers would have to follow a company-approved management script. The policies would limit the freedom of unethical employees who might want to bully, harass, or abuse their colleagues.
Similarly, the management can conduct regular, private reviews with every employee. Such a forum can either be a one-on-one conversation or written responses to questionnaires. Through these frequent encounters, the employees would not only get the chance to provide work-flow insights, but they would get inconspicuous opportunities to report cases of unethical and illegal treatment. One of the challenges that victims of abuse, bullying, and harassment face the lack of a forum in which they can air their grievances without the rest of the team knowing. That is one major limitation of filling human resource reports of indecent and unprofessional behavior. However, regular employee participation meetings would provide one with an opportunity to air their grievances with none the wiser.
Poor employee engagement causes low workplace morale. The performance of the employees, therefore, dips (Johnson, 2009). If the clients are patients, such as at a hospital, poor service delivery is easy to establish. Patients will, therefore, complain and make unrealistic demands from the nurses that are attending to them. Since the nurses might not be in a position to fulfill those demands, the patients may end up getting frustrated, and therefore treat the nurses unkindly. The patients can insult, abuse, or harass the staff, and since the organizational structure does not accommodate the input of the employees, such cases will remain unaddressed.
Employee engagement is vital to the growth and sustainability of many organizations today. It not only provides the management with information on how to improve the work but also provides an avenue for employees to raise their concerns. It is especially important if there are issues about harassment, bullying, or abuse by some employees.
References
Johnson, C. (2009). Bad Blood: Doctor-Nurse Behavior Problems Impact Patient Care. 2009 Doctor-Nurse Behavior Survey, 1(1), 1-19.
Krogstad, U., Hofoss, D., and Hjortdahl, P. (2004). Doctor and Nurse Perception of Inter-Professional Co-operation in Hospitals. International Journal for Quality in Health Care , 16(6), 491–497.
Macey, W., & Schneider, B. (2008). The Meaning of Employee Engagement. Industrial and Organizational Psychology , 1(1), 3-30.
