10. A Holistic Approach to Employee Engagement

Engaging with employees has always attracted a degree of mystery for corporations and management across the world. The nature of corporations and management styles has evolved over time with more sophisticated workplace understanding, technological developments, and new societal norms and trends. However, the need to touch people to keep them more engaged and eventually more productive has always surfaced newer challenges. Not too long ago, a purely functional approach would have led management to consider employee satisfaction (rather than engagement) as a factor of monetary payouts. This later changed to the inclusion of fun and camaraderie at the workplace as contributing to creating a more satisfying and rewarding work experience. Organisations moved further on to give employees the opportunity to learn and develop as better professionals, partnering with them to give back to the society and even letting employees do what they would like to do where the organisation simply offers the most fertile soil for employees to flourish. Despite a range of academic deliberations and management experimentations, employee engagement still remains a mystery for many. This chapter presents the mainstream discussions and models on employee engagement. I will draw on my experience of working in talent consulting with various clients in different sectors and present a case study of an employee engagement project that I led. My arguments will focus on how we can have a more holistic approach to employee engagement considering the multitude of dimensions that are at play for an individual in an organisation. Challenges, opportunity areas and learning from real-life experience will be presented to bring home the fact that engagement is not a stand-alone concept, but is an integral element for the business.