Home Depot Employee Engagement Examples

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is based on the relationship between people and organizations. People and organizations need each other. Organizations need ideas, energy, and talent; people need careers, salaries, and opportunities (Bolman & Deal, 2013, p. 117). The facts are that employee engagement is based on employee needs. As an example Apple’s offshore employees that make their products suffer in bad conditions with long hours, low pay, and intense pressure to mass produce more product. This company is an example of not having very good employee engagement. Employee engagement is about taking care of the people in your organization to allow them to grow and prosper. Employees gain motivation and interest in the success of the

organization when their needs are being met.
First strategy that I would apply would be employee empowerment. The act of allowing someone to make decisions on their own gives the employee a sense of self-worth.

Northouse (2012) states “All of us have a need to feel competent. We want to present ourselves in a way that suggest to others and ourselves that we know what we are doing” (p.214). Letting employees feel empowered makes them feel competent and this is a great step towards a highly motivated person. When I worked at Home Depot our managers would always say “remember you are empowered to make a healthy decision to better help the customer”. This empowerment did not help anyone, but the customer. We were empowered to give the customer a price break. The type of empowerment I am talking about has to be genuine. The employee needs to know that you really feel they have what it takes to have a voice in what happens in day to day operations. This leads to job satisfaction. Job satisfaction relates to the degree in which an individual feels positive or negative about a job. Job satisfaction is an attitude, not necessarily a predictable one. Links between attitudes and intended behavior is important to understand as a leader. People comment about expressed attitudes by peers often in the workplace. They are either positive or negative about their current situation. Attitudes come

in different forms like job satisfaction, job involvement, organizational commitment and employee engagement. People can show displeasure with their jobs and remain working at that same job for years. The need for their job becomes more important that the attitude of not liking it. An effective leader helps others achieve job satisfaction. In order to achieve this, one must create a work environment that develops both high performance and high job satisfaction. Leaders can use careful observation, interviews and questionnaires to examine how satisfied people really are. These tools give you a snap shot of areas that may need more attention as an organization. Some of the aspects examined are working conditions, advancement, praise, feeling of accomplishment and freedom to express judgment.