Enhancing Effective Staff Engagement

Introduction

The importance of effective staff engagement on productivity, customer service and profitability has been demonstrated in multiple research studies.

Complex, large-scale service industries can be particularly sensitive and yet it is also these sectors that face the greatest challenges in developing and retaining well motivated staff.

OneView is specially designed to address key challenges and support enhanced staff engagement. It offers management the potential to improve business performance on multiple levels, whilst also contributing to reduced staff turnover and associated recruitment costs.

Staff Engagement

Effective employee engagement creates the conditions in which all staff members have a commitment to their organisation’s goals and values, are motivated to contribute to organisational success, and to deliver individual performance to their maximum potential.

But achieving effective employee engagement is far from a singular process. Rather, it is the result of broad management approaches spanning overall leadership and corporate culture, day-to-day operational management, and administrative norms. Advanced workforce scheduling and optimisation systems such as OneView can contribute to these approaches at planning, information management and process levels.

To consider the ways in which leading information systems can support staff engagement, it is useful to use the work of Frederick Herzberg to briefly consider the different aspects of personal motivation and engagement.

It may be nearly sixty years since Herzberg developed his “two factor theory of motivation”, but the principles remain as true as ever. Herzberg’s research identified certain factors that cause job satisfaction (motivators), while a separate set (hygiene factor) cause dissatisfaction. His work demonstrated that dissatisfaction can be reduced by improvements in the “hygiene factors”, but these improvements alone did not provide motivation. As illustrated in the table below, the theory demonstrates how a combination of factors can influence overall satisfaction; both factors need to be high for full engagement.

Through his work, Herzberg identified that the “motivators” that provide positive satisfaction arise primarily from the intrinsic conditions of the job itself, such as recognition, achievement, or personal growth. In contrast, “hygiene factors” are primarily extrinsic to the work itself, and include aspects such as company policies, supervisory practices, remuneration, communication, and allied administration. OneView can support positive motivators and reduce de-motivators, helping to realise benefits at staff, productivity, and stomer levels in the following ways.

In complex, resource intensive industries that frequently operate a scheduled workforce in order to deliver round the clock services, the range and depth of “hygiene factors” is greatly heightened.