Employee Engagement: Key Implications For Human Resource Management Practices

Employee Engagement (EE) has been the deciding factor of organizational success in the recent years. The conflict for talent today is one of the prime challenges faced by organisations, both large and small, and it has become increasingly harder to attract and retain the right talent that is necessary to sustain a stable workforce. To keep today's dynamic workforce engaged, is the overarching need for the practitioners and academicians alike. The prominence of engaged employees is depicted in the strong bottom line outcomes, productivity, retention, low attrition. Engagement has gained huge momentum in the past 2.5 decades. Hence to leverage engagement in the minds of employees, various enablers/drivers have been identified based on the industry needs and generational differences. Extant literature identifies rational drivers like pay and rewards, personal development and career development) and emotional drivers(feeling valued and involved, involvement in decision making...) to drive engagement in the work place. This paper consolidates the research activities of EE and the Human Resource Management (HRM) practices that enable engagement further in the minds of the employees. Mainly HRM practices are targeted because, any organization has to have robust HRM practices to address the needs of the workforce. HRM practices is an umbrella term which can address the individual differences of the employees. In addition, though engagement has been in the news for the past 2.5 decades for engagement to deliver its purported benefits engagement needs to be explicitly embedded within an integrated system of HRM policies, practices and procedures This paper brings about an integrative review of employee engagement and HRM practices to harness engagement in the minds of employees which will result in organizational effectiveness and accentuates EE as a tool for competitive advantage.