Cultural Issues in Employee Engagement: Illuminate, Causes, and Significance

Introduction

Today’s management approach has been changed, Human Resource Department do lots of activity to engage, to enthuse and to excel the employees toward task. Famous organisation like Apple, Microsoft, Google and other companies follow the activities to build employee relations. Affection, Love and Cohesiveness are the social need of anyone’s. Today’s Human resource Department focuses on this social need to make a strong bond between the employer and employee.

Today’s world is digital world; thought processes and actions are continuously changing to face the challenges in this competitive world. Employee engagement is not tangible thing by which any organisation predicts the requirement of the employee by one touch, all employees are alike, degree of engagement will be different, and employees themselves will be responsible of own level of engagement. Companies have their own strategies to make employees engaged at a work place. These strategies may vary companies’ polices and work environment. According to the Gallup great work place award 2015; many popular companies who maintain the great workplace and environment to involve the employee into a work. ABC Supply Co., Inc, Indus Towers, Adena Health System and many more companies proved that engagement plays a vital role in the performance of the organisation. On above, Google, American Express, John Lewis, Hyatt, Southern Airlines and Virgin are on the top of the list of employee engagement. These companies focus on different approaches i.e. transparency, behaviour, listening to the employees, etc.

Employee engagement can be of three types with the perspective of employees. Some employees are actively engaged with passion, dedication and determination towards the companies. They do assignments with futuristic approach; give creative and innovative ideas to the development of the organisation. Second type of employee engagement i.e. Not engaged, these types of employees do their work without energy and passion; personality of these employees are sleepwalker and lazy. Third types of employee engagement is actively engaged, these employees are not only unhappy at the work place but it also affects other employee to make unhappy them. It has been proved by many researcher that highly engaged employee give healthy environment and higher productivity to the organisation. Engagement can affect employees’ attitudes, absence and turnover levels and various studies have demonstrated links with productivity, increasingly pointing to a high correlation with individual, group and organisational performance, a success measured through the quality of customer experience and customer loyalty. Beyond this, it is a challenge to manage diverse work force at a work place. To make a engaged employee, main issue which occur is cultural issues. Culture varies person to person

With advancement and enhancement in the usage of technologies, and the growing need to globalize organizations, industries are going across the national geographical boundaries and expanding the scope of their business dealings. Once a concern is globalized, the need for the search of the best person to carry out the respective tasks emerges. Now, that is something opening up new opportunities for candidates across international boundaries; making these boundaries thinner and gradually eliminating it as a criterion for choosing a job.

As we see these days, the supremacy of Multi-nationals is sprouting; and so is the need to have different people from various countries and cultural backgrounds. This cultural mix is a boon to any organization in terms of new ideas, unique creativity, increased exposure, foster innovation, richer brainstorming and better customer understanding and decision making; but the same gives rise to a number of cultural issues in the organization too, like- the unclear culture, resistance to changes, vague assumptions, reduced communication, and the list continues. Employee engagement has become a crucial topic in the organisation to compete in the market, it is necessary to having highly engaged employee at a workplace.