People Management

Employee engagement has become a top business priority. In this rapid cycle economy, business leaders know that having a high-performing staff is essential for progress and existence.  They identify that a highly engaged workforce can increase innovation , productivity , and bottom-line performance while reducing costs related to hiring and retention in highly competitive talent marketplaces. But while most executives see a clear need to improve employee commitment, many have yet to develop noticeable ways to measure and challenge this goal.  However, a growing group of best-in-class companies says they are gaining competitive advantage through establishing metrics and practices to effectively calculate and improve the impact of their engagement initiatives on overall business performance.

Work redesign is becoming increasingly prominent as a strategy for attempting to improve simultaneously the productivity and the quality of the work experience of employees in contemporary organizations.  Although the benefits of work redesign (or "job enrichment" or "job enlargement") are widely touted in the management literature, in fact little is known about the reasons why "enriched" work sometimes leads to positive outcomes for workers and for their employing organizations. Even less is known about the relative effectiveness of various strategies for carrying out the redesign of work  (Hackman, 1 975) .