Engaging Employees Through High-Involvement Work Practices

Employee engagement can be critically important to competitiveness in the contemporary business environment. This article focuses on what managers can do to achieve a high level of employee engagement. A high involvement work system can be built using four interlocking principles described in this article; providing employees with power, information, knowledge and rewards. Power means that employees have the power to make decisions that are important to their performance and to the quality of their working lives. Employees should have access to an information system that provides employees with data that is timely and relevant. Knowledge includes employee skills and abilities used to make decisions and take action. Lastly, employees must be rewarded for expending discretionary effort to enhance organizational performance. Evidence of the effectiveness of high-involvement work practices has been documented in several research studies that are described in this article. While large studies have confirmed the positive effects of high-involvement work practices in manufacturing, impressive results have recently been documented showing that high-involvement work practices can be generalized to the service industry sector. Lastly, the article examines how firms can implement high-involvement work practices. The author highlights the importance of a self-design change strategy that requires managers to develop a vision of the new organization and state it in broad terms, leaving the more specific designing to be done by individual work units.