Leading and Managing People

Aim: To develop a critical awareness of current factors required for leading and managingpeople effectively for sustained organisational economic performance, competitiveness and prosperity.

Learning Outcomes:

To be able to

- Demonstrate critical knowledge and understanding around key and contemporary debates about theory and practice in the specific field of employee engagement.

- Evaluate and analyse any given workplace scenario relating to effective people performance and management within the organisational context;

- Diagnose and identify appropriate solutions to any issues or problems that will limit optimum work performance or affect the application and utilisation of worker capability.

Context:

Your Chief Executive Officer (CEO) has just returned from a conference where h/she attended a presentation on engagement. The speakers, from a variety of organisations in the public and private sector, presented case studies detailing the organisational benefits that they had received from the engagement strategies that they had introduced. Although each speaker seemed credible, it appeared that what was meant by the term engagement differed from speaker to speaker. Furthermore, each organisation seemed to measure engagement in a different way and report different outcomes.

Although still very interested in how engagement can benefit your organisation, your CEO has asked you to undertake some research in order to understand what engagement is and whether it really does have the reported benefits of improving performance. H/she would like to know more about what the organisation can do to change levels of engagement.

Your Task:

Within your own organisation (or one with which you are familiar), draw on relevant research evidence and organisational practice to produce a short report of approximately 2000 words addressed to your organisation's Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, that:

1. Critically analyses the concept of employee engagement;

2. Critically analyses the relationship between levels of engagement and organisational performance in your own organisation;

3. Makes recommendations to achieve changes to levels of engagement in your organisation.

Introduction
(Around 200 words). Short introduction to the report setting out what the aims and objectives of the report are, what the report will cover and why. You may want to provide a very brief overview of your organisation at this stage

Literature Review

(Task 1, around 800 words) Using relevant academic literature or practitioner-orientated material for support,briefly analyse the theoretical concept underpinning engagement, explaining what it is and why engagement is such a ‘hot topic' in management circles.To what extent it is thought to work or not and why it benefits (or not) an organisation. You should make reference to any relevant theory, models, frameworks etc. of engagement and include critical viewpoints. You are also expected to include relevant examples of at least one or two organisations and their engagement strategies.

Discussion
(Task 2, around 600 words) Consider the existence and impact of engagement strategies on your organisation by evaluating how your organisation engages the workforce at different levels and in different ways. How do these strategies help the organisation to perform (achieve its goals and gain competitive advantage)?

Conclusions and recommendations
(Task 3, around 400 words) This section should initially answer your report objectives and draw together the main points from your analysis of literature and other discussion about your organisation. It summarises what has been learned from undertaking this research. It should also begin to weigh up the options available to the organisation and what would impede implementation of further action. It should reach an overall conclusion as to the extent and effectiveness of engagement strategies on your organisation and begins to identify the way forward. No new information should be presented in the conclusions.

Make a considered initial list of no more than four relevant recommendations for improving engagement based upon your conclusions, clearly stating how they can add value to the organisation.