1.2 Antecedents to employee engagement
HRM policies and practices used to elicit employee engagement can be applied to the individual employee, to employees as a collective group or, as is sometimes argued, to both. A useful model here is the ‘VOICE framework’, outlined in Storey et al. (2009), as a means of addressing factors that might lead to appropriate employee engagement (see Figure 1). Click on the letters on the left-hand side of the image below to explore the different components of the VOICE framework.
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Figure 1 The VOICE framework
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The CIPD (2014a) have identified three related aspects of engagement that are also helpful in thinking about policies and practices that need to be in place to ensure these are facilitated:
- intellectual engagement – thinking hard about the job and how to do it better
- affective engagement – feeling positively about doing a good job
- social engagement – actively taking opportunities to discuss work-related improvements with others at work.
The CIPD (2014a) further suggest that organisations need to pay attention to:
- effective communications that keep employees well informed and reinforce the organisation’s purpose
- giving employees meaningful voice – facilitating upwards feedback, having respectful, adult-to-adult conversations and responding to employee views
- role modelling – employees need to see that managers are committed to the organisation and uphold the values of employee engagement in how they act
- fair and just management processes for dealing with problems and supporting employee well-being.