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Chapter 2: The Case for Employee Engagement – The Evidence
Fujitsu also updated its corporate intranet to include an enhanced and
extensive sub-site termed “Invest in Yourself”. This included an outline of career
development policies, career maps and self-assessment, and a catalogue of
over 400 training courses available to employees.
Eighteen months later, Fujitsu’s employee survey results showed the impact.
People’s perception of their career development opportunities had moved
strongly upward. Fujitsu is now recognised in the UK as one of only 33
Investors in People Champions. Sue Payne, Head of People Development
Services, says: “This is a good example of how we were able to use the results of
our engagement survey to identify an issue of great importance to our people.
We did have the processes in place to support our people – we just weren’t
explaining it properly. Once we understood this, we were able to close the gap
and have a genuine impact on engagement levels.”
48 Engagement-based well-being can be maintained in a recession. Research by
Professor Sharon Parker from Sheffield University 87 suggests that introducing
deliberate work organisation and change management strategies can combat the
negative effects of reduced headcount. Results from a four-year longitudinal study
showed that there was no overall decrease in well-being from before to after
downsizing for the 139 employees remaining in an organisation despite an increase
in work demands. The potentially detrimental effect of increased demands appeared
to have been offset by improvement in work characteristics arising from initiatives
introduced as part of the downsizing strategy. The study showed that high demands
were associated with poorer well-being, but that increases in control clarity and
participation were associated with improved well-being.
Conclusion
49 This chapter sets out some of the findings to date in what we hope will be a useful
and accessible way. Our conclusion from the evidence available, including our own
first hand observations of the impact of successful employee engagement in
practice, is that the correlation between engagement, well-being and performance
is repeated too often for it to be a coincidence.
87
Parker, S.K., Chmiel, N., and Wall, T.D. (1997) ‘Work Characteristics and Employee Well-Being Within a Context
of Strategic Downsizing’ Journal of Occupational Health Psychology
65