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.