Employee Engagement in London - Case Study Example

Employee Engagement in London Name: Tutor: Subject: Date: INTRODUCTION William Khan defines employee engagement as harnessing of institute colleagues' personalities to their labor role parts; in engagement, individuals work and express themselves in the flesh, cognitively, and mentally throughout role performances.Psychological conditions involved in employee engagement include: psychological meaningfulness, psychological availability and psychological safety.According to a report done by Gallup in 2012 on the state of the global Workplace; employee engagement insights for business leaders worldwide., employee engagement is rare with only 13% of employees in the world engaged at their place of work.The study by Gallup was done in 140 countries and showed that New Zealand and Australia have the uppermost levels of employee engagement with up to 23% and 24% of employees involved in employee engagement respectively. These figures were however small compared to the ones in the United States of America that had up to 30% of its employment engaged at work (Fletcher & Robinson, 2013). This paper seeks to critically evaluate the implementation strategy for the employee engagement at the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust using Kahn’s 1990 model of employee engagement. The paper also seeks to provide justified recommendations on how the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust can improve employee engagement in the future (Admasachew & Dawson, 2011). Psychological safety The London ambulance service has included the health and well-being strategy for its employees to ensure that there is employee engagement. The strategy on personal safety implemented by the London Ambulance Service has extensive significance with engagement. To ensure personal safety of its employees, the London Ambulance Service has introduced LINC, made sure that the employees who work on the front line wear stab vests and it has introduced a trauma counseling service (Halliday et al, 2013). Khan, 1990 defines safety in his model as a sense of being able to show and employ self without fear of negative consequence to self-image, status or career. It goes further to associate personal safety with elements of public systems that generate more or less non-threatening, foreseeable and constant social circumstances by which to engage. By implementing the strategy on personal safety, the London Ambulance Service therefore ensures that they have shaped how their employees inhabit their roles. The Changes to working practices that have been introduced by the ambulance service NHS Trust that is as a result of the partnerships with the trade unions does not include a psychological safety element in terms of maintaining the organizational norms. The partnership has improved on the deployment of the staff and it has introduced new working hours that have helped the organization meet the demand for its service. The partnership has however not considered the fact that by doing so it is not putting the element of psychological safety in terms of the organizational norms of its employees into consideration. The partnership is instead distorting the shared expectations of the employees about the general behaviors of system members (Khan, 1990). According to Khan, 1990, employees that stay within a normal way of behaving and working feel secure than those who go out of the protective boundary. This could be a potential source of disappointment and unease especially for employees with less influence, as deviancy is in many social systems. According to Khan, 1990, supportive management heightens psychological safety, The London Ambulance service has ensured that employee engagement is always on the manager performance agenda. This will enable the employees to be open, give new ideas and suggestions and try new things; people feel safer when they have some control over their work. The Trust has also ensured that they provide supportive management by improving the relations of its employees and the unions. This, the Trust has done by implementing suggestions from members of staff, for example the introduction of a cycle response unit that was suggested by a member of staff. This shows supportive managerial mechanisms by the managers. This will encourage other employees to open up and give new ideas, knowing that they will be supported and in turn lead to improved employee engagement. The trust has in addition, engaged the staff in proposing possible cost saving methods that will lead in making savings of over 53 million pounds. By doing this, the Trust ensures that the employees feel like they are a part of important decisions for the London Ambulance Service and this will improve employee engagement. Psychological meaningfulness Psychological meaningfulness according to Khan is associated with having a feeling of getting a return on putting in of oneself in a currency of emotional, cognitive or physical energy. Employees will feel psychological meaningfulness when they feel useful, valuable and worthwhile, that is, they made a positive change and were not seen for granted. The employees of London Ambulance Services are given a psychological meaningfulness by being involved in the open air meetings and focus groups where they are consulted on how to provide the best services to patients and how to enhance their experience of working for the London Ambulance Service. The employees of London Ambulance Service are therefore able to give themselves to their work and to others in their roles and they are also able to be given and receive; the employees are more likely to invest themselves in their roles that satiate their personality and basic needs, tasks and they are able to derive meaning in their lives. Giving psychologically meaningfulness to the employees at the London Ambulance Service has led to a raise of demand for its services, which in turn has led to the improved deployment of the staff, flat staff turnovers and improved working hours for the staff at LAS. There is psychological meaningfulness when the task done comprises of interpersonal interactions with co-workers and the customers (Khan, 1990). The London Ambulance Service intends to provide this meaningful interaction between customers and its employees by giving their employees as much information as possible on what happens to the patients that they serve. Giving the staff this information will inform them on whether they did a good job or not and this will improve their engagement. The ambulance service has also not set response time as a measure of success; this has led to mere clinical outcomes, a measure and outcome that matters most to the employees of the London Ambulance Service. The study done by Khan, 1990, showed that meaningful interaction result to the promotion of dignity, a sense of worthiness and self-appreciation. This meaningful interaction result in setting that people want to give and to receive. The London Ambulance Service has provided another avenue for meaningful interactions between its co-workers by the introduction of the peer-to-peer support scheme called LINC-listening, informal, non-judgmental, confidential. LINC uses the members of staff that have volunteered to be counselors as counselors. By using the members of staff as counselors, the ambulance service provides counselors a chance to interact with other employees as coworkers and as cohorts. Councillors and employees that face the same challenges in their work activities are able to bond and form emotional bonds that exceed the typical co-worker connections. Psychological availability This is a sense of having emotional, psychological or physical resource to engage personally at a specific moment in time (Khan, 1990). Physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion, individual self-doubt and outside lives influence psychological availability. The London Ambulance Service meets the demand of emotional energy through the introduction of the counseling model and the peer-to-peer support scheme LINC that supports its staff emotionally. According to Khan, 1990, expressing oneself in certain tasks needs emotional labor and takes a definite point of emotionality. The ambulance service also provides security by providing stab vests to employees who are on the front line. Employees outside lives that could influence them psychologically and take them away from their work are catered for by the presence of LINC which is targeted at employees that are experiencing hardships at work or in their homes. LINC has led to flat staff turnovers and a decrease in staff absence rates in ambulance services. The trust does not include an option where the physical psychological availability, that is, the physical energy of its employees is assessed. The consequence of not assessing the physical energy of the employees is that the employees could become depleted. According to Khan, 1990, Research on stress has most of the time included an evaluation of self-assessment of capability to engage in coping strategies. The London Ambulance Service NHS Trust does not have a measure to evaluate their employees on their coping strategies and physical capabilities. This could not only lead to client dissatisfaction but it could also lead to employee disengagement and in extreme cases the loss of life of a client. How the Trust can improve employee engagement in the future. The trust can improve employee engagement by giving them growth opportunities in their careers. The trust should include forums for the employees to air out their views about their career plans. This will heighten the psychological safety of the employees in terms of management style and leadership.In this way, the employees will be receiving supportive management; this will send a positive message to the employees that they can be trusted and should not fear advancing their careers so that they can grow and have a better future for themselves (West et al, 2012). The London Ambulance service should also consider giving its employees other awards and recognition on top of the formal dinners and nomination of employees for awards (Meier, 2014). The award and recognition can be an incentive for higher performance so that it can give other employees something to endeavor for. This should be considered following the national staff survey that showed that the motivation of the employees of the London Ambulance Services NHS Trust fell below average when compared with other ambulance services (Sanders, 2012). The managerial team can also get more information about their employees’ life at home and at work and work out more proposals that will allow their employees to balance out home and work life (Farmer, & Nimegeer, 2014). London Ambulance Service NHS Trust does not mention anything about the relation between its employees and immediate supervisors (Meier, 2014). Enhancing the relationship between the employees and their immediate supervisors will increase psychological safety by way of showing a supportive management process and style (Khan, 1990). This can be done by devising and implementing programs that encourage communication between the managers and the employees (West & Dawson, 2012). To have psychological safety within the Organizational norms, roles and time shifts of the employees of the London Ambulance Services should be clearly spelt out. According to Khan, 1990, employees that stay within normally suitable ways of behaving and working felt much safer than those who went outside their protective boundaries (Corbett, 2013). Important norms in the London Ambulance Service could include the amount of time that should be allocated to one particular employee; the number of hours and shifts that every employee in the London Ambulance Service should have. Such norms should not be deviated away from. The London Ambulance Service NHS Trust has recently formed a partnership with trade unions to meet its rising demand of services (Manning, & Co-Leader, 2012). The partnership has changed the working practices of the employees by introducing new working hours. Deviating from their organizational norms could lead to frustration and anxiety. The London Ambulance Service NHS Trust should therefore consider clearly spelling out the time shifts of the employees after consulting with them during focus groups on which times suit them best and sticking to the norms formulated (Schneider & Bowen, 2010).  The London Ambulance Service NHS Trust should include an exercise whereby they are able to know their employees physical availability in terms of their physical energy. This will enable the trust to assign specific roles to specific employees that will result to meeting the ambulances’ demand,having satisfied clients and most importantly this will led to employee engagement (Bruce, 2014). CONCLUSION Engaged employees willingly invest more time, energy and creativity to ensure that there is a success in their places of work. They have a feel of commitment and purposefulness in their role, and they convey passion, energy and zeal to do their work. Apart from all the above factors, employees that are engaged, most of the time, produce the best results for their companies and for themselves. They are high performers in their places of work and this leads to the success of the companies that they work for. References Admasachew, L., & Dawson, J. (2011). The association between presenteeism and engagement of National Health Service staff. Journal of health services research & policy, 16(suppl 1), 29-33. Bruce, D. L. (2014). Evacuation and Transportation. In Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine (pp. 487-510). Springer London. Corbett, K. (2013). Profiling Mental Health Service Use in the Square Mile: A Report to the City of London Local Involvement Network. Voluntary Action Westminster. Farmer, J., & Nimegeer, A. (2014). 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