Management communication can be defined as every communication type as an exchange between at least two parties (Suter, 2009). Therefore, to get an effective communication in workplace specifics skills need to be included in.
The management skills, leadership skills, language adjustment to the target audience, are a part of it (Euson, 2007). Communication goals are multiples and permit the company viability. It allows effectively many things as ideas exchanges, make a plan, reach an agreement, execute decisions, negotiate, conduct sales, send orders, build relationship… Failure to communicate can occur many discomforts for the company, leads often to conflicts and may put the company in danger.
Through the following critical paragraphs regarding the employee engagement, we will be able to check how an effective management communication can contribute to an organization’s profit. Literature around employees engagement In academic terms, the employee engagement can be defined by four major approaches. « Need-Staying » is the first approach introduced by Kahn. He is seen as the first applicant of engagement theory within a workplace (Kahn 1990; Harter et al., 2002; Rich et al., 2010).
He defines the engagement as staff involvement within their work tasks realization (Kahn, 1990). Kahn’s employee engagement work is based on many academic works (Freud, 1922; Goffman, 1961; Maslow, 1970; Slater, 1966; Smith & Berg, 1987). He included also to it previous theory as the job design (Hackman & Oldham, 1980), the « social identity theory » (Ashforth & Mael, 1989) and the « job stress theory » (Thoits, 1991). The literature regarding « emotion in the workplace » was also used (Hochschild, 1979). In 1992, Kahn added to is work the existence of psychological presence between workers and management: the needs. Some authors realized testing regarding Kahn’s employee engagement theory (May, et al.
, 2004). The original domains (meaningfulness, safety, availability) defined by Kahn’s where lately reexamined (Rich, et al., 2010). Engagement although in decline, is associated as a predictor factor of the turnover, the staff outcome and the organization financial performance (Bates, 2004; Baumrod, 2004, Richman 2006, Shuck, 2010)« Burnout-antithesis approach », is the second approach (Maslach et al.’s, 2001). Maslach defined the employee engagement as a positive state, ‘characterized by high levels of activation and pleasure’ (p. 417).
By this definition, she rejects the idea which linked the work with the burnout (Seligman, 2002). The negative correlation between burnout level and employee engagement highlighted by empirical research validated Maslach idea (Schaufeli et al., 2002). Other authors describe the independence between commitment and work but related to the employee’s psychological state and vigor. (Shirom, 2003).The third approach is “satisfaction-engagement” (Harter et al.
, 2002). Harter was the first author to link employee satisfaction with business profitability. Other authors have found that the manager’s effectiveness positively influenced the staff engagement (Luthans and Peterson, 2002). Other authors went further in this reasoning and underline that the manager efficiency does not only affect their commitment but also their performance and their optimism (Arakawa and Greenberg, 2007). The effectiveness of management also allows the well-being and the health of employees (Harter, et al., 2003)The last approach is multidimensional (Sack, 2006). In academic point of view, Saks was the first researcher who had look and linked to the employee’s engagement antecedents and their consequences. The workers encountered less stress and fatigue when they are emotionally, psychologically and cognitively engaged (Britt et al.
, 2005). Many concepts emerge favoring employees’ commitment to their business (Macey and Schneider, 2008). Passion is presented as a unique form of staff engagement (Zigarmi, et al., 2009).An organization within their members are highly engaged might, are supposed to outperform compared to companies with “low” employee engagement.
Companies that have highly effective internal communications had 47% higher total returns to shareholders (Nyce and Quade, 2012). Over the last decade, the staff engagement became a principal management initiative to ameliorate business success and permits a win/win situation for the employers and the employees (CIPD, 2006).II.
Effective management communication : an important factor in profit creationThe means used by employers to communicate with their interns as well as with the outside world is recognized as a competitive factor. Poor management communication can, in fact, have serious financial consequences for the company (Lutgen-Sandvik and Sypher, 2009).To understand the benefit of the communication on the company profitability it is useful to underline the risk of having a bad communication and its impact on the profitability of the company. The communication competencies are the keys successes to contemporary managers. In a workplace, employees look to their leaders to provide them a direction. If their managers have poor leadership skills, the risks of having poor communication are high.
Incompetent leaders exhibit directive indecisiveness, do not inspire confidence to their subordinates, or communicate poorly with their employees (Boxall and Purcell, 2011; CIPD, 2006).A lack of communication can create uncertainty that leads to employee stress and creates employees conflict. Effectively if the manager does not clearly define their tasks, roles the people do not know what to do and make difficult the realization of teamwork.To carry out routines department functions or again specials projects companies often rely on teams. Lack of communication with the manager or between colleagues can lead to teamwork failure. Some tasks might realize many times while others might be overlooked completely. This situation can lead to conflicts and failure of the work.Demoralized, demotivated employees lose their interest in the company.
They do not realize extra-effort but just do the expected job. Employee face this situation when they feel not listening, unappreciated, disrespect by their manager. If the manager gives them the possibility to communicate more, they could express their ideas, creating and so affect positively their productivity and the company profitably.
Due to the lack of employee motivation, commitment, concentration, moral there is a diminution of the productivity due and also a possible increasing amount of errors. OKA lack of effectiveness in management communication can effectively lead to uncertainty, demotivation but also to a turnover raise and consequently a creation of extra charges. Working with new employee refer to lost productivity and knowledge. Thanks to the habitude and repetitive tasks old employee acquired a certain rapidity to realize it. With the leaving employee are not replaced it is mean that the remaining staff will be overworked and will leads directly to job disengagement and dissatisfaction. They can consequently start to look for a new job by thinking about leaving the company.
If they planned to stay the company will need to furnish a lot to effort to regain their goodwill. The turnover will create extra costs as the training cost for the new employees, the interviewing cost (time, travel expenses, recruiters salaries…). As we could appreciate the turnover generate lot of extra cost an can be avoided by doing the right things for your employees included mainly a good communication. Effectively the Bureau of Nation Affairs estimated that the annual lost due to employee turnover is about $11 billion (Hassard et al., 2014). Gallup study showed that companies with employees are committed to outperforming the competition by 147 percent of earnings per share (maximum) (Gallup, 2017). Every organization needs to change, evaluate with the time to become more competitive, to be involved on the globalization because of the link between national and international economies increase or also to be in time with the technological advancement.
The change becomes moreover difficult to set within an organization where exist bad leadership communication. The employee disengaged will not accept this change, will resist and will become a barrier to change, and therefore will impact the profitability of the organization.A lack of communication within a company can also impact on the external stakeholders.
The employees are more willing to realize errors and consequently, the customers can but defected product. This inconvenience can impact the reputation, the renowned of the company. A lack of communication can also be critic during a crisis period. It can be easy to solve some when the employees are involved and linked to the organization (Thambi, 2014). The company needs to arrange a meeting and have an effective, reactive extern communication (damage limitation). Thanks to various aspects such as confidence, employee commitment, the company will be able to develop a strong and reliable intern communication (Boxall and Purcell 2011). Pepsi can be a fabulous example of his crisis resolution through a fantastic external communication.
This world leader in 1993 faced a problem, a customer assumed have found a syringe on a Pepsi box.This announcement had a bomb effect by provoking a mass consumer indignation. In addition, another 50 reports followed this idea in other similar cases. All his claims were later denied. Without waiting, Pepsi sure to deal with false accusations, choose to launch a video campaign where we could discover their impenetrable boxing process. A video showing a woman inflicting a syringe in a Pepsi box without being seen by the storekeeper helped to win the fight.
Thanks to this defensive and aggressive campaign, Pepsi allowed to bounce his sales and save his brand imagery (Leonard, 2017). It could be a disaster, leads the customers to ban this brand if the link and relations between employees and management were not built. Google can be a good example to relay the importance of employees care and engagement.
The Google way invented by the manager permit to motivate their employees are and make them feel involved in the company, the result is their engagement. Google is a fabulous example of how engagement thanks to an effective communication can help to increase the productivity. Thanks to staffs happiness, 20% of Google products are imagined during employee free time such as Gmail for example (Luenendonk, 2014). III. Employee engagement: a negative impact on people heath and on the company profitabilityAn over engagement of the employees can also have a negative impact on their health and affect the company profitability, its the critic of some authors regarding EE. Effectively, this time it is about burnout concept. A job burnout is « is a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job, and is defined by the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy ». Burnout can, therefore, affect: the employee commitment, their job satisfaction and job performance, and can lead to important turnover (Maslach et al.
, 2001).A burnout can effectively affected their job Performance, it is associate with diverse forms of job withdrawal like absenteeism, aim to leave the job, and actual turnover. Nevertheless, for people who do not leave their job, burnout leads to work with lower effectiveness and productivity.
As result, burnout affects job satisfaction and a reduced their engagement regarding their job or the organization. People in burnout situation can have also a negative impact on their colleagues by causing personal conflict, contaminate them and by disrupting job tasks. Burke showed also some evidence that burnout often has a negative “spillover” effect on employee’s home life (Burke & Greenglass 2001). Burnout is linked to job characteristics. It can come from high quantitative job demands for the time available, burnout is a response to overload refer to exhaustion dimension.
It also comes from qualitative job demands, it is mainly the result of role conflict (when conflicting demands at the job have to be met) and role ambiguity (lack of adequate information to realize the job well) due to poor management skills.IV. While important, the employee engagement is under-represented in the companyEven if the EE within a company is crucial for its success it is still not present in the majority of companies. Only one-fifth of the staff were truly engaged in their company (The 2007-2008 Global Workplace Survey- Hamel, 2012).
Generally, in the United Kingdom between 35 and 39% of the employees are engaged. Workers are the most important asset within an organization, they effectively realize the work which permits to keep the company going. It is the reason why the mangers need to furnish extra effort to have an effective communication to engage more their employees.However, even if the management communication it is a vital aspect to build the employees engagements it is not the only one. The EE can be affected also by the activities sector, the current time like in recession time (Saks, 2006), the personal characteristics (genre, ages, ex: old workers are more engaged…), the place occupied on the company (managers have higher levels of engagement than their suppliers).
(Boxall, et al., 2011).Conclusion : Through this critical analysis, we could appreciate the different opinions about employee engagement and see how much it is essential for the sustainability of an organization. Thanks, different real example the utility to obtain and build an effective management communication show that it the key to a profitable company. Commitment and a good management communication allow the company to decrease in turnover, a decrease of mistakes made, develop a competitive advantage by increasing the employee’s creativity. All these factors have effectively a positive impact on the productivity of the company.
Although many managers focus on the build this commitment, the committed employees remain so far too few. A lot of tools emerged to fix this situation like the definition of ‘four enablers’ (MacLeao, 2009) in order to develop staff engage.