A strategy to assist management in workforce engagement and employee retention in the high tech engineering environment

Many companies use survey methods in an attempt to gauge employees' attitudes and opinions toward the company. These attitudes and opinions are directly related to an employee's engagement within the company. In many instances, employees wait in vain for the survey response and the subsequent employer actions, but the truth is sometimes management does not know what to do with the results. For this reason, we theorize that this type of survey, typically utilizing the Likert-scale, is not adequately assisting management in addressing employee engagement and retention issues. For instance, in many occasions, once the survey results are tabulated, companies are doing little or nothing to address the issues. In fact, far too many companies make the mistake of conducting employee engagement surveys, and then ignore the answers. Thus, we propose that a company should take advantage of the survey results, and utilize them to provide data to bridge employees' needs and goals with stakeholders' responsibilities and goals by refining and incorporating them into a hierarchical decision model (HDM). Thus, this would essentially be utilizing the quantitative data to determine what to measure qualitatively. We use a case from the high tech industry, specifically focusing on the engineering environment. Engineering environments are known to be more creative and such approaches would be more beneficial. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.