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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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Employee Engagement

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This chapter has illustrated the complex nature of employee engagement. It has demonstrated the extent to which it is a managed workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and at the same time able to enhance their own sense of well-being. In broad terms, it can be understood as cognitive, emotional and physical role performance characterised by absorption, dedication and vigour, and dependent upon the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, safety and availability.
CIPD defined the drivers of employee engagement as having opportunities to feed your views upwards, feeling well-informed about what is happening in the organisation and believing that your manager is committed to your organisation.
a)    The IES concluded that the main driver of engagement is a sense of feeling valued and involved. The main components of this are said to be involvement in decision-making; freedom to voice ideas (to which managers listen); feeling enabled to perform well; having opportunities to develop the job; and feeling that the organisation is concerned for employees’ health and well-being.
b)    Macy and Schneider (2008) suggested that engagement has three dimensions: intellectual engagement – thinking hard about the job and how to do it better; affective engagement – feeling positively about doing a good job; and social engagement – actively taking opportunities to discuss work-related improvements with others at work.
The concept of engagement has been compared with other similar constructs, such as employee motivation, employee commitment, employee satisfaction and, more recently, concepts such as OCB. However, supported by the work of researchers such as Meyer (1997), Buckingham (1999), Wright and Cropanzano (2000), Harter et al. (2003), Bakker (2009), Macey and Schneider (2009) and Avey et al. (2009), the chapter concludes that engagement is something more, something new and slightly different which transcends related concepts.
The concept of engagement has been compared with other similar constructs such as employee motivation, employee commitment, employee satisfaction and, more recently, concepts such as OCB. However, supported by the work of researchers, such as Meyer (1997), Buckingham (1999), Wright and Cropanzano (2000), Harter et al. (2003), Bakker (2009), Macey and Schneider (2009) and Avey et al. (2009), the chapter concludes that engagement is something more, something new and slightly different which transcends related concepts.
The link between high levels of engagement and organisational benefits has been cited by Harter et al. (2002) as improved retention of talent, enhanced levels of customer satisfaction, improved individual performance, higher team performance, greater business unit productivity and profitability and increased enterprise-level financial performance.
The chapter considered the strategies organisations adopt in order to generate engagement. Four key aspects were mentioned in detail: the need to create an appropriate culture; the importance of open and transparent communication with the vital channel for upwards communication by the employees being open and robust; the need to ensure the integrity and competence of line managers and their skills in managing employees and ensuring that their full potential was being realised; and the need to create an appropriate working environment in which employees had the resources they required in order to undertake their roles effectively.
Engagement levels across the world vary, but the significant conclusion is that the global workforce is not engaged, at least not to the extent that employers want or need their employees to be in order to drive results. The findings indicated that, worldwide, over 24 per cent of employees were disengaged, 62 per cent of employees were moderately engaged and only 14 per cent of employees were considered to be highly engaged. This has been termed the ‘engagement gap’ and it is defined as the difference between the discretionary effort that organisations need for competitive advantage and organisations’ ability to elicit this effort from a significant portion of the workforce.

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