Employee Engagement Affects Employee Retention

I have 7 years of work experience and during my profession the biggest challenge as a HR professional had always been retaining potential employees and engaging all the employees to keep them motivated to be committed to their work and the organisation. This research came up to my mind when I took my classes of research methods I, during my very first semester at Dublin Business School. In May 2018 I was appointed as a Part-time HR assistant at Dublin City University, this was my first international exposure in human resources and to my knowledge, experience and understanding retention and organization performance is an international concern. 

Keeping the experience in mind I started checking the CIPD website regarding the skills shortage and got to know as already stated for the justification of my research that currently As per CIPD Labour Market Outlook for autumn 2017 survey, i.e. combined with the varying nature of labour, over three-quarters (78%) of respondents in the HR Practices in Ireland survey (2017) have practiced skills shortages in their organization in the last 12 months. Therefore, Currently and in forthcoming employee engagement and retention is the most essential topic for every organization that will be more focused on to retain and engage employees. The concept is to understand and bring up with the solution in retaining employees through different factors that derive employee engagement.

Therefore, through this study I wanted to analyze that what is the effect of these independent variables namely succession planning (Gulzar & Durrani, 2014), meritocracy (Pashootanizadeh & Rangriz, 2014), employer branding ( Park & Zhou, 2013) and Line Manager (Alfes, Truss, Soane, Rees, & Gatenby, 2013) upon the intervening variable employee engagement and latterly on the dependent variable employee retention and further affecting organization performance.

However, I was formally asked to email to the Director HR of the Dublin City University in regards for the permission to carry my research on the HR department where I was encouraged by the team to do so. I started reading the articles for employee engagement, employee retention. My very first topic in mind was, ‘What factors create employee engagement leading towards employee retention?’ and through my continuous reading of research articles I came up with few employee engagement factors which were succession planning, meritocracy, role of the line manager, employer branding and talent management. 

During my Research methods II, I was advised by my supervisor to remove some of the factors as the research has a limited time. Therefore, on careful consideration and proper articles talent management was removed from one of the factors. Secondly was to decide what methods to approach and I was affirmed about the quantitative methods because I wanted my research to have a valid conclusion and authentic results and therefore, I opted for hypothesis, where I started reading books on SPSS by Rachad Antonius in the book Interpreting Quantitative Data with SPSS. For the sample size and population I was advised by my supervisor in research Methods II that since I have the context which is Dublin City University HR department therefore, it will be census because I will be getting data from all the respondents.

When I started my thesis, I was provided the supervisor Mr. David Wallace, he made sure that I was confident in my research aim and the method of doing the quantitative approach keeping in mind the time is the limitation. During my first meeting, He helped me in defining what was my ultimate aim for research which was identifying the impact of employee retention on organization performance and how to affect employee retention through employee engagement through which my research topic was concise and became crystal clear for my further analysis. After the first meeting, my first step towards my thesis was writing Literature Review, where I used some of the articles from the proposal, searched more journal sources and further critiqued the sources. 

During my second meeting, David guided me through correcting my writings and making it easier for the readers, where I was also advised to work on building my questionnaire as quantitative approach was confirmed for this research. David also advised me to go for both quantitative and qualitative method based on the small population. However, the qualitative method was not approved by Dublin City University keeping in mind the confidentiality of the topic and HR Practices of the University, therefore, with a careful consideration of the Dublin City University HR management team a list of 30 people were provided to me for distributing survey questionnaire out of 35 employees in the HR department where 5 employees were newly appointed out of which some of them were not in the capacity or position to fill a survey. 

When the literature review was finalized and approved by David, then the questionnaire was reviewed and I was guided in forming a questionnaire on the basis of my literature review. My main purpose of doing literature review along with the questionnaire was to distribute the survey and get it back before the Christmas Holidays at my work. However, the questionnaire was approved by the supervisor and I forward it to the HR manager who was assigned by the Director HR to assist me in my research. 

The management team at the Dublin City University made sure that the questionnaire was not biased or negative for the respondents or for the department therefore, few changes were made in the questions and were rephrased. Proper email was drafted to all the 30 respondents explaining the purpose of my research and when do I expect them to be filled within a proper stipulated mentioned time. The management made sure that the questionnaire was filled anonymously where I was told to distribute the hard copies to all the respondents and a box was labeled at the HR reception as ‘Joshna’s Survey Box’ where the respondents could submit their filled survey maintaining their confidentiality. 

During this time, I started writing about the Research Methodology and the reason of conducting quantitative method and rejecting qualitative method. Morever, The Management team made sure that I got all my questionnaire back, Once all the questionnaire were filled that is where I started coding all the responses on excel for the SPSS analysis. During my Christmas holidays, I started working on the chapter of Data analysis where the huge problem occurred that the SPSS couldn’t get me all the authentic results because of only 30 respondents which is why I continued my data analysis on SMART PLS as advised by my previous supervisor in Pakistan where she helped me in getting the license to get to use SMART PLS Software and advised few books for data interpretation and analysis and it gave me an advanced and well organized figures and analysis providing full insights of the report and read the questionnaire and each responses well through which my Hypothesis were selected and based on that conclusions and recommendation were drafted.

Consequently, It was made easier to conclude because when I drafted the hypothesis, I mentioned the authors that accepted those variables through their research which helped me in the end to critically analyze as per the relevant authors and saved time. When I was done with writing the conclusion and the recommendation, it is then I started writing the Introduction because I was confirmed about the results and the research and the problem was also affirmative that the most important employee engagement factors were succession planning and employer branding and employee retention maintained well would impact positively on organizational performance. 

Through all the results and analysis justification was prepared as employee engagement, employee retention and organizational performance is the most vital HR practices which cannot be ignored nationally or internationally. Therefore, many organisations still face skill shortages because succession planning is not performed properly or the employer branding isn’t maintained in the market.

Throughout my thesis the most difficult part was to do data analysis and its interpretation. As I had already used SPSS in my previous qualification, using SMART PLS which is more advance in also reading less sample sized data was yet a challenging, time consuming and learning phase. While I was writing the recommendation and conclusion, I was satisfied with my analysis, findings and research. I feel that this report will be valuable for various researchers and companies that take organization performance a major concern and retaining employees through engaging them. A true HR professional would know that this research has been based on practical work experiences, secondary and primary data.

There were few modifications to the topic but in the end the solution and path to it was concise and crystal clear. I am sure this research will be useful for not only Dublin City University but also for various HR professionals and organization that are looking for effective HR Practices and ways to solve employee turnover that is influencing their growth or performance. As far as my career is concerned, this research will help build my understanding about the broad HR Practices, this would be my career step in my current employer i.e. Dublin City University. Through my MSc. I was allowed to do so, that has increased my understanding of gauged gap of HR current factors. I am confident that my learning abilities have been extensive through this research and moved me a step forward in my career progression which is be added to my resume as well.