High Performance Work Systems and Employee Engagement

The idea of this report is to look at the High performance working and employee engagement.

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Research of this report is based on academic and web based literature review. The major findings of this report indicate that High Performance work system can bring success for an organization. Employee engagement is one of the best HR practices. High employee engagement can improve the company’s overall performance. Barriers for High performance work practice implementation can be avoided staff training, involvement (e. g. Information sharing) and motivation (e. g. Rewards).

Practicing the high commitment seven HR practices suggested by Pfeffer can improve the organization performance. Based on the finding, this report recommends that Information sharing, training, selective hiring Rewards and incentives can improve the J&W plc’s staff performance. There have been a significant number of studies conducted over the last few years investigating links between human resource management and organisational performance. It was mainly focused on the concept of high performance working practice and employee engagement. These concepts have been implemented in USA and Britain as well and proven positive.

The main idea was to implement some particular HR policies and practices, which has the potentiality to contribute to the improvement of the employee attitudes and behaviour, labour turnover and higher levels of productivity, quality and customer service. In his last two books Jeffrey Pfeiffer have discussed about the best HR practice models and proposed 7 HR practices. These were secured employment, selective hiring and sophisticated selection, team working, High compensation, extensive training, learning and development, reduction of status and sharing information (Rayner C and Smith D, 2009).

This is a report on J&W PLC staff performance to investigate the high performance working and employee engagement. The report will focus on the HR practices, its implementation, benefits, potential barriers and limitation. According to Harley B et al (2010), High performance working system allows the employees a degree of judgment and flexibility in terms of the way they work. Autonomous and semiautonomous team work is the heart of High performance working system including individual works which is characterized by judgement, range of different skills, multitasking and continuous feedback.

These forms of work function, works best when it is added with variety level of information sharing. As it ensures the staff are aware that what is happening in the work place and they can take part in decision making. It is also mentioned that in High performance work system there should have range of incentives for the staff and different measures to motivate them. High performance work system became popular in 1990s. After being faced high global competition United States companies needed a different ways to improve the quality, productivity, and responsiveness of their service and product.

The US department of labour had introduced the High performance work system and mentioned about its different characteristics. There were Multi skilled team work, empowering the frontline worker, broad training, management of labour cooperation, ensure quality and customer satisfaction (Dessler G 2012). A good number of studies had been conducted on this topic and the result had shown that the High performance work system is a successful approach –King J (1995) had conducted a survey among 1000 companies in US.

He had reviled that 60% of those company had implemented at least one of the HPW system practice and most of them had reported that increase in productivity and 70% had reported improvement of productivity. In a recent meta-analysis Combs et al (2006) had researched 92 studies, the study results shown the links between high performance work practice and company performance. Three sets of HR practices were identified from those studies.