Comparing and Contrasting Employee Engagement Strategies at Three Different Organizations

Explaining Employee Engagement

Write an analytical report, comparing and contrasting the Employee Engagement strategies and methods used at 3 different organisations. One of the organisations must be the John Lewis Partnership (including Waitrose in your analysis if you wish). You should select 2 other organisations of your choosing.

How does each of the 3 companies (based on your research into their employee engagement practices), compare to the observations, theories and evidence presented about good employee engagement practices, drawn from a wide range of academic, business and professional research sources?

Ensure you choose organisations that have enough available (reliable) information about their employee engagement strategies to allow for meaningful analysis. A lack of relevant evidence about employee engagement strategy in a company you choose may cost marks. Also remember to be critical; you are not being asked to do public relations for any of the companies. Your analysis should cover strengths and weaknesses of the employee engagement strategies you examine in your case studies. You are free to choose from any industry or public and /or  voluntary sector organisations.

You will need to draw evidence about each organisation from different sources but there are some good examples of employee engagement case studies to help you identify organisations here:

You will need to relate your case study findings to observations, theories and evidence gathered from a wide range of text books, academic journal articles, business and professional sources (e.g. CIPD, HBR, MIT SLOAN Management review) etc.

Required Structure - Component Parts of Assessment 2

Marks will be deducted if the report is not structured as follows:

• UEL Front sheet
• Title Page
• Contents Page

(all above not part of word count)

 Introduction (approx. 250 words)

This section should make the reader aware of the purpose of the report. It should explain (in flowing sentences and not as a list) what the reader should expect in regard to structure and key themes covered in the main body. It should also (briefly) introduce the three companies / case studies you are analysing. It should, of course, also explain what employee engagement actually is (very briefly as this will be done in detail in the next section). You may also add a hypothesis (predicted findings) but this is not essential.

You should choose your own relevant headings for each of the main body sections and any further sub-sections you break your work into within the structure below – these headings are part of your word count.

Analysis of Three Case Studies

2. Explain what Employee Engagement is and why a successful employee engagement strategy can help businesses succeed (approx. 500 words)

This is the section that you submitted in draft form at end of February – ‘part A of assessment 2’ – you may improve / amend your original before submission.

3. Analysis of 3 case studies (approx. 1,500 words)

You may break this section up into 3 or 4 subsections (with relevant sub-headings) and structure your analysis as you see fit.

In this section you should critically examine strategy and methods used by 3 different companies / organisations from any industry (or public / voluntary sector). One of the organisations must be John Lewis partnership. The central question you should answer is:

How does each of your 3 companies (based on your research into their employee engagement practices) compare to the observations, theories and evidence presented about good employee engagement practices, drawn from a wide range academic, business and professional research sources? You may also make observations / comparisons about any differences or similarities between the three companies, if you feel they are relevant to the academic theory.

4. Conclusion (approx. 250 words)

Do not introduce any new evidence in this section. This is essentially a summary of the most important findings and observations you covered in the main body. If you included a hypothesis in the introduction you should explain whether or not it proved to be accurate. You may mention any slight limitations that your report might have (i.e. what were you not able to find out about / or cover due to space limitations that might have been relevant) and make suggestions for future research that could build on the work in your essay.  

5. Create a 6 question employee engagement ‘pulse survey’ (approx. 100 words)

Design 6 relevant questions for an ‘employee engagement pulse survey’ to be distributed to the employees at John Lewis Partnership. You may use Likert Scale type questions if you wish.

6. An explanation of the rationale behind the questions chosen and the purpose of the pulse survey itself (approx. 400 words)

If you wish to you may use a number of in-text citations in this section to support your justification. However, this is the only section in which you will not necessarily be marked down if you choose to use just 1 or 2 (but you still need to write well and make a convincing case). In your own words try to make a strong argument for why the questions you have chosen can give you valuable information and explain how that information can be used in a practical way.