Employee Engagement and Business Outcomes for ADNOC

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of employee engagement within the context of ADNOC, a major oil company in Abu Dhabi undergoing a significant 2030 action plan. The report explores the key elements of employee engagement, including intellectual, affective, and social dimensions, and differentiates it from related concepts like organizational commitment and job satisfaction. It emphasizes the importance of aligning employee engagement with organizational purpose, values, and business strategy, particularly in the context of ADNOC's vision. The report further examines the drivers of employee engagement, such as management opinions and meaningfulness of work, and evaluates the benefits for managers, employees, and the organization. It outlines strategies for creating a culture of engagement, including job design and role autonomy. Additionally, the report identifies diagnostic tools for measuring employee engagement and proposes relevant HR strategies, such as people resourcing, development, and communication, to enhance engagement levels. The analysis includes an employee value proposition and examples of HR strategies to address any barriers to engagement, concluding with recommendations for ADNOC to achieve its strategic goals through an engaged workforce.

Running head: EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Employee Engagement
[ADNOC]
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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Executive Summary:
Employee engagement is increasingly becoming a part of major organizations. It is because
these organizations see potential business benefits in having an engaged workforce. Some of
the benefits are low employee turnover, high job satisfaction, increased employee motivation,
low absenteeism and so forth. This task was also on establishing a discussion on employee
engagement in the context of ADNOC, a reputed oil company in Abu Dhabi. ADNOC as
discussed in this study is about to undergo a huge 2030 action plan. With this plan ADNOC
has identified a set of strategic goals to be achieved by 2030. To develop world class talent is
one of these goals. The study validates with relevant discussion a fact that an engaged
workforce is a necessity for this plan to be a success. With relevant discussion on the topic
the study suggests that an engaged workforce could be highly beneficial for ADNOC to
control challenges that affect productivity. These challenges include but not limited to such as
increasing employee turnover and absenteeism, low job satisfaction and employee
motivation, and so forth.

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Table of Contents
A brief introduction on the case study.......................................................................................4
Q1: The concepts and key elements of employee engagement and its link with business
outcomes....................................................................................................................................4
a) Employee engagement and its principle dimensions such as intellectual, affective, social.
................................................................................................................................................4
b) An explanation on whether there is any difference between employee engagement and
other related concepts such as organisational commitment, employer involvement and job
satisfaction..............................................................................................................................6
c) The need for aligning employee engagement with components e.g. organisation’s
purpose, values and mission and business strategy (Use ADNOC vision, mission, values,
strategy)..................................................................................................................................8
Q2: Importance of employee engagement as a contributor to positive corporate outcomes.....9
a) The principle drivers of employee engagement such as opinions on management,
employee voice, meaningfulness of work, employee well-being etc...................................10
- An evaluation of the benefits of having an engaged workforce for managers, employees,
customer and organisations..................................................................................................12
b) Outlining steps that an organisation can take to create a culture of employee engagement
through measures such as job design, discretionary behaviour, role autonomy, etc...........13
Q3: Knowing how to implement HR strategies and practices to raise levels of employee
engagement in a specific organisational context......................................................................14
a) Identification and evaluation of the types of diagnostic tools such as employee attitude
or climate surveys, focus groups, metrics e.g. employee turnover, absenteeism rates in

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relation to measuring employee attitudes and the level of employee engagement in the
context of the case study firm..............................................................................................14
b) Proposing relevant strategies like relevant people resourcing, development, performance
and communication strategies to raise the levels of engagement by considering ADNOC's
“employee value proposition” and construct a plan.............................................................16
 HODs will be able to explain any management decision.................................................17
 Employees can share the problems faced by them...........................................................17
Table 1: Employee Engagement Plan......................................................................................17
- Example of an employee value proposition and list the hallmarks of a ‘good’ employee
value proposition e.g. unique, relevant and compelling.......................................................18
- Examples of relevant HR strategies to raise levels of employee engagement e.g. sounding
boards, focus groups, think tanks, inputs to strategy and a few examples of measures to
address any barriers e.g. methods of influence and persuasion, evidence-based arguments.
..............................................................................................................................................19
Conclusion................................................................................................................................20
References................................................................................................................................21

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A brief introduction on the case study
ADNOC is an Abu Dhabi based national Oil Company. The business has expertise in
exploration, storage, refining and distribution of petrochemical products. ADNOC has played
important and integral role in the economic development of Abu Dhabi. The company has
now identified and devised strategic goals to perform even better than they are currently
doing. These strategic goals as part of their 2030 Plan include also developing excellent talent
(Adnoc.ae 2019). The plan suggests that ADNOC desperately needs an engaged workforce,
which understands their work responsibilities as well as go beyond this to benefit ADNOC in
numerous ways. Nevertheless, ADNOC is investing in its people. They want to generate the
leaders of next generation. They want to become one of the highly preferred employers to
work with (Adnoc.ae 2019).The pieces of information furnished so far indicate the purpose,
which this task is serving. The purpose is to describe employee engagement with the help of
its various elements, related concepts, case examples and much more.
Q1: The concepts and key elements of employee engagement and its link
with business outcomes.
This section analyses key elements and concepts related to employee engagement, and
its outcomes in relation to the case business.
a) Employee engagement and its principle dimensions such as intellectual,
affective, social.
An organisation is said to have highly engaged employees when its employees have
commitment to the organisation as well as to its values. Moreover, such employees possess

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eagerness to help organisational members and colleagues. Employee engagement though is a
debatable topic goes beyond just job satisfaction. Employee engagement is not just related to
employee motivation. Engagement is something an employee can offer, which may not be the
part of an employment contract (Graban 2018). There are popularly three levels of employee
engagement. These are social, affective and intellectual engagement (Graban 2018).
Social Engagement:
Social engagement means communicating using the online communication channels
such as social media channels. These channels can be used to establish effective inter-
organisational communication between organisational members. Social media channels can
also be used to interact with customers in a productive way. Hence, the use of social media
channels do not just keep organisational members updated on various things but also in
developing a relationship of trust with customers (Mone and London 2018). Few widely used
social media channels are Twitter, Facebook and so forth (Mone and London 2018).
Affective Engagement:
Affective engagement means feeling positive about the job responsibilities. Indeed, a
positive feeling about a job is one of the factors of employee motivation. When there is
positive feeling in employees, finding solution for a problem will become easier. There will
be motivation to look for wide range of ideas from various possible resources. Affective
engagement in employees will also ease out the work pressure of supervisors, as their people
are self-dependent (Bailey et al. 2017).
Intellectual Engagement:
Intellectual engagement provides further boost to employee motivation as because of
intellectual engagement they are motivated to work harder to get the solution (Albrecht et al.
2015). Problems remain unresolved for a significant amount of time when employees lack

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relevant skills or they lack the required interest. On the contrary, when they are self-
motivated to work harder and try various ways to reach to one or more relevant solutions,
they end up achieving their strategic target (Albrecht et al. 2015).
b) An explanation on whether there is any difference between employee
engagement and other related concepts such as organisational commitment,
employer involvement and job satisfaction.
There are evident differences between employee engagement and other related
concepts despite a fact that most of the related concepts mean similar to the employee
engagement. The differences are:
Employee Engagement and Organisational Commitment:
Employee engagement as stated in earlier sections of this task is about employees
having positive work attitude, socially connected to organisational members and customers,
and possessing high desires to find a solution. On the other hand, organisational commitment
is a connection that the employees feel with their organisations. Organisational commitment
is a post-impact of employee engagement. When employees feel engaging to everything in
the workplace their commitment with the organisation will gradually improve. A highly
engaging employee will actively take part in activities that happen on a weekly, monthly and
yearly basis. (Mann and Harter 2016). For example, such an employee will give valuable
inputs to a management decision such as a strategic alliance (Mann and Harter 2016).
ADNOC has also identified the needs to develop a world class talent to be able to accomplish
the 2030 goals (Adnoc.ae 2019).
Employee Engagement and Employee Involvement:
Employee involvement is about creating an environment in which employees have an
impact on management decisions. It is somewhat similar to employee engagement

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considering Social engagement is one of the principle dimensions of employee engagement.
Social engagement encourages engaging with colleagues and customers by means of various
social media channels. However, employee engagement is much beyond just an employee
involvement. Employee engagement is not created it rather depends on motivating factors.
More than anything else employee engagement depends on the intrinsic motivation of
employees (Singh et al. 2016). For example, a management graduate will feel intrinsically
motivated if he or she gets to work in their desired industry. On the contrary, they will not
want to or will lose their job interest if they end up getting an undesired job profile. If it
happens, they will carry a never-ending tendency to look for a better opportunity (Singh et al.
2016).
Employee Engagement and Job Satisfaction:
Job satisfaction is a post-impact of employee engagement. When an employee loves
his or her job and feels engaged to their work, they will develop high job satisfaction. Both
job satisfaction and employee engagement are important from the employers’ as well as the
employees’ perspective. However, job satisfaction does not just depend on employee
engagement but also on other related concepts like employee motivation, employee
involvement and organisational commitment (Eisenberger, Malone and Presson 2016).
Research shows that extrinsic motivation in the form of incentives drive performance for few
employees. On the other hand, research shows that employee engagement has no significant
relationship with extrinsic motivating factors (Eisenberger, Malone and Presson 2016).

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c) The need for aligning employee engagement with components e.g.
organisation’s purpose, values and mission and business strategy (Use ADNOC
vision, mission, values, strategy).
Without aligning employees with the organisations’ purpose, the management will
not be able to receive productive input from employees (Adnoc.ae 2019).ADNOC serves
many purposes like doing the community wellbeing (Adnoc.ae 2019).If the purpose is not
understood to employees, they will not be able to drive their self-motivation towards the
purpose.
An alignment between employee engagement and the organisation’s values will
ensure that these values are attained. Organisation’s values are a set of variables, which acts
as its identity. If the values are not clearly known, even the highly engaged employees can
struggle to act according to the values. As a result, the rate of unproductive works will
increase. Hence, the business will struggle to create values with its pre-defined set of
variables (Adnoc.ae 2019).For example, ADNOC creates values by fulfilling variables such
as Progressive, Collaborative, Responsible, Respectful and Efficient. If these values are not
understood, employees will struggle to align with these. To be able to attain its 2030 goals,
ADNOC would need to go beyond their workplace culture and look for talents from across
the globe (Adnoc.ae 2019). This means the future workplace at ADNOC will be culturally
diverse. ADNOC in order to accommodate diverse cultures and to deliver on its values would
require equal contribution from each employee. Collaborative working is one of the values at
ADNOC whereas there are few countries that have people more inclined to individualism.
People in the United States of America, the United Kingdom and so forth are more
individualist than collectivists. These facts just suggest the need to align employee
engagement with the organisations’ values.

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Employee engagement needs to be linked to inspiring vision and clear mission of an
organisation. If there is no clear mission the vision will be affected. For example, ADNOC
will be undergoing few changes to attain the strategic goals of 2030 plan. If there is no
awareness on the roles each employee has to play, they will just be taking care of their basic
duties. Rather, they should know the expectations that the management has with each
employee. Even the most engaged employee will be of no use for ADNOC in case the person
is not aware of its new roles as part of 2030 goals (Adnoc.ae 2019). On the other hand, if
expected roles are understood the most engaged employees of ADNOC would give their best
to make it happen. They may take help of appropriate management tools and frameworks
such as Professional Development Plan (PPD) to develop relevant skills.
Aligning employees with the business strategy is necessary to ensure they are
focusing nowhere but on the right things. It also ensures that employees spend their time
wisely on appropriate things (Eldor and Vigoda-Gadot 2017). The 2030 plan of ADNOC is
significantly challenging considering the level of changes this will be bringing to its
operations both upstream and downstream, supply chains and talent management. By
aligning employees with the business strategy, ADNOC should be able to utilise their highly
engaged employees in appropriate areas.
Q2: Importance of employee engagement as a contributor to positive
corporate outcomes.
Positive corporate outcomes depend on various factors such as availability of required
resources, effective decision-making, implementation of decisions, effective leadership and
so forth. Likewise, positive outcomes also depend on high employee engagement in the
workplace. This section analyses what are the factors that drive employee engagement. The

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section also covers the benefits of promoting and practicing employee engagement in the
workplace. Moreover, it provides ways to create and implement employee engagement in the
workplace.
a) The principle drivers of employee engagement such as opinions on
management, employee voice, meaningfulness of work, employee well-being etc.
There can be ample number of drivers for employee engagement. Not to mention, employee
engagement is a debatable topic and that the listed drivers will have few people agreeing on
these or else. However, there are still many factors, which appear as potential drivers for
employee engagement in the workplace. These factors are discussed as below:
Opinions on Management:
Kang and Sung (2017) suggests that when employees are given authority to give
honest feedbacks and opinions on their supervisors, the managers and senior management
they gradually develop a sense of belonging and a sense of being loyal to their employer.
Employee Voice:
Creating an environment where employees feel free to raise their voice in favour or
against of a management decision actually boosts their loyalty level for the organisation.
Their loyalty is boosted further when they realise that their voice is given a heartiest
acknowledgement from the management team.
Meaningfulness of Work:
Smith and Bititci (2017) identify the necessity for meaningfulness of work in the
workplace. On the contrary, less meaningful work does not just consume extra time and delay
the project completion but also cause unexpected problems to employees. A continuous
exposure to such tasks may also lead to employee dissatisfaction.

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Employee Well-being:
Employee wellbeing according to Breevaart and Bakker (2018) is a major issue as
many companies are striving to address the issue to keep their employees highly satisfied. It
is understandable that employee satisfaction influences their intrinsic motivation leading to
increased level of engagement with their work and the employer.
Autonomy:
Managing the workforce is becoming more challenging for the managers. It is more
due to increasingly changing working behaviours of employees. Many factors are affecting
the working behaviours such as the growing number of millennial workers in the modern
workforce. Research suggests that millennial workers do not like overly dependency on their
managers. Rather, they want to be a part of the decision-making process (Menguc et al.
2017). Hence, the managers by giving autonomy to employees to a feasible extent will
actually be able to drive them to employee engagement.
Communication:
Communication as in the opinion of Hanaysha (2016) has an impact on employee
engagement. Employees on a daily or weekly basis have lot of queries regarding the process
and all to be answered by the management team. Moreover, they want their problems to be
addressed on a priority basis. If it does not happen as expected by them, they start developing
a negative perception for the management. This gradually affects their level of engagement to
their work.
A Learning Culture:
Kaliannan and Adjovu (2015) say that a learning culture is a huge necessity for the
modern workforce. Learning never ends for an employee irrespective of whether they are