Employee Engagement and Trust in Virtual Teams: Tesco Report

This report examines the people management strategies of Tesco, a multinational retail giant operating in both brick-and-mortar and virtual environments. The report identifies key challenges, including employee engagement in physical stores and building trust within virtual teams. It explores the significance of employee engagement for organizational success, emphasizing the impact of leadership styles, particularly transformational leadership, on fostering a positive work environment. The report also delves into Human Resource Management (HRM) practices, such as work-life balance and fair compensation, to address engagement issues. Furthermore, it addresses the complexities of building trust in virtual teams, highlighting the importance of communication, leadership, and collaborative behaviors. The report concludes with recommendations for Tesco to enhance employee engagement and strengthen virtual team dynamics through leadership training and HR initiatives. This report is a student submission and can be found on Desklib.

MANAGING PEOPLE

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................1
Employee engagement challenge in Brick and Mortar..........................................................1
Challenge of building trust in virtual team.............................................................................3
CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................................4
RECOMMENDATIONS...........................................................................................................5
REFERENCES...........................................................................................................................7

INTRODUCTION
Managing people in a company faced by leaders and human resource managers in
dealing with employees, managing and organizations of change in practical and theoretically
informed manner. People are considered as most valuable asset of any organization, but the
talented employees are valuable for business and worst staffs are biggest liability. The most
important and difficult job for today’s manager is to manage people effectively at the
workplace. The HR manager and leader should inspire, motivate, encourage and lead them.
Sometimes they have to fire, hire, evaluate or discipline employees. In this regards, the
following report is prepared to determine people management in a company operating in both
brick and mortar and virtual context.
The organization chosen here for discussion is a retail giant of UK, Tesco. It is a British
multinational general and grocery merchandise retailer that is headquartered in Hertfordshire,
England. The main purpose of Tesco is to serve its customers effectively. Its corporate
structure has customers at the top. Also, the company needs employees with right level of
skills at all level of corporate structure. Tesco is operating its brick and mortar business in 12
nations globally through 6,780 stores. Additionally, the organization employs around 500,000
employees worldwide. Besides its main business in the grocery outlet, the organization has
diversified to provide a range of other services and products, such as mobile phones and
personal finance. Recently, the company has also developed its brick and mortar business
model into virtual operations to put emphasis on modern day techniques, through customer
relationship management program, Tesco direct and Clubcard (Hackney, Grant and
Birtwistle, 2006).
The company is facing challenge in its both Brick and Mortar and Virtual context. In its
Brick and Mortar business model, Tesco is facing issue of employee engagement. Moreover,
its virtual operations is affected by less trust among team members. These challenges can be
successfully deal by leadership and HRM approaches in the organization, which is explained
below:
Employee engagement challenge in Brick and Mortar
The term employee engagement is referred to a level to which workforce is motivated
to add to success of business and are ready to apply discretionary effort for completing tasks
that are significant for achieving corporate goals. Hiring managers and senior management of
Tesco know how significant employee engagement for their company’s sales is. Their
commitment and knowledge can be the difference in between disgruntled customers and
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happy ones (Anandikar, Deruntz and Kulesa, 2015). Although, Tesco competes in other
manners besides the satisfaction of customers, the less engagement of employee is bad for the
organization. As the economy at global level slowly develops from recession, opportunities
for workers will open up somewhere else and the company can again be forced into strong
struggle for talent. This can prove costly for Tesco if it will have less engaged manpower
(Furst and et.al., 2004). In fact, more than 50 percent less engaged employees of retail sector
plan to leave in subsequent year, in comparison to only their 10 percent of more engaged
colleagues. Also, engagement of employees matters when it comes to perceptions of
employees for corporate performance. With the help of more engaged employees, Tesco
would perform better in the market. This entails that active engagement of employee in
perfectly related to corporate performance through better customer service and less turnover
(Feinberg, 2015).
In this relation, a range of steps can be taken by leaders of Tesco to lessen the turnover
risk among its employees. The effectiveness of company is influenced by leaders through
their followers. Leadership can have great influence on employee’s engagement in the
organization (Holton, 2001). Among several leadership theories, the transactional approach
restricts the leader to use behaviours based on rewards for attaining employees high
performance that only have effects for short-term. Moreover, the LMX (Leader Member
Exchange) theory supports the privileged group’s development at the workplace and appears
discriminatory and unfair. The particular theory does not define how to create trust and how
employees can become part of in-group (Gebauer, Lowman and Gordon, 2008).
But, the transformational leadership appears as a style that fosters growth of manpower
engagement. Transformational leaders offers an inspirational vision of objectives that can
support in overcoming with narrow factionalism and self-interest in companies. They
summon wider and new energies within followers. It has been found out by Bakker and
Schaufeli in 2008 that workforce who have positive interactions with managers have
improved engagement level (Gibson and Cohen, 2003). Besides this, Wang, Orwa, Lawler
and Walumbwa (2005), determined that adopting transformational style of leaderships result
in enhanced commitment of company and job satisfaction. Furthermore, it has been analysed
by Cartwright and Holmes (2006) that leaders who concentrate on trust development and
relationship building at work increase the level of employee engagement (Dealtry, 2005).
Transformation leaders are not considered as control figure but mutual support for shared
purpose and the collective good for the company. From such perspective, transformational
leaders have capability to influence directly the employees overall engagement level as well
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as are able to fulfil work and human needs of their staffs, a dividend of empowering and very
unique style (Jayanti, 2012). Hence, it can be perfectly said that effective leaders are
competent and they can handle the challenges faced by Tesco. They should not distract by
infighting and politicking, rather collaborate and cooperate with others. The leaders of Tesco
inspire confidence among employees by their different conducts and actions. They are caring,
honest and trustworthy (Konrad, 2006).
In addition to above, the human resource manager of Tesco can handle the challenge of in-
store employee engagement by adopting following policies:
Work-life balance – The Company can support its employees to balance life priorities and
work by not only providing practical support, like flexible schedules of work but also through
offering emotional understanding and support. By supporting work-life balance the HR
manager of Tesco can be more attractive its current and potential manpower as well (Cascio
and Shurygailo, 2003).
Fair compensation – More than the compensation amount, what is mostly matter is
perception of employees towards pay fairness. Cultivating such attitude among staffs may be
as simple as defining how their pay was identified, showing the connection in between their
performance and pay as well as ensuring that they well understand how to enhance
compensation of their own (Nemiro and et.al., 2008).
Innovative climate – The HR manager can inspire and engage people through offering them
with exciting tasks to do. Employees like to try new things, being listened to and share their
ideas. The opportunity to become innovative will both motivate and challenge to perform at
their level best (Kimmet, 2007).
Since, manpower engagement has positive and direct influence on satisfaction of
customers, the leader and HR manager at Tesco should take initiative to enhance client-facing
workers engagement for increasing buyer’s satisfaction (Reilly, 2014).
Challenge of building trust in virtual team
Many researchers and consultants agree that developing trust is a great challenge in
creating successful virtual organizations and teams. Trust has been considered as glue of
international workplace. Tesco is facing difficulty in managing conflict and building trust due
to less ability of team members to make face to face interaction (Kirkman and et.al., 2002).
Communication gap is very challenging in virtual teams that also make it very tough to
overcome with cultural obstacles. Such challenges are not insurmountable to virtual teams.
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Leaders and HR manager professional’s active engagement in adequate training and selection
of virtual team staffs, the appropriate technologies selection and executive support
encouragement for virtual groups can turn such challenges into great business opportunities
(Royal and Agnew, 2011).
In relation to HRM approaches, two practices can improve performance of virtual
teams at Tesco, such as training in skills for developing informed community and
collaborative behaviour. When HR team have significant investment in these practices, the
collaboration can be strong and reflect the business strategies and corporate cultures (Bonk,
Kim and Zeng, 2006). Collaborative behaviours at Tesco may comprise engaging in
purposeful discussions, demonstrating appreciation to others, program management and
productively or creatively resolving conflicts. Moreover, developing informal community
activities like mentoring, coaching and feedback can be facilitated at workplace by HR
manager to help virtual members feel connected to the company. Also, HR should ensure that
promotions and succession planning are tracked for providing credit and recognition to
virtual team members (Wallace, 2012).
Besides above, strong leadership is must at Tesco for the success of virtual teams.
While the abilities and skills required for conventional teams managers are similar to those
required of virtual teams, there are some main differences. Virtual teams don’t have
advantage of regular face-to-face communication and as a result experience difficulty in
developing rapport and trust among team members. In order to foster rapport and trust, the
leader of virtual team at Tesco should put emphasis on building relationship, demonstrate
good skills of communication (comprising capability of giving regular feedback) and have
emotional intellect. As decision making process can be challenge, specifically early in
partnership of virtual teams, the leader should have a track record of generated outcomes and
focus on procedures as well (Arnison and Miller, 2002). The virtual team leaders at Tesco
should consider the following:
 Develop and maintain trust by using communication technology;
 Ensure that team diversity is understood, leveraged and appreciated;
 Manage virtual meetings and work cycles;
 Enhance team and its mentor’s external visibility;
 Ensure that benefits are received by individuals through participation in virtual teams
(Bharwani and Butt, 2012).
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CONCLUSION
It can be concluded from above report that in present competitive environment of work,
the organization is required to move beyond only motivating their staffs and towards the
development of engagement environment. With regards to styles of leadership,
transformational leaders appear to be more self-confident to lead engagement culture at work.
Transformational leaders at Tesco can display behaviours like displaying vision, supportive
management to improve engagement level of employees.
Additionally, it is hard for any team to develop trust, but specifically it is very hard in
case of virtual groups, whose members have less chances to make personal interaction.
Virtual teams often grow around projects with people drifting away and coming together
during distinct phases. Also, misunderstanding can arise on frequent basis with virtual teams,
as its members span different cultures, which is very hard to detect and awkward to address.
Virtual teams hardly assign special time to build relations.
RECOMMENDATIONS
After analysing the paper, it can be suggested that leaders can play significant role in
employee’s engagement development by projecting characteristics and ideals that are knotted
to engagement drivers, i.e. providing vision to staffs and being supportive. Tesco can start
training sessions for leaders on topics related to employee engagement and transformational
leadership. As a strategy of human resource development, leaders training should emphasize
that such move towards transformational leadership skills development is not just an initiative
of human resource but an initiative for corporate development that should be adopted daily.
The company can build comprehensive tactics for executives that would provide them with
tools of developing skills to share their vision, build trust and creative effective relations in
between organization and employees. Leaders of Tesco by applying such skills can be
positively perceived by their manpower. As a consequence, employees would be able to
develop increased productively level and high business commitment.
In relation to trust building in virtual teams it can be suggested that HR manager of
Tesco can build “getting-to-know-you” sessions among members of this group. Dedicating an
hour to virtual meeting for relaxed conversation about interests, family, professional
backgrounds, etc. can provide advantages to company. Moreover, team leader can develop a
template that members can populate easily with useful informations. This fact sheet can be
email by people to others or they can post it in shared locations, which is only accessible to
members of team. Furthermore, team leaders can develop a space and time where members of
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team can learn lesson with others. Such sharing can occur in an online conference, in a blog
or wiki. Also, team leaders should connect regularly with members virtual team members and
develop suggestions plus opportunities for individuals to connect with others. This can be
effective done by video conference or phone and avoid an over-reliance on email. Finally, it
can be recommended that in virtual teams people should be encouraged to discuss about
behaviours that tend to break and build trust.
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REFERENCES
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