Employee Engagement and Human Resource Practices in the CEE Region and Europe

This article presents the findings of the ‘European Employee Engagement Survey’, which is a bi-annual research that was executed in 2010 and 2012 with the participation of almost 300 European Human Resource (HR) professionals. The main objective of the research was to explore a comprehensive picture concerning the state of employee engagement within the European region with special attention to the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region. By introducing descriptive statistics of survey responses the paper provides an interesting overview about various approaches to employee engagement as well as the variety of HR and engagement management practices applied in the CEE and European region. Furthermore, through multi-variable statistical analyses it also reveals deeper coherences of HR and engagement practices with demographic data as well as certain employee aspects, such as employee morale, engagement and organizations’ talent attraction and retention ability. The research confirmed that employee engagement had become a widely recognized concept among European HR professionals. Growing importance was attributed to employee engagement across European organizations with the intention to more deliberately manage employee engagement and link engagement measures to business results. Interestingly, however, the research findings did not fully support the generally agreed notion that improved HR and engagement practices would remarkably contribute to the improvement of employee aspects.