Developing engagement
June 14, 2008
Yesterday I was considering the meaning of the term employee engagement, and concluded that it is the way employers develop the employee experience so that they feel highly motivated and committed to doing a great job for the company. So what sorts of practices produce high engagement? Well of course there’s no magic answer and employers must remember that every single person they employ is unique. The UK workforce is made up of a wide variety of people with different ages, genders, cultures and backgrounds, and different people will respond to different situations. Examples of work aspects that may influence engagement include flexibility, feeling fairly rewarded for the job, acceptable working methods, opportunities for development and progression, and probably most importantly, fair and effective management.
Managing engagement centrally means developing ways to measure engagement levels, or ‘taking the temperature’ as it is sometimes referred to. You need to find out how engaged employees are and what will make them more engaged. Using surveys and other consultative methods such as focus groups or performance management systems are good ways of collecting valuable information on this. But as always, this information is useless if it is only used in a positive way and not left lying around to gather dust or used against an employee who has been bold enough to honestly give their opinion.
Information from engagement measurement exercises needs to be used strategically at management level; as I said yesterday engagement will drive business performance so it should be high on the agenda for all managers. Management meetings or development sessions can be constructively used to analyse the information collected and strategies developed to tackle some of the key big themes that arise. The hard part will be making time to concentrate on this on top of the day to day operational issues that always take preference in such meetings. This is where HR needs to do its job as a driver of this issue – to keep pushing the subject up the agenda and highlighting as much as possible the reasons why this is such an important business objective for all of the company, not just the HR team.
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2 Responses to “Developing engagement”
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Why dont HR staff engage staff more by actually being HR professionals instead of selling out and informing company management of any little thing that an employee says?
What happened to HR people being unbiased and being true to their profession?
Is it pressure from management, desperation for cash in the current financial climate or a lack of ability?
Hi James
Your comment is a little unclear in its meaning, but you’ve obviously had a bad experience with HR. I think HR will often inform management of what’s going on in the workforce if they’re concerned about something or feel they need to pre-warn management before something happens (e.g. an employee leaving). It can be quite a balancing act between responsibilities to employees and responsibilities to the business, and the two cross over quite a lot.