The importance of getting more strategic clarity

Implications of strategic engagement choices

References

The lack of progress in employee engagement

Almost 30 years have elapsed since William Kahn first proposed the concept of “personal engagement” (Kahn, 1990), since when there has been growing appreciation of the subject of employee engagement, culminating in the 2009 MacLeod Report to the UK Government, which underlined its importance as a business issue. Yet despite this awareness, and the huge industry surrounding the topic (consulting, surveys, etc), how much progress has really occurred in the past quarter of a century? Excepting some notable case studies showing progress (Tomlinson, 2010), this activity has not generally translated into significant improvements in engagement scores. Recent UK research reported only 35% of people felt their employer inspired them to give of their very best (CIPD, 2016) and 45% of US employees are apparently likely or very likely to look for a job outside their current organisation in the next 12 months (SHRM, 2016). While the economic uncertainty since 2008 may have affected employee attitudes negatively, could it also be a consequence of ineffective engagement activities by employers? Some experts argue employee engagement is not strategic (Brooks and Saltzman 2012), while only 34% of US employees felt their employer had an official employee engagement strategy anyway (Business Wire, 2016). Likewise one UK study (People Lab, 2016) reported that fewer than half of companies had any engagement strategy in place, and that most activity was focused on internal communication and running surveys. Research into major Swiss companies (Matthews, 2013) showed that of 20 assessed in detail, 18 generally agreed that employee engagement was an important priority, but only 12 measured it via surveys, and just one reported their engagement performance publicly. Furthermore, follow up interviews with 5 of these companies revealed that none felt they had an actual engagement strategy. These results suggest that there may be a significant gap between the stated importance organisations attribute to engagement and what they actually do in practice. While employee engagement and culture have been reported by companies to be their top people-related challenges (Deloitte, 2015), these may in reality be buried in an over-long list of priorities to which human resources has to respond. The risk then is that: (a) employees become all too aware of the gap between the rhetoric and reality; and (b) the efforts of the employer are more focused on measuring engagement rather than addressing it.