Employee Engagement

Last month I visited Brazil for the second time the past year. I met with four different consulting firms on behalf of a company on whose board I serve. One of the recurring themes during my visit was employee engagement. It is a hot topic and many world class consultancies such as Hewitt, Hay, Gallup, and my old alma mater Louis Allen Worldwide are scrambling to respond to this market interest.

It is my view that fostering employee engagement is the core work of HR functions. In today's fragile economy, competitive advantage is elusive since other firms can pretty much copy your products and emulate your service offerings. However, no one can really copy how your employees feel about your company. Research has shown that organizations with better employee engagement perform better on a number of critical measures, e.g., profitability, customer retention, etc. Engagement means going the extra mile to achieve company goals. It is the extra that affects the competitive advantage.

Research on employee engagement suggests that what drives it varies from company to company, so there are no universal remedies or across the board solutions. What drives it in your organization might be very different than what drives it elsewhere.

We have made many advances in measuring and analyzing employee engagement, but we are in the primitive stages when it comes to targeted interventions. Consultancies seem to know less about how to improve it than they know about measuring it.

The source of implementation wisdom comes from the day to day experience and know-how in job design, carefully architected reward systems, effective leadership practices, and human resources policies and programs. HR departments need to step up and lead with properly configured strategies and programs. You cannot improve employee engagement with training programs, communication blitzes, or focus groups. Sure, these might help but they alone will not sustain change and improvement. It is not the job of consultants to do this. Most consultants lack the knowledge in the fundamentals of human resources management. It is not their mantra. Most make money by being good diagnosticians, not treatment specialists.

Treating the intervening variables may give the illusion of progress, but addressing the causal variables is where the honey is, so to speak. The former is akin to treating the symptoms. Unfortunately, this is where most effort goes in, in my view.

What are your ideas and successes in this area? Are you willing to exchange them? Enjoy the journey along the learning curve.