Strategic HR What is engagement?
Fact Fact
or fiction?
Few seem able to agree on what engagement is or how to measure it. Some argue
that it never existed at all and was nothing more than the latest fad. By
RACHEL SHARP
London, ascribes to. “There is no
‘it’. Engagement just isn’t a thing,”
he says. “I’ve been looking at it for
at least 10 years and I have
absolutely no idea what it means.
I’ve sat in meetings with people
discussing engagement scores and
said ‘what does it mean’ and they
don’t know.”
He points to how the concept
first came into being. It was 1990
when William A Kahn first coined
the phrase ‘employee engagement’
in an article in the Academy of
Management Journal. Over the
course of the decade employee
engagement surveys started
appearing, with the likes of
Gallup pioneering the concept.
But most would agree that
the movement really took
off after David MacLeod,
co-chair of the Employee
Engagement Task Force
and co-author of the
MacLeod Report, and
co-author Nita Clarke
published their
governmentcommissioned
Engaging
for Success report in 2009
and set up the Engage for
Success Task Force. Today
it’s the HR teams without a
dedicated engagement
strategy and annual
engagement survey in
the minority.
“Engagement was a useful
political tool for the CIPD
and Engage for Success that
said we need to treat workers
properly and the reason we
need to do that is because the
UK lags behind with
personal productivity,”
says Briner.
“Is this really engagement? I
think it should be in the
L&D category.” So came the
feedback around the table at the
recent HR Excellence Awards 2019
judging day in response to one
organisation’s submission in the
Outstanding employee
engagement strategy category.
It was a similar story for
another entry: “This isn’t really
engagement. It’s a pulled-together
list of initiatives that could have
helped engage employees and
have then been called employee
engagement after.”
This isn’t to say that the award
entries were poor quality, or that
none fitted our judges’ definition
of ‘true engagement’. And many
showcased remarkable work.
It’s just that this work wasn’t
always necessarily what others
deemed ‘engagement’.
This confusion isn’t isolated to
the awards circuit alone. Ask a
collection of HRDs about their
employee engagement strategies
and descriptions will cover
everything from wellbeing to
rewards structures, from new
HR technology implementation
to L&D.
Which raises questions about
what this mythical creature
employee engagement actually is.
Is it all of the above? Or
something else entirely? And is
HR blindly pursuing something it
doesn’t fully understand? Or that
doesn’t even exist?
An elusive beast
It’s this latter radical verdict that
Rob Briner, professor of
organisational psychology at
Queen Mary University of
“I don’t think it means anything
on its own. It’s just what
HR was looking for at
the time,” agrees Cary
Cooper, professor of
organisational
psychology at the
University of
Manchester.
20 HR June 2019 hrmagazine.co.uk
/hrmagazine.co.uk