What is engagement? Strategic HR
June 2019 HR 21
I’ve been
looking at it
for at least 10
years and I
have absolutely
no idea what
it means
explaining that such woolliness
allows HR to use engagement as
an important-sounding tool to
show the business it is doing
something valuable.
“People – whether consciously
or unconsciously – try to keep
things ambiguous as there’s
strategic value in doing so,” he
says. “Life is a bit easier if we don’t
bother defining it and that’s
why you get people putting
everything under that umbrella as
it’s strategically useful. So again
and again you get HR trying to
avoid being precise and clear; it
feels sometimes all these words
and concepts being thrown
around are like a defence.”
No magic bullet
Others, however, wouldn’t go as
far as to say engagement doesn’t
exist. Just that too much emphasis
has been placed on it as a fix-all
and – crucially – not enough
attention given to what people
mean when using the term.
“It’s confusing,” says Cooper,
regarding the many different,
sometimes conflicting, definitions
out there. “People are using all of
these phrases and think they
mean the same thing, but
they don’t.”
A huge part of the problem,
explains Dilys Robinson,
principal associate of the
Institute for Employment Studies
and the organisation’s research
lead for employee engagement, is
that people conflate the tools that
help achieve engagement –
wellbeing and rewards strategies
for example – with the concept
itself. “These are the tools to
achieve engagement, but are not
in themselves employee
engagement. They can just
contribute towards employees
feeling positive towards the
organisation and feeling more
engaged,” she says.
MacLeod asserts that
employee engagement is in fact
the “umbrella term” under which
all these different parts of good
HR’s problems – and lo and
behold it hasn’t,” Cooper adds.
While some see it as an
umbrella term for a range of HR
activity, Briner believes this is part
of the problem. “You can say
benefits is engagement or
employee experience is
engagement or performance
management is engagement, so
everything is engagement. And as
people say: if something means
everything it means nothing.”
This is the “strategic ambiguity”
of the term, notes Briner,
“The Engage for Success
movement said that we needed
more involvement by employees
in decision-making and needed
them to feel more part of the
culture – that then led to metrics
and measuring it and
organisations doing annual
engagement surveys. So what
that’s morphed into is people
saying engagement is the magic
bullet that’s going to solve all of