HR fall. “All those things play into
good job quality, good work –
that is good pay, job design,
wellbeing, social support and so
on – and create the conditions in
which people are engaged,” he
says. “So employee engagement
joins up all these various terms.”
Cooper sees this differently
again, however. Instead of
engagement being the umbrella
concept he argues it’s just one
small aspect – together with line
manager EQ, flexible working and
good work/life balance – of the
more critical overarching focus of
“good work or a wellbeing
culture…” Which is “way beyond
employee engagement”, he says.
HR has spent too long focusing
on the wrong thing, explains
Cooper: “That’s why mental ill
health has flourished, because HR
has relied too heavily on just that
one metric and it’s not the magic
bullet that will increase
productivity per capita or reduce
stress-related illnesses. We haven’t
seen the bottom line affected by
just dealing with employee
engagement so we need to
go further.”
Rita Trehan, former CHRO at
Honeywell and founder of Dare
Worldwide, agrees that
engagement has detracted focus
away from arguably more
important HR disciplines.
“Employee engagement
was coined as a way to
motivate people to come
to work and do their
best. But the reality is
that this is only one
layer of what is
important to people.
Companies need to get
deeper and look at the
culture as it’s culture that’s
important,” she says.
“Engagement is just part
of the culture, it’s not the
full culture.”
Even if engagement does
exist, says Briner, it should
be lower on HR’s agenda
than it commonly is.
Strategic HR What is engagement?
Defining employee engagement:
What does it mean to the experts?
For David MacLeod, co-chair of the Employee Engagement Task
Force, “employee engagement is about creating conditions in
which people willingly offer their full capability and develop their full
potential”. On a more granular level Engage for Success defi nes four
enablers of engagement: strong strategic narrative (“employees can
relate their job to whatever we’re doing as an organisation and
where it aspires to go”), engaging managers (“managers treat me
like a human being”), employee voice (“the voices of the most junior
travel to the most senior and vice versa”) and organisational integrity
(“the values are consistent with the behaviour in the organisation”).
For Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the Royal Society for the
Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, there are
three dimensions to the concept: the “individual” dimension, which
involves understanding and taking an interest in the welfare of
employees; the degree to which the company “attends to the
collective feeling in the organisation”; and an employee’s right to be
engaged in big decisions. The latter “gets less attention” but is
notable by its absence. “What makes society democratic is people’s
participation and their sense that politicians are responsive. But if you
don’t have the underpinning of formal democracy and rules you’re
in danger of having a strategy that works for the good times but that
can easily be put to one side when things get diffi cult,” he says.
“There’s three things we talk about in psychology on engagement –
the hand, the head and the heart,” says Dan Cable, professor of
organisational behaviour at London Business School. “So physically
are you showing up? The head is: are you mindful of the goal? So
you don’t just do processes, you think up better ways to get the
outcomes you need. And the third thing is the heart. So are you
making yourself emotionally available and do you genuinely care if
customers are happy?”
“I think it’s when your personal values and the values of the
organisation are aligned and they genuinely care about each
other,” says Helen Mitchell, head of internal communications and
engagement at Alzheimer’s Society. “It’s when the employee gives a
damn about the organisation and what it’s trying to achieve and
the organisation gives a damn about employees and enables
them to be the best they can.”
There is a difference between people being engaged with their
day-to-day work and with the organisation, highlights Dilys
Robinson, principal associate of the Institute for Employment
Studies. It’s engagement with the organisation where the
“woolliness” seems to creep in. “Academics say organisation
engagement is too diffi cult to research but we can research
what drives people to be engaged with day-to-day work.”
There’s also a difference between individual engagement and team
engagement, says Amy Armstrong, senior faculty at Ashridge, Hult
International Business School. “Individual engagement is about ‘I
have autonomy and opportunities to grow’,” she explains. “Team
engagement is about the climate so ‘is it a trusting atmosphere
where I feel I can speak up and have psychological safety?’”
22 HR June 2019 hrmagazine.co.uk
/hrmagazine.co.uk