The HR profession has bought into psychologists’ construct of employee engagement – hook, line and sinker. And that, in my view, helps to keep the HR profession stuck where it is – hoping for, but not earning, the elusive “seat at the table.”
At its core, engagement really has little, if anything, to do with how work gets done and results get produced in an organization. And so when HR professionals focus (obsess) on measuring it, they do so at the expense of more critical items such as work processes, social learning, the quality of the hiring process, and accountability.
In “Debunking Employee Engagement Myths,” an article just published in Talent Management, Dan McMurrer and I dive into these ideas in detail, and lay out the research that has shaped our thinking on this issue.
We expect to take some flak for this perspective, but hope also to do some good in the process. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Hi Laurie,
I agree with you and Dan that employee engagement is an important concept, but only as a part of a larger talent management system. I think that folks forget that engagement is best seen as a means toward an end.
PS: Congratulations on the new blog–I added you to our blogroll at LeaderChat. Looking forward to following you throughout the year.
Posted by David Witt
Link | March 9th, 2010 at 9:31 am
Hi Lauri and Dan,
I enjoyed the article. Your point of view in the first part of the article is refreshing, however, your solution seems to suggest “more of the same, except better executed.”
I tend to agree with you that the HR profession is obsessed with benchmarking and is too often misled into looking for answers in external surveys, when the real need is for some navel gazing – i.e., looking at your own situation, referencing your strategic imperatives and establishing a sound analytical framework and crafting a solution that works for you. I think employee engagement has been quite well characterized at this point and that beneficial impacts on business results have been identified so that discovering the right “employee engagementbusiness result” model for your company is a worthwhile endeavor. There’s a lot of scope for better surveys (with questions that account for non-traditional factors and ask questions in a way that yields answers amenable to analysis) and even more scope for more powerful (i.e., econometric rather than Excel) analysis. More and more of that is happening now in enlightened HR shops and the resulting literature will be very interesting indeed.
Posted by Amit Mohindra
Link | March 16th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
The article is quite thought-provoking. Engagement in the abstract does very little. I have groups reporting to me who are engaged in the sense of being really committed, but their commitment is to activities that are not productive or even counter-productive. The foundations of successful enterprise are clarity in what to do and how to do it, and that does require getting into the details of what the enterprise is about, how work needs to be done, and how employees learn to do it. Engagement may be a result of those requirements being met, but it also can occur when they are not. So, while really low engagement might be a useful preliminary signal, high engagement is not a good indicator of the health of an enterprise.
Posted by Alan Lesgold
Link | March 24th, 2010 at 11:43 am
Brilliantly said, Alan!
Engagement is (probably) necessary, but it certainly isn’t sufficient. Because so many have essentially come to equate engagement with business results, the HR profession has gotten locked into an unproductive (potentially even counter-productive) measurement gridlock.
Posted by Laurie Bassi
Link | March 25th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Thanks, Amit. We couldn’t agree more–except with your comment that what we are suggesting is “more of the same, except better executed.” In our work, we do EXACTLY what you suggest in your second paragraph. For example, you might want to take a look at our Harvard Business Review article (http://custom.hbsp.com/b01/en/implicit/p.jhtml?login=BASS030207S&pid=R0703H).
Posted by Laurie Bassi
Link | March 25th, 2010 at 1:21 pm