By Ian J. Cook, CHRP

Engagement is an alluring concept. Intuitively it sounds great; who would not want people to be engaged? The promise that it can be measured and linked to results has made this practice one of the more common and well-resourced areas of HR over the last decade.

The main themes of the concept of engagement – commitment to work, willingness to put in extra effort, satisfaction with the work experience and an emotional connection to your workplace and work colleagues – have a high degree of face value when it comes to identifying the way we would like people to work. It would be a brave leader who stood up and said, “I do not want my people to be engaged”.

The Halo Effect, Fads and Academic Scorn
However in the practice of human resources, promising concepts often succumb to a “halo effect”, by which they become the answer to all complex organizational questions. The expectations of what can be achieved, and the promise of certainty when it comes to the people side of business, become unrealistic; then, as with the concepts of teamwork and empowerment, which preceded engagement, the concept falls into disrepute and something else takes its place. So goes the cycle of a fad.

Within each fad there remains the kernel of the original great idea. From these elements comes the opportunity to push HR practices into a deeper, more robust, more professional and well-founded set of practices. This is the true promise of engagement: to get beyond the fad and the hype and the pseudo measurement, to the place where you are delivering what your organization needs. Here are some ideas on what and how you can enhance your practice in this area.

One place you will not find the word engagement is in the academic literature. They recognize many of the concepts associated with engagement, however the multi-dimensional and mercurial nature of the concept means that it does not survive the rigours of academic thought.  A look at why engagement does not fit into academic practice also indicates how to deepen the processes in HR.

Not all Commitment A Good Thing
Commitment to the workplace is a common corner stone for engagement models. It is assumed that if people want to stay with your organization that is good. This assumption is actually not correct. There are three types of commitment, only one of which actually leads people to want to work harder.

Some people stay because they feel they have no choice, some people stay because they believe they are getting the best reward for the least effort possible and some people stay because they work hard and find the work rewarding. A measurement of commitment that lumps all of these people together is irrelevant and potentially misleading, especially if you assume that the intention to stay is a good thing.

Also there is nothing that links intention to stay with the actual act of staying. Studies¹ into turnover rates indicate that factors outside of the job are as or more influential than factors inside the job when it comes to who is leaving and why; results from the HR Metrics Service indicate that vacancy rates have a significant influence on turnover rates. More people actually leave when there are more opportunities out there. Finally the research² into the impact of forced layoffs indicate that taking action to reduce your workforce will increase your voluntary turnover rate substantially.

Causal Connections and Proof of Profitability
There have been no academic studies that prove engagement impacts profits or revenue. The papers which link engagement to results  tend to come from the consulting firms offering engagement solutions. It is unclear from these papers which comes first; Do better results make people feel better or when people feel better about work do the results follow? This causal connection has yet to be convincingly proven.

What has been proven is that there is no singular practice in HR which leads to success. Great recruitment does not bring success; great onboarding does not bring success; great development does not bring success. What has been proven to bring success is that organizations with sustained results, better than their peers, will have a cluster of aligned and self-reinforcing HR practices which work in concert to enable better productivity from the collective staff group. Called High Performance Work practices, this need to build an HR infrastructure, which is aligned and self-reinforcing is a more certain way to develop performance for your organization than trying to “fix” all the areas that got low scores on your engagement survey.

Advocating a Measured Approach
This article is not intended to suggest you stop trying to understand how your people experience work, their teams and the organization’s leadership. Effectively tapping into and utilizing this information is more important than ever. We do advocate that you gather and process this information in a focused way, on a regular cycle, avoiding the once a year, mega surveys with their associated costs and deluge of data.

We also advocate that you do not chase “engagement”, however you define it, for engagement’s sake.  You need a clear and detailed strategy to grow the effectiveness of your HR contribution to the business, this should be founded on the principles and ideas found in the high performing work practices literature. What you learn about your people and their experience of work should shade and colour how you go about implementing and refining your strategy, but not be an end in itself. In this way you access the best aspects of engagement and leave the faddish element behind.

1. BC HRMA – Research Briefing – Why People Stay
2. BC HRMA – Research Briefing – The Impact of Forced Layoffs

A global citizen, Ian J. Cook, MBA, CHRP (ijcook@bchrma.org) has chosen to make his home in Vancouver where he heads the growth of BC HRMA’s research and learning services.

(PeopleTalk: Fall 2012)