Whose responsibility is employee engagement?
Retention is such a crucial talent issue right now and employee engagement is a vital predictive measure.
I’ve had several conversations with leaders about employee engagement recently – from within HR and outside. There are many different perspectives on who should own it.
When we look at Dave Ulrich’s model, we can all identify with ‘hope’ at the top. It’s definitely desirable to create the conditions for people to have a positive, optimistic outlook and ambition.
How can organisations make employee engagement happen, consistently?
If you have it within your EVP, you’ve got to deliver it.
To what extent is engagement the responsibility of top leaders, versus the local manager, or of HR?
What do you think?
This topic always comes up when I’m working with organisations to raise the level of their HR business partnering. Making sure that partnering fulfils its potential is a two-way street. Business leaders have to ‘get’ it too, and actively support it through all the levels they lead.
Engagement of employees can definitely be improved when business leaders engage fully with their HRBPs – let them partner, challenge and coach and not bog them down with transactional work.
Top down understanding of what partnering means, together with top down commitment, means that the HRBP can partner much more effectively with the local manager to drive engagement – and, therefore, create value.
Alignment workshops – involving key leaders from HR and the business – are a key feature in our work with clients who want to raise the level of partnering. They build clarity and agreement about:
i) the business priorities that the whole HR team needs to get behind, and
ii) what partnering needs to look like.
Please get in touch if you’d like a no obligation chat to explore your own situation and hear about how I’ve seen this play out with clients.
