Aligned with theHRDIRECTOR Appraising Employee Engagement roundtable (8th April 2014), the event sponsor, Valuentis, has released its second published report entitled Employee Engagement in Organisations: ‘State of the Notion’ report 02. The combination of the roundtable debate and this extensive and probing report, represents one of the most revelatory and thought-provoking insights into the role of engagement in the rapidly changing workplace.
The purpose of these reports is to uncover organisational reality and provide signposts for those organisations who are committed to embedding and sustaining high employee engagement. Our database has increased to 145 participating organisations of varying sizes and locations – a more reflective sample of the market place. The findings and message however reinforce that of the first report. To recap from our first published report published back in September 2013, employee engagement has been a hot topic since the turn of the century. Many organisations have launched various initiatives under the guise of employee engagement though some with fairly tenuous links. Employee engagement as a term has generated huge interest and comment across the globe and continues to do so. But just how far have organisations got in terms of embedding leadership and management practice that enables employee engagement in improving/sustaining productivity and performance?
To restate, as evidence-based management practitioners, we have observed, alongside a plethora of successful future-leaning projects, a certain amount of confusion and misunderstanding with regard to employee engagement. From an informed knowledge perspective, sorting the ‘wheat from the chaff’ requires a fair degree of due diligence. We have consistently asked questions to fundamentals such as: What exactly is employee engagement? And what problem was it designed to solve? Whose responsibility is it in organisations? What are the key components of EE strategy and embedding it as standard practice? What are the impediments to doing so? Why definitions and measurement are critical and how do organisations evaluate progress? And so on.
Some of the answers are not always obvious nor what perhaps conventional wisdom may suggest and there remains too often a gap between organisational belief with its consequent actions and solutions to the daily conundrum of obtaining ‘optimal employee engagement’. We would like to thank all of those organisational representatives who took the short time out to complete the survey and provide this important market data. We would also like to thank OsneyMedia, Symposium Events and theHRDIRECTOR magazine, for their co-operation in carrying out the survey and their continued provision of high quality conferences, roundtables and publications that support the industry.
