Who Owns Employee Engagement in Your Company?
Mention employee engagement to most managers, and the usual reaction is “that’s an HR issue”.
Nothing could be further from the truth…
Employee engagement is the responsibility of every manager and leader in your organization. The very success of your company rests on how engaged your managers can make your employees feel.
Employee engagement is about connecting the hearts and minds of your employees with the values and vision of your company. It’s about getting your employees to feel more connected with your company, to take greater ownership, responsibility, and go a bit further for your customers, not because you ask them to, but because they want to.
In the same way that the financial success of your company is not just the responsibility of your finance director, employee engagement is not solely the responsibility of your HR department.
Ask Alex Furgerson, one of the most successful football managers ever, who owns employee engagement at Manchester United. He doesn’t say HR, because HE owns it as the manager. He sees the one-to-one connection between the engagement of his players and the results they achieve on the pitch.
The fact is, employee engagement, however you define or understand it, is about making your staff feel more connected to your business so you can get the most from them. That is the responsibility of each and every manager in your company.
No amount of HR initiatives or programs will compensate for the words and actions of your managers. That is not to say that your HR department cannot and should not play a vital role in helping your managers create higher levels of engagement with their employees, but ultimately your managers have to take responsibility for engagement.
At a company wide level, your CEO’s office and board-of-directors need to ultimately own employee engagement, but that will never happen unless they clearly understand the direct link between people and profit. Thankfully, there is now endless conclusive evidence which proves the connection between engaged employees and higher revenues, profits and company value.
But even in the face of such indisputable evidence that employee engagement leads to greater profits, the challenge is still to move employee engagement out of HR and onto the agenda of the CEO and Board.
Category : Blog
