Employee Engagement Is Everyone’s Job – Ask #HR Bartender
Throughout my career, I’ve heard the lines “Sales is everyone’s job.” and “Recruiting is everyone’s job.” Meaning that, while organizations have sales departments and recruiting teams, there’s an expectation that everyone is working together to make sure the organization brings the maximum amount of revenue and attracts the best talent.
Today’s reader note reminds me that everyone has another job.
I’m an HR generalist with a heavy focus in training, performance, and engagement. Lately, I’ve a noticed HR roles that focus solely on employee engagement. Do you think employee engagement roles is a trend or here to stay?
I’m early in my HR career and don’t want to pursue a career in employee engagement and lose other core competencies that I have grown over the past few years. I enjoy the employee engagement focus but worried that it’s only a trend.
First of all, I don’t believe the concept of employee engagement is a trend. At some future point, people might call it something different from engagement and that’s okay. But, organizations need engaged employees. It helps them produce quality products/services, deliver excellent customer service, and achieve their business goals.
I’d add that organizations today need to learn more about how to create an engaged workforce. The latest statistics from Gallup indicate that only 1 in 3 employees are engaged. There’s a lot of work to be done and, unfortunately, I don’t see us going from 33 percent engagement to 100 percent overnight. So, the focus on engagement will be around for a while.
That leads to the idea of having dedicated roles focused on employee engagement. This is where I get a little concerned. I believe that it’s everyone’s job to create engaged workplaces. So, does creating dedicated employee engagement roles take everyone else off the hook? If the answer is like the examples above where there’s an employee engagement team but everyone’s expected to contribute, then it’s totally cool. If not, then I would wonder how someone can be successful if they are solely responsible for making employee engagement happen.
The answer really comes down to organizational culture. Is the company culture one that will hold everyone accountable for contributing to engagement OR one that will hold a single person / small team accountable? Maybe instead of looking at the trends, we need to look at workplace actions.
Image captured by Sharlyn Lauby after speaking at the Healthcare Human Resources Association Conference in Stillwater, MN
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