New research for the Observer suggests large companies are at last making an effort to understand their employees and 'engage' with them.
Large companies claim that they are doing more than ever before to listen to their staff and improve relationships. "Employee engagement" – the jargon for firms' efforts to communicate and build good relations with their workforces – is a key topic in management circles.
Since 2006, companies have had a legal duty to "have regard to the interests of employees" and to report on their interactions with staff each year in their accounts.
This is all very good, ethical and fits into my mindset but some realitties worth pointing out.
1 The primary objective of the organisation is the bottom line. The only language that will have an impact on management is does employee engagement actually deliver results. And organisations are not really that interested still. Nita Clarke, co-author of government-commissioned report Engaging for Success, says: "It's amazing how little attention the investment community pays to the fact that employee engagement has a real impact on medium- and long-term company performance." A recession makes that message more difficult to communicate as the firm has more on its plate than some management fad term. Sometimes they have to worry about redundancy consultancy.
2 As much as we can advise our clients, it pays to have good ethical procedures, correct engagement, great culture, blah, blah, most actually only change once threre is a crisis. Sometimes it is an Employment Tribunal claim, members of staff leaving that creates a problem which leads to meaningful change.
3. Talent is largely wasted. Global employee surveys conducted by the consulting firm Towers Watson regularly find that just 20% of workers are fully engaged in their work. That is, 80% are giving less than they could. Fom my experience, nothing that radical there. This is the way things have always been.
4 A lot of so called Employee Engagement is cosmetic. As the Observer piece pointed out, dutifully carrying out employee surveys or asking people for ideas for new products and then not following up is a recipe for cynicism and disaffection, not engagement. Consultation exercises, newsletters and intranets may look good listed in annual reports, but they don't in themselves change people's attitudes or behaviour. Some of the most depressing organisations I have worked with have lots of these products and services.
5 Mediation and Dispute Resolution Procedures help and can help a lot, but are no panacea.
6 The recession creates short pessimissm for Employee Engagement but long term positive change. Employee engagement is the way forward but not necessarily in the way many organisations are doing it now. As the late Delorese Ambrose observed in "Healing the Downsized Organisation "We can hope that phoenixlike, out of the ashes of these paradoxes and seeming chaos, there will emerge a redefinition of our work and the relationships that support it." Amen.
Justin Patten, Mediator