Most leaders are acknowledging that engagement is critical to deliver sustainable business success. Less people chasing more profitability is a tough environment - one in which the business must capitalise on people's effort. 

Engagement results from feelings of genuine involvement. It drives commitment to deliver because work has meaning and matters to people individually. In a downturn, tapping this discretionary effort is even more essential. 

Engagement is a mindset

Engaged people link their values and purpose to that of the organisation and become willing contributors. But engagement is a mindset, not an event.

Studies have consistently demonstrated that engaged staff are more productive and although senior leaders recognise this criticality, ‘engagement' often falls through the cracks.

So who's responsible for translating the ‘engage staff' strategy statement into business reality?

Whose job is it?

Senior leaders know engagement is important, but may be unsure of where to go for help. Traditionally they have turned to HR or internal communication - and many have recently created a head of engagement role - but this misses the point.

Engagement is part of effective leadership and must be picked up by leaders at all levels. Functions such as HR might be able to facilitate, offer advice and ensure other processes support engagement - but they can't actually do it.  Engagement is a full-bore leadership responsibility, not artful support activity.

HR - or heads of engagement - will focus on reward structures, encouraging informal recognition, providing business-wide communication, developing leadership skills and so on. But without leadership action, these support activities are wasted.

Surveys can help

Staff surveys are one way to discover existing levels of engagement and identify problem areas. Too often these only use ‘trailing' indicators such as staff understanding of strategy and their commitment to deliver it. So it's important to include ‘leading' engagement indicators such as pride, advocacy and loyalty towards the organisation, and perceived managerial support.

When leaders behave as if short-term profit is their sole interest, engagement levels dip. Worse, sending messages to the contrary, that staff see as contradictory through management's actions, only heightens distrust - a sure killer of engagement.

Staff who feel engaged put in much more effort, perform better and are nearly 90% less likely to resign. Several different studies have shown that only 50%-60% of the people in the organisations surveyed felt engaged - a huge loss of productive capacity.

Work up your own solutions

Those in support functions can help find and communicate success stories, to seed further engagement activities and help lift engagement levels overall.

Like any other change initiative, lifting a ready-made solution is unlikely to work for you. Your programme must use the language of your business, be closely linked with business objectives and become a leadership responsibility throughout the company.

 ‘Quitters take bad breaks and use them as a reason to give up. It's all a matter of pride.'  Nancy Lopez

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