Guest (2014) is amongst those highlighting that many of the policies and practices that are said to help deliver employee engagement are difficult to distinguish from human resource management more broadly. This might lead us to question whether a focus on engagement offers anything new or different for HRM professionals. As already highlighted, there is a particular concern that employee engagement has become the commercial ‘product’ of consultancy firms; whose services often include the measurement of engagement through annual organisational surveys (Arrowsmith and Parker 2013). We will explore this issue further in Activity 3.
About 60 minutes
We have highlighted concerns that employee engagement has become a ‘product’ of consultancy firms. A key tool used is the measurement of engagement through surveys.
These surveys can pose a number of issues in understanding and addressing ‘levels’ of engagement within an organisation:
Using consultants is often an expensive undertaking but many consultancy firms consider survey offerings as a ‘loss leader’ and so they may be available at a low cost. If your organisation is new to this area then using a reputable existing survey can be more cost effective than developing your own. However it is important to consider that commercial offerings rarely acknowledge the ‘darker’ side of engagement and, as Guest highlights, the ‘risk must be that it [employee engagement] will soon join the pantheon of laudable aspirations with which we can all agree, including happiness, quality, growth and sustainability; goals that most of us would like to pursue, concepts that some people think we can measure but goals that remain ultimately elusive in many if not most cases’ (Guest, 2014, p. 233).
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