This week, I attended the HRD Summit 2017.
We had two days of fascinating, inspiring presentations from talented HR colleagues from across the globe and I met a huge number of interesting people.
One thing that struck me, however, was how some of the messages that were shared here, were different from the 'Top Trends for Engagement' recently shared by Gallup or Deloitte. For example, Bersin by Deloitte suggests that "employee engagement has become the top issue on the minds of business leaders, directing us to an entirely new model of management". At the HRD Summit, although Engagement was still very much a focus, the top themes of interest to HR leaders were the Changing Needs of Clients, HR Transformation and the Future of Work.
A focus that Gallup's recent studies have taken is on Millenials and how they are not attached to their employers, and only 29% are engaged in work. At the HRD Summit there was a definitive shift towards looking at the older generation. How we will all grow much older and as a result how there is a trend of older generations entering back into the workforce: many who have retired still want to do some freelance work because they enjoy what they do. There were interesting discussions around how we engage with this group of people - to be able to tap into the incredible wealth of experience and knowledge that these (ex-) employees bring, organisations need to offer flexible solutions that will work around these individuals' desire to work part-time on an adhoc basis. There will be a trend for companies to get smaller with a core of people employed by them, but a large network of experts to tap into as and when required. All of this brings new challenges to engaging with employees - possible challenges for HR in terms of defining who is 'allowed' to access what scheme, versus a company's ability and desire to engage and collaborate effectively with all the people that work for them - from adhoc to permanent - and cater for their different needs.
There was also recognition that in some cases, engagement scores and the desire to continuously increase these and strive for 'more' is actually unhelpful and too one-dimensional. If engagement is not well defined in organisations, but is tied to performance measures there is a risk that high figures are seen as desirable, without much thought about the bigger picture. For example, sometimes too high engagement scores can be negative: employees that are consistently too engaged, are at risk of burnout, if wellbeing is not also taken into account. Employees that are too happy with the status quo (often part of an engagement measure), are at risk of not being open to change.
Similarly, having company wide ‘one size fits all’ annual engagement surveys and reports, bear the risk of turning employees off, as staff don't feel these reports are meaningful or acted upon. There is a new trend of increasingly qualitative sessions - listening to representative groups of employees talk about what really matters to them and feeding this back to the Executive Board. Equally, there is a push towards personalised reports that each employee receives, where their individual engagement score is compared against the company or team engagement score. For areas where these employees score lower than the average, specific solutions at an individual level are suggested: for example, if an employee is dissatisfied with his or her career, they are pointed to the career website of the organisation, with specific actions they can take and own.
Finally, there was a trend towards being more conscious about what you want to measure in your organisation and when, rather than blindly doing annual engagement surveys, because 'it's the done thing'. Instead (or in addition), the suggestion was to have regular Pulse surveys to measure what you need.
The one message that didn't change, was that engagement still remains a company's opportunity to create the environment for their people to allow and enable them to do what they do best, and thus create value through discretionary effort. With the changing make-up of our workforce - be it Millennials or ex-employees returning, this will be as important as ever.
If you have any comments or insights that you would like to share, get in touch! I would love to hear your thoughts.