Page 84 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

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Employee Engagement

The Root of the Problem

As the concept of employee engagement has grown in popularity,
consultants have scrambled onto the engagement bandwagon to
lay claim as experts in the field. In the words of John Gibbons of
the Conference Board:

The difficulty in agreeing on what employee engage-
ment actually is also stems from the efforts of compet-
ing consulting firms to create opinion surveys that
represent their own unique approach to the concept.
These consultants understandably have worked hard
to create brandable approaches in order to distin-
guish themselves from their competitors. But, by doing
so, they have in fact created a confusing number of
de facto definitions of employee engagement. What’s
more, they have also created an equally diverse array
of ways to measure it.

Benjamin Schneider and his colleagues wrote: “The plurality of
these engagement definitions make [sic] it obvious that the mea-
surement of engagement is neither uniform nor clear. In fact,
many HR consultants and practitioners have re-packaged exist-
ing employee surveys and called them engagement surveys.” As
a field of study and practice, this matter is not simply confusing
. . . it is grave.

Lack of Accountability
You might wonder, given the magnitude of this problem and its
implications, why consulting firms have not been held account-
able for using valid measures of employee engagement. The rea-
son is that most corporate vice presidents and human resources
managers who engage consulting firms do not have a sufficient