"Employee engagement is at or near the top of most surveys that cover the concerns of HR leaders. Almost everyone is enthusiastic about the concept... However, there is far too little focus on the problems or issues related to engagement," says a world-renowned consultant in the field of human resources and current professor of management at San Francisco State University John Sullivan.
In his article on ere.net John Sullivan summarized the most serious potential problems of managing employee involvement. He divided the 20 specific issues into five categories. We bring you a brief overview, you can read the original article describing the problems closely below (link Source).
1. Problems associated with the proving the impact on business
-
Engagement is not productivity or output to be measured easily.
-
Engagement does not have one clear definition and, therefore, it is difficult to measure.
-
Engagement can be a byproduct but not the cause of productivity, retention, customer satisfaction etc.
-
Return on investment may be low.
-
Engagement may be influenced by external factors.
-
High level of engagement may not prevent turnover.
-
Employees may show a very good performance even without emotional relation to the organization.
-
Too strong emotional bond may result in worse performance.
-
It is more difficult to measure emotion and effort than to measure actions and behavior.
-
External evidence to demonstrate the impact on business can be controversial.
2. Problems associated with actions to encourage engagement
-
Results of engagement surveys may not be actionable.
-
Identification of the strongest steps may be very difficult.
-
The time needed for the individual steps to increase engagement may be long.
-
Different age and cultural groups of employees are engaged by different things.
3. Problems associated with the process of engagement surveys
-
Answers may be unreliable as in all other staff surveys.
-
Using anonymous surveys, you will not know who to target.
-
Collecting answers too often or too rarely is not efficient.
-
You may not know whether you hire or just cultivate engaged staff.
4. Problems associated with managers
-
Managers are usually convinced that engagement is a matter of HR, not theirs.
-
Managers and employees may not properly understand what engagement is.
-
Reporting the indicators of engagement may not be effective.
-
Managers may not be rewarded for engaging their people.
5. Problems associated with the administration of engagement programs
-
The objectives and scale of engagement programs are often limited.
-kk-