This is a guest post from Christine Livingston. She is a coach and writer, who helps professional people wanting to work and live on their own terms. With a successful career both inside and beyond the corporation to draw from, Christine gives the support, challenge, tools and inspiration that enable people to thrive. You can follow her on Twitter @coblyn. Or why not follow her RSS feed?

I heard on the grapevine last week that UK headhunters have an increasing number of employee engagement vacancies on their books. Recession-battered businesses seeking to fix their morale problems ahead of the expected job market upturn, apparently.

Now, I’m a major advocate for people at work. Treat people as adults and give them meaningful jobs that allow them to use their talents, and the results can be incredible. Not only do you create a community of happy, engaged individuals; you also deliver fabulous customer service and differentiate your brand in the marketplace. All good for the bottom line.

But the jobs I see advertised, and the “employee engagement” I see practiced, fall well short of enabling that picture. Here’s why:

Employee Engagement isn’t just about measurement

Talk to many engagement professionals and, before long, they’ll be telling you about the surveys and systems they use.

You’ll hear them debate whether Gallup is best, versus another provider or some in-house solution.

And I’ve seen some wonderful presentations by engagement specialists, cutting their data in all kinds of ways to analyse the effects of this on that.

Sure, measurement is important. But it’s a bit like making the mistake of thinking Google Analytics is your marketing effort. You can use metrics to have useful discussions about how you’re doing. But for too many, measurement is an end in itself.

Programmes and initiatives miss the point

A lot of companies make the mistake of envisioning engagement as something it must “do” to its employees.

They miss the point that people are individuals, not some amorphous mass to be dealt with uniformly.

They fail to understand that the essence of employee engagement is about relationship. And that relationship is a dynamic, ongoing process between people, and involving lots of dialogue and interaction.

Misguided, they crank the same old people management levers they’ve ever cranked. Even if they have new names and different looks. Company wide messenging; reward and recognition programmes; sheep-dip training initiatives.

And are then surprised when they get the same old results.

Management jargon alienates people

One of the job ads I read said:

“The successful candidate will have dialogic skills and understand the benefits of an appreciative approach.”

Management is riddled with such language and the whole area of employee engagement is no different.

There are two dangers in this. The first is that those managers who want to play the game of adapting to their corporate system will mimic the language without necessarily having the depth of understanding to go with it. So around the executive tables, the senior folks sound like they get the whole employee engagement thing. But don’t confuse that with them actually getting it in practice.

Second, using such impersonal language to work with what is a company’s most personal of resources only alienates the very people it’s supposed to draw closer.

Because employers rarely treat their people as people, they rarely see the full benefits of an engagement philosophy.

HR ownership detracts from engagement’s importance

Engagement is not an HR function. It’s an attitude of mind and a way of being that needs to be positively practiced by the CEO and each of a business’s leaders.

Sure, HR plays a big role in advocating and modelling engagement, and in providing the tools to support a business bring it to life.

But too many engagement dreams die on the vine because they are pushed by HR rather than being lead by the business.

The switch on/switch off mentality misses the point

Before the downturn, employee engagement was flavour of the month. Driven by an understandable desire to compete on both people and service, many companies allocated big budgets to it.

But as soon as recession hit, engagement was seen as an area of discretionary spend and its hype downplayed. Not only that but the spirit of engagement was forgotten.

Because managers didn’t know what was happening they withdrew from talking to their staff. Development initiatives were cancelled without the kind of adult conversations needed to accompany such a move. People were sacked in the most inhumane ways.

Now with things apparently easing off, it’s safe to talk about engagement again.

But if you see employee engagement as something that’s just for good times, or for fixing things, you will never engender the trust and respect of your people that’s so central to its success.

If you want to be successful in managing employee engagement, you need to commit to it in the long term. Done well, it requires a profound shift in the thinking and being of leaders in any business that chooses to adopt its philosophies. It needs courage, confidence and the belief that relationship is not only possible, but required through a business’s good and bad times.

Are you up for that?

This is a guest post from Christine Livingston. She is a coach and writer, who helps professional people wanting to work and live on their own terms. With a successful career both inside and beyond the corporation to draw from, Christine gives the support, challenge, tools and inspiration that enable people to thrive. You can follow her on Twitter @coblyn. Or why not follow her RSS feed?

Thanks to j lord for the image