By Amy Shabacker Dufrane
So much about employee engagement has been researched and reported in the last few years. Gallup estimates a marked decline in employee engagement since 2020, the first falling-off in over a decade. Despite uncertain economic indicators, organizations struggle to attract, recruit, and retain qualified talent. Advancements in people analytics have provided more insights but haven’t really identified the underlying factors that matter most to talent segments.
The toll of driving employee engagement is yet one more stress on HR. Burnout levels among HR professionals who have served on the frontline of the global talent crisis throughout the pandemic are high. And, with all the focus on qualified talent and employee engagement, little is done to focus on HR. Are we shoemaker’s children without shoes? Somedays, it feels that way.
HRCI recently conducted a study in partnership with Drexel University, a top 100 Carnegie Research institution and global leader in experiential education. The sample population of 2,032 was drawn from our impressive roster of HR professionals and the corollary purpose of the research was to examine engagement drivers, specifically to what extent organizations implement talent management practices for HR professionals.
Hold your hat. There’s more to engaging HR than you might think.
First, HR professionals were asked to rate the drivers that have the biggest impact on their own engagement. It’s no surprise that an ethical workplace; trust & integrity in leadership; a compassionate leader; meaningful work; and workplace culture topped the list. Yet, when the same questions were posed to senior HR leaders – CHRO, EVP, SVP titles – after the same primary drivers of ethics and trust, decision making authority, access to budget and fiscal resources and organizational structure supplanted the secondary drivers of culture, leadership quality and meaningful work. To retain senior HR leaders, one can postulate that how that person is positioned in the organizational hierarchy matters in terms of influence and legitimacy. In other words, if you expect an HR leader to remain engaged, you need to give them the latitude to make decisions and the financial resources to ensure success.
It’s probably not surprising that trust and ethics are the two most frequently cited drivers of engagement for HR professionals. What about those who aspire to be HR leaders? Advancement and promotion opportunities matter most for this talent segment, followed by an ethical workplace; trust & integrity in leadership, with job title coming in fourth.
The research also asked HR professionals to rate the extent to which their organization engages in talent management practices for non-HR employees, as well as HR employees. Although the responding HR professionals are receiving growth and development opportunities and participating in select organizational-wide practices (e.g., people analytics, employee surveys), they are being left out of the most important talent management practices, specifically (1) talent reviews (2) high-potential identification (3) succession management (4) talent retention interventions and (5) overall employee experience. Ouch.
The respondents were primarily identified as women (79.6 percent) and Gen X (50.9 percent). Slightly more than 60 percent work in the for-profit sector with a wide swath of employee population sizes. HR business partner/generalists were 48.1 percent, and the majority of responses (67.4 percent) came from organizations operating in one country only.
On average, nearly 70 percent of all HR professionals are engaged. Given the circumstances, these results are favorable in contrast to the downward trend that Gallup has detected. No significant differences were identified in engagement by generation or gender; however, mid-level managers are the least engaged group as compared to individual contributors and executives. Overworked and literally caught in the middle, none of us were surprised by this result. Being a middle manager is a tough role, regardless of which discipline you’re working in. While clearly the heart and soul of the HR profession, mid-level managers are working harder than ever.
This research by Dr. Salvatore Falletta, GPHR, professor and Director for Human Resource Development, Leadership, and Organization Studies at Drexel University as well as the founder and President of HR Intelligence.Org, really put the employee engagement for HR issue in perspective for me. It’s particularly pragmatic given his earlier roles as a CHRO and HR executive at several best-in-class companies including Nortel Networks, Alltel, Intel, SAP, and Sun Microsystems. It validates what we already suspect: We preach about not taking a one-size-fits-all approach to engaging talent segments across an enterprise, yet we do little to design and deliver engagement programs for ourselves. There’s a strong business case for engaging HR professionals and even with engagement rates of 70 percent, they need to be at the receiving end of talent management programs before burning out and leaving. Cultivating a positive employee experience that engages the workforce and creates a culture of belonging starts with HR: worthy and serving of the same care they give others.
