Survey uncovers six critical roles for HR practitioners
Employee engagement is a singularly individual concept. Human resources policies may set standards across organizations and business strategies may build momentum for companies to move forward into markets. But engagement is built in individual moments — in the trusting relationship with the supervisor, in the day-to-day transactions with colleagues or customers that show the individual that he matters, and in the sense of satisfaction he gets from having gained and proven a new capability.
So given the fact the HR leader isn’t involved in these countless points of interaction where trust and meaning are built or lost, how does she play a role in making sure that, across multiple locales and offices, the vast majority of employees each feel that unique bond with the organization and its success?
In How Much and How Important? Executive Views on Employee Engagement Factors, a recent study jointly conducted by Canadian HR Reporter and employee assistance provider WarrenShepell, leaders were asked about the presence and importance of a range of workplace characteristics from pay and safety to employee input and growth.
HR leaders at 10 of the highest ranking organizations — those with a strong presence of the most engaging factors — were then interviewed about some of their workplace characteristics that helped employees be engaged.
Their stories cut a wide swath, reflecting the variety in types of business, size, culture and business approach. Nevertheless, a few themes emerged as to the role of the HR leader.
Six key HR roles
According to the case studies, the HR leader in an engaged organization plays the following six roles:
•the designer of engagement tools and processes;
•the rapid decision-maker in resolving issues quickly;
•the highly accessible support resource;
•the formal or informal manager and guardian of organizational processes geared to promote engagement;
•the formal communicator; and
•the information resource specialist.
These roles are in line with what Bernie Mitchell calls “the facilitator” role of HR leadership. Mitchell, vice-president of human resources at The Co-operators, a Guelph, Ont.-based insurance company employing 2,900 people, said HR’s role might be to educate business leaders about the importance of engagement.
“But I’ve been pretty adamant about moving away from that in the last several years, now that we’ve educated the organization about what engagement is,” said Mitchell. “I don’t think HR itself can change engagement. It’s not HR’s responsibility to do that. You need leadership from the top and from supervisors and managers — and the staff — to own engagement.”
In her view, it’s up to business units and individual work teams to decide on their own how to foster engagement. HR will facilitate in such sessions, equipped as it often is with survey data that help identify what employees say need fixing.
Linda Lupini, vice-president of HR at QLT Inc., a Vancouver-based biotechnology firm with 440 employees, echoes this viewpoint.
Feed, cultivate engagement culture
“HR’s role is to initiate programs and feed and cultivate a culture that promotes engagement,” said Lupini. “But a huge responsibility for HR is to leverage the managers to be very active in keeping employees engaged.”
Like The Co-operators, QLT regularly participates in the Best Employers in Canada ranking by Hewitt Associates, and out of that participation her HR department can access hundreds of pages of data.
“And I think it’s the responsibility of HR to make sure that when you participate in things like that, that the HR group works out with the managers what the data mean for their particular groups,” said Lupini. “HR can be strategic in helping managers improve engagement if they need to do that.”
Ian Hendry, an HR practitioner who is president of the Strategic Capability Network, a Toronto-based networking group for senior HR practitioners, said engagement is built upon the level of trust and caring in each one-on-one relationship, starting at the front line and going all the way up the organization.
“You want a boss who cares about you, both from a personal standpoint, our physical or emotional needs, and from a developmental standpoint,” said Hendry. “And that caring has to express itself quite candidly — you need to see real caring. And it’s about having the courage to have tough conversations that address what improvements have to be made and what new skills you need to move up the corporate ladder.”
Each individual’s responsibility to build and foster trust in a managing relationship goes all the way up, through to the leadership level where trust and honesty have to be “lived.”
One of the biggest challenges that organizations have is “the consistency of action,” said Hendry.
“You have certain expressed values in an organization and they’re not lived out,” he said. “They’re spoken of often, but if the actions you see coming from the top of the organization all the way down are not consistent, then you create cynicism.”
From that point of view, Hendry would describe HR’s chief role as that of giving managers the skills it takes to build trusting and caring relationships with reports. Hence, an emphasis on HR’s role in coaching managers has been growing in recent years and, in Hendry’s own job at a major bank, he finds himself having more conversations about this with managers than he did five years ago.
What disengages staff?
For David Guptill, vice-president of HR at Lafarge Canada, a building materials supplier with regional head offices in Montreal, Toronto and Calgary that employs 10,000, even more crucial than paying attention to what engages employees is paying attention to what disengages them. That’s because he sees employee engagement much like marketers see customer engagement. It’s easier to keep them than lose them and try to win them back.
“How do you disengage employees? I think we’ve done a lot of things in the last five years to disengage employees,” said Guptill, speaking about employers generally. “When we run into difficulties with pension plans, we change the design of our plans and employees are not happy with that. There’s huge employee disengagement arising out of that.”
So when management teams across the country consider such decisions as changing pension plans, said Guptill, the HR leader needs to raise the question: “Have we considered the impact on employee disengagement?”
Large organizations, in particular, tend to do a poor job of eliminating things that make people disengaged, he added. He recounted a recent conversation he had with another HR leader whose organization decided to impose a corporate-wide supplier of office products. The inadvertent effect of that was the employer turned off a large number of administrative assistants, who no longer had the option to use their own suppliers.
“In our zeal for efficiency, we can disengage whole groups of employees,” said Guptill. “So the role of the HR leader is to be very cognizant in every activity we do in the business, to ensure we are not disengaging employees needlessly.”
On the bright side, he added, when raising questions about the impact decisions have on engagement, HR no longer feels like a voice in the wilderness.
“Employee engagement is generally an acknowledged issue. It gets to be more and more evident as we become shorter and shorter of manpower. Is it a new issue? No, but it has gained focus because of the switching paradigm. We’re now in a situation where it’s a seller’s market in many of the skills areas.”
HR programs
Policies, perks and programs
The survey How Much and How Important? Executive Views on Employee Engagement Factors also asked a group of questions regarding the overall employee proposition. Respondents were asked to answer "yes" or "no" about whether the organization consistently offers any of the following to all qualified full-time employees.
Flextime
No: 44.8 per cent
Yes: 55.2 per cent
Regular casual dress work environment
No: 21.1 per cent
Yes: 78.9 per cent
Employee assistance program
No: 29.5 per cent
Yes: 70.5 per cent
Extended parental/caregiver leave (beyond mandated)
No: 29.5 per cent
Yes: 70.5 per cent
On-site or paid caregiving
No: 96.7 per cent
Yes: 3.3 per cent
Paid health club membership
No: 86.4 per cent
Yes: 13.6 per cent
Paid volunteer hours and/or matching charity donations
No: 82.1 per cent
Yes: 17.9 per cent
For last issue's coverage of i>How Much and How Important? Executive Views on Employee Engagement Factors, check out Misfiring on the rules of engagement as well as the case studies on Computronix and the Translation Bureau.
So given the fact the HR leader isn’t involved in these countless points of interaction where trust and meaning are built or lost, how does she play a role in making sure that, across multiple locales and offices, the vast majority of employees each feel that unique bond with the organization and its success?
In How Much and How Important? Executive Views on Employee Engagement Factors, a recent study jointly conducted by Canadian HR Reporter and employee assistance provider WarrenShepell, leaders were asked about the presence and importance of a range of workplace characteristics from pay and safety to employee input and growth.
HR leaders at 10 of the highest ranking organizations — those with a strong presence of the most engaging factors — were then interviewed about some of their workplace characteristics that helped employees be engaged.
Their stories cut a wide swath, reflecting the variety in types of business, size, culture and business approach. Nevertheless, a few themes emerged as to the role of the HR leader.
Six key HR roles
According to the case studies, the HR leader in an engaged organization plays the following six roles:
•the designer of engagement tools and processes;
•the rapid decision-maker in resolving issues quickly;
•the highly accessible support resource;
•the formal or informal manager and guardian of organizational processes geared to promote engagement;
•the formal communicator; and
•the information resource specialist.
These roles are in line with what Bernie Mitchell calls “the facilitator” role of HR leadership. Mitchell, vice-president of human resources at The Co-operators, a Guelph, Ont.-based insurance company employing 2,900 people, said HR’s role might be to educate business leaders about the importance of engagement.
“But I’ve been pretty adamant about moving away from that in the last several years, now that we’ve educated the organization about what engagement is,” said Mitchell. “I don’t think HR itself can change engagement. It’s not HR’s responsibility to do that. You need leadership from the top and from supervisors and managers — and the staff — to own engagement.”
In her view, it’s up to business units and individual work teams to decide on their own how to foster engagement. HR will facilitate in such sessions, equipped as it often is with survey data that help identify what employees say need fixing.
Linda Lupini, vice-president of HR at QLT Inc., a Vancouver-based biotechnology firm with 440 employees, echoes this viewpoint.
Feed, cultivate engagement culture
“HR’s role is to initiate programs and feed and cultivate a culture that promotes engagement,” said Lupini. “But a huge responsibility for HR is to leverage the managers to be very active in keeping employees engaged.”
Like The Co-operators, QLT regularly participates in the Best Employers in Canada ranking by Hewitt Associates, and out of that participation her HR department can access hundreds of pages of data.
“And I think it’s the responsibility of HR to make sure that when you participate in things like that, that the HR group works out with the managers what the data mean for their particular groups,” said Lupini. “HR can be strategic in helping managers improve engagement if they need to do that.”
Ian Hendry, an HR practitioner who is president of the Strategic Capability Network, a Toronto-based networking group for senior HR practitioners, said engagement is built upon the level of trust and caring in each one-on-one relationship, starting at the front line and going all the way up the organization.
“You want a boss who cares about you, both from a personal standpoint, our physical or emotional needs, and from a developmental standpoint,” said Hendry. “And that caring has to express itself quite candidly — you need to see real caring. And it’s about having the courage to have tough conversations that address what improvements have to be made and what new skills you need to move up the corporate ladder.”
Each individual’s responsibility to build and foster trust in a managing relationship goes all the way up, through to the leadership level where trust and honesty have to be “lived.”
One of the biggest challenges that organizations have is “the consistency of action,” said Hendry.
“You have certain expressed values in an organization and they’re not lived out,” he said. “They’re spoken of often, but if the actions you see coming from the top of the organization all the way down are not consistent, then you create cynicism.”
From that point of view, Hendry would describe HR’s chief role as that of giving managers the skills it takes to build trusting and caring relationships with reports. Hence, an emphasis on HR’s role in coaching managers has been growing in recent years and, in Hendry’s own job at a major bank, he finds himself having more conversations about this with managers than he did five years ago.
What disengages staff?
For David Guptill, vice-president of HR at Lafarge Canada, a building materials supplier with regional head offices in Montreal, Toronto and Calgary that employs 10,000, even more crucial than paying attention to what engages employees is paying attention to what disengages them. That’s because he sees employee engagement much like marketers see customer engagement. It’s easier to keep them than lose them and try to win them back.
“How do you disengage employees? I think we’ve done a lot of things in the last five years to disengage employees,” said Guptill, speaking about employers generally. “When we run into difficulties with pension plans, we change the design of our plans and employees are not happy with that. There’s huge employee disengagement arising out of that.”
So when management teams across the country consider such decisions as changing pension plans, said Guptill, the HR leader needs to raise the question: “Have we considered the impact on employee disengagement?”
Large organizations, in particular, tend to do a poor job of eliminating things that make people disengaged, he added. He recounted a recent conversation he had with another HR leader whose organization decided to impose a corporate-wide supplier of office products. The inadvertent effect of that was the employer turned off a large number of administrative assistants, who no longer had the option to use their own suppliers.
“In our zeal for efficiency, we can disengage whole groups of employees,” said Guptill. “So the role of the HR leader is to be very cognizant in every activity we do in the business, to ensure we are not disengaging employees needlessly.”
On the bright side, he added, when raising questions about the impact decisions have on engagement, HR no longer feels like a voice in the wilderness.
“Employee engagement is generally an acknowledged issue. It gets to be more and more evident as we become shorter and shorter of manpower. Is it a new issue? No, but it has gained focus because of the switching paradigm. We’re now in a situation where it’s a seller’s market in many of the skills areas.”
HR programs
Policies, perks and programs
The survey How Much and How Important? Executive Views on Employee Engagement Factors also asked a group of questions regarding the overall employee proposition. Respondents were asked to answer "yes" or "no" about whether the organization consistently offers any of the following to all qualified full-time employees.
Flextime
No: 44.8 per cent
Yes: 55.2 per cent
Regular casual dress work environment
No: 21.1 per cent
Yes: 78.9 per cent
Employee assistance program
No: 29.5 per cent
Yes: 70.5 per cent
Extended parental/caregiver leave (beyond mandated)
No: 29.5 per cent
Yes: 70.5 per cent
On-site or paid caregiving
No: 96.7 per cent
Yes: 3.3 per cent
Paid health club membership
No: 86.4 per cent
Yes: 13.6 per cent
Paid volunteer hours and/or matching charity donations
No: 82.1 per cent
Yes: 17.9 per cent
For last issue's coverage of i>How Much and How Important? Executive Views on Employee Engagement Factors, check out Misfiring on the rules of engagement as well as the case studies on Computronix and the Translation Bureau.
