Employee Engagement: HR's New Power Lever

By Raphaël H. Cohen — Harvard Business Review France. Updated 9 January 2024. Originally published 30 December 2019.

Rethinking the mission of Human Resources makes it possible to give renewed meaning to those who, day after day, look after the human dimension of the company.

What is the purpose of a Human Resources department? When this question is put to senior executives, the answers are rarely clear and are almost never unanimous. That in itself says a great deal about the ambiguity that still surrounds a function which, in most organisations, has never fully found its place.

Some still see HR as a glorified personnel office, confined to administrative tasks: contracts, payroll, holidays and the paperwork of hiring and dismissal. Others perceive it as a quasi-trade-union body whose role is to defend employees against management. More recently, a third vision has emerged, that of "chief happiness officers" tasked with making people feel good at work through perks, games and convivial moments. None of these three representations does justice to what HR could and should be.

The real mission of HR is to put in place working conditions that maximise the level of engagement of employees. Everything else flows from this single objective. Seen through this lens, the various activities of the function suddenly regain their coherence:

- Attracting talent and building an employer brand that makes the company desirable to the people it wants to recruit. - Nurturing a culture that is genuinely lived and that employees can be proud of, rather than a set of values displayed on a wall. - Supporting personal development, so that each person can grow and find meaning in their work. - Handling administrative management in an exemplary way, because nothing erodes engagement faster than sloppy, unfair or opaque processes.

The Objective: Maximising the Level of Engagement

If the mission of HR is to maximise engagement, then several conditions have to be met.

First, employability must be developed. Employees who feel that their skills are being kept current, and that they remain valuable on the job market, engage far more readily than those who feel they are stagnating.

Second, there must be a good fit between the role and the employee, as well as compatibility with the team. A talented person placed in the wrong role, or in a team where the chemistry does not work, will disengage no matter how generous the perks.

Third, fairness must be respected. Nothing destroys engagement more surely than the perception of injustice, whether in pay, promotion, recognition or the way rules are applied.

Fourth, the managerial culture must encourage people to invest themselves. Here HR acts as the conductor of an orchestra: it does not play every instrument itself, but it ensures that managers create the conditions in which people want to give the best of themselves.

To know whether these conditions are actually being met, HR can rely on three simple indicators, each based on a question asked on a scale from 0 to 5:

- To employees: "To what extent do you feel that the company puts in place the conditions that make you want to give the best of yourself?" - To managers: "To what extent do you feel equipped and supported to create, within your team, the conditions that foster engagement?" - To senior management: "To what extent do you consider that engagement is a strategic priority that is actively steered?"

The gaps between these three answers are often more revealing than the scores themselves.

Finally Playing a Central Role in the Company

For too long, HR has been assessed on indicators of means rather than indicators of results: number of training hours delivered, number of positions filled, speed of recruitment. These metrics measure activity, not impact.

Engagement, by contrast, is a genuine result indicator. It is directly correlated with performance, customer satisfaction, retention and the capacity to innovate. By taking ownership of engagement, HR shifts from a support role to a strategic one.

To make this shift concrete, HR can put two questions to the company's decision-makers:

- "Do you agree that the level of engagement of our employees has a direct impact on our results?" - "If so, are you prepared to make engagement a steered priority, with dedicated resources and someone accountable for it?"

Once this logic is accepted, the very name of the function should evolve. Just as we speak of a Marketing Director or a Finance Director, we should speak of a Director of Engagement (DE) — or Chief Engagement Officer. The title matters, because it makes explicit what the function is truly accountable for.

Engagement then becomes a function in its own right, on a par with marketing or finance: a lever of performance that is measured, steered and improved. And the people who devote themselves every day to the human dimension of the company finally see their contribution recognised for what it is — strategic.