HR: a case study in improving employee engagement

Human Resources not only services managers, it is also critical for staff engagement because highly effective managers have a high percentage of engaged employees and a low percentage of actively disengaged staff. When I looked at the results from the first survey, our HR department was clearly not in good shape. There were two critical HR units that needed attention.

Efforts to prioritize and upgrade leadership, resources and processes are starting to pay off. HR Shared Services is heading in the right direction with engagement scores that have more than doubled and a 35 per cent improvement in the actively disengaged score. On the consultative front, they’re ready to support managers, with 67 per cent of HR professionals engaged and only 8 per cent actively disengaged.

One thing I quickly discovered is that having multiple focuses within HR wasn’t helping us make progress on much.

In HR, we had a list of 95 priorities across the Region. Our HR Leadership Team worked to identify four A priorities and three B priorities. The other priorities had to be dropped or deferred.

This helps provide focus, but it also provides our people with the tools to understand and explain what current priorities are, and what areas may need to be revisited at a later date. We stand a much better chance of getting things done with this focus.

Click here to see a graphic representation for HR’s engagement scores