Engagement isn’t HR’s job

Let me be clear, this blog isn't a criticism of HR professionals. If anything, it's a defence of them. HR teams are stretched, under-resourced, and often asked to carry the weight of problems that belong elsewhere in the organisation. They are asked to protect individuals at all levels and often find themselves caught in everyone’s crossfire. And when it comes to the annual engagement survey, we've created a system that sets everyone up to fail.

Engagement isn't an HR problem. It's a leadership problem.

Gallup's research is unequivocal on this point. 70% of the variance in team engagement stems directly from the line manager. Not HR. Not the executive team. The manager. 

When someone disengages, it's rarely because the benefits package changed. It's because their day-to-day experience of work (shaped almost entirely by their immediate manager) has deteriorated.

Yet most organisations still use HR to commission an annual survey, collect the data, and look to leaders to commit to action. In my experience, leaders then nod approvingly at the slide deck before returning to their day jobs and waiting for change to magically happen.

The irony is plain for all to see. We're spending money measuring engagement whilst simultaneously abdicating responsibility for improving it.

HR professionals are as much a part of the culture as everyone else. They sit in the same meetings, experience the same frustrations, and work under the same leadership behaviours that shape how engaged people feel. 

Asking them to be both participant and fixer creates an impossible conflict. They can be custodians of culture - securing budgets and helping to define, articulate, and embed it - but they cannot be custodians of engagement.. That responsibility belongs to every person who manages another human being. Yet somehow, when the survey lands, it becomes HR's problem to solve.

There's a better way.

Engagement surveys should be owned by the executive team, with each manager accountable for their own results. HR's role should be to provide the infrastructure that enables managers to act on feedback. The tools, the training, and the coaching support. Not to interpret every data point and prescribe corporate solutions that rarely land at team level.

The high-performing organisations that I work with understand this. They achieve engagement levels around 70% (more than 3x the global average) not because they've hired better HR teams, but because HR have embedded engagement into management development programmes to ensure that it’s everyone's job.

If we're serious about engagement and the tangible benefits it provides, we need to stop outsourcing it. Every manager needs to own their numbers, have the skills to interpret them, and be held accountable for acting on them. HR can, and should, be a partner in that journey. But they can't do it alone.