Summary:
Employee Engagement is the new ideal of organization effectiveness and HR often sees itself as the champion of it. Champion maybe, but EE is an organizational leadership issue for which all of senior management must be responsible.

[Definition: Employee engagement is a heightened emotional and intellectual connection that an employee has for his/her job, organization, manager and co-workers that in turn influences him to apply discretionary effort to his work.]

Article:
I recently presented a workshop on this topic to a group of earnest HR professionals. I seriously doubt any of them will be able to convince their organization to adopt an employee engagement strategy, though the organization may in fact have some engaged employees in their midst.

If you are a senior HR person working in an organization where it is a core value to have an employee engagement strategy (and the executive actually knows what that means), you probably are at the management table. But, employee engagement is not a pre-requisite for HR strategic partnership. You can have employee engagement without HR being responsible for it. In fact if HR is seen as ‘responsible for the Employee Engagement Strategy’, you may not have as much engagement as imagined. Conversely, HR can still be at the management table, and contributing to the success of the enterprise, without employee engagement – in fact, that is more usually the case.

But,

if promoting a culture of employee engagement matters to you,

And if you can see how it can contribute to the organization being a high performing organization,

Then you owe it to yourself to convince your CEO and Senior Executive Team of this strategic advantage. And then demonstrate how this strategy can be implemented to become part of the fabric of the organization culture.

If you can do that, you are a strategic partner;
If you can’t, you should look for another job.