The meaning of ‘employee engagement’ for the values and roles of the HRM function

Employee engagement has become a dominant part of the vocabulary of human resource management (HRM), yet there has been little investigation of the implications of this for HRM in organisations. This article analyses a case study of an initiative at New Zealand Post designed to improve the engagement and performance of supervisory staff. It makes two important contributions to the development of the nascent literature. First, it suggests that effective engagement initiatives require political astuteness and commitment on the part of HR. This is because they require a clear business case focused on performance, not merely engagement itself, and an evidence-based approach to design and implementation. This potential appears to be furthered by the commonly observed restructuring of HRM into a ‘business partner’ role. Second, a purposive approach to employee engagement involves HR interrogating the employment relationship to address fundamental issues of employee voice, work design and management agency. This can introduce complications, and resistance, into the partnership with management, but it also offers a means to reconcile ‘soft’ (employee-centred) HRM values to ‘hard’ (performance) concerns around specific change management initiatives. Employee engagement thus need not constitute unitarist subterfuge, but rather something of a ‘neo-pluralist’ turn in the values and activities of HRM.