Are they being served?

With HR's attention well and truly focused on managing redundancies and pay cuts, has it taken its eye of the ball when it comes to employee engagement? HR certainly has its hands full at the moment. If it’s not calming the waters post redundancy it’s pacifying those who may have pay, benefits or training cuts. However, in the effort to mop up the mess caused by the recession, it appears many companies have lost sight of what is important: Making sure the employees they do have are happy, productive and hopefully, there to stay. In fact according to market research agency ORC International, those organisations that succeed in making employees feel engaged and positive about their work situation could see the difference between survival and administration. And while this all seems pretty obvious stuff, the reality is many organisations are ignoring the basics, which could be detrimental to the engagement levels of employees. So how can HR make sure it’s doing the best for the employee and the organisation in a downturn? “You can get departments or HR leaders that can be very strategic long term and you can actually get those that are very short term but the trick at the moment, particularly in a recession, is to do both,” says David McLeod, head of HR operations at McDonalds. “You have to keep a vision, direction and sense of purpose and progress towards what you are trying to achieve long term, while at the same time managing the short term blips that might come and hit you. For some organisations, those blips are short term, some have a significant HR focus and for some they can become unnecessarily distracting.”