Tomorrow morning sees the publication of the MacLeod Review, a UK government enquiry into “employee engagement”. Engagement is the jargony word used to describe workers who care about what they are doing and who believe in what their business or organisation is trying to do. (And who are not, like the Catherine Tate character – pictured below – “not bovvered!”)
Employee engagement is an X factor for successful businesses. It is where that other much-vaunted quality, “discretionary effort”, comes from. The MacLeod Review was set up to find out how widespread genuine employee engagement is in the UK, and what is preventing it from developing further.
Clearly, greater engagement is going to be needed to help drag the economy out of recession. The report is under wraps until Thursday 16th July, but I can exclusively reveal that the report’s core recommendation to government is that it should lead “a concerted effort involving all the stakeholders in the employment field, to raise the profile of this topic, so more and more people ‘get it’”. The authors – David MacLeod and Nita Clarke – propose “a national awareness campaign, facilitated by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).”
Some bosses may simply frown and say that they have no time for new initiatives of this kind. Others may feel that they “get it” already. But there can be little doubt that, as surveys confirm, the bulk of the British workforce feels disengaged, even at the best of times. So the need for greater awareness and understanding is clear. The report is being supported by WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell, Sainsbury’s Justin King, Pearson’s Rona Fairhead [full disclosure - Pearson publishes the FT] as well as the head of the employers organisation the CBI and the trade union body the TUC.
British managers may have their heads down right now and could fail to pay enough attention to this report’s findings. That would be a mistake. Recovery will come from engaging the workforce more effectively. The MacLeod Review explains why this matters and suggests what managers can do about it. Seriously, it is time to engage.
Stefan Stern writes a column on Tuesdays on 
Ravi Mattu is the editor of 
Lucy Kellaway writes a column on Mondays on 
Luke Johnson writes an FT column on Wednesdays on 
Lucy Kellaway, FT columnist and associate editor, offers her solution to your workplace problems in a column in the Financial Times. In the 
