Clients often talk about the need for more adult-to-adult conversations where the leaders treat employees with respect and listen to and value their views and concerns.  Time and again, however, engagement surveys tell us that this just isn’t happening.  ‘Soft stuff’?  Hardly.  In my experience the ability to have these kinds of difficult conversations is the ‘hard stuff’.

This picture reminds me that the engagement gap is also between HR and the rest of the board. How can HR leaders engage with other leaders diferently?

What do you think?

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One particular table exercise was to discuss “what HR can do to create employee engagement?”

A theme that came up on several tables was: ‘we need to see people as human beings who are valued and respected instead of a simple resource to be used up’.

That really got me thinking.  So many people share that feeling of not being treated by their organisation as human beings – it’s an unspoken that lies just below the surface.  I made this picture to capture both the intensity and simplicity of this issue.

Interestingly, the problem is clearly embedded there, in language, in the name of that most familiar of organisational job functions: ‘human resources’.

So what can HR do to make an organisation treat its people more like human beings and less like resources to be consumed?
What could I do today that would treat the people I work with more like human beings and less like raw resources to be used? What could I change personally?

At Delta7 we know that in order to treat other people with respect we have to first learn how to respect ourselves. What one thing could you do to treat yourself with more respect today?

We’d like to know how this picture makes you feel. Just post a comment (below)

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