Keeping, motivating and informing the best people is key to any organisation’s success. So it’s no wonder that employee engagement is a more important topic than ever in the context of internal communications.  Increasingly, evidence is proving that engaged employees are simply more productive – which speaks for itself in terms of a company’s future success.

The big question is this – is the HR team best placed to manage the employee engagement process? Or is the marketing side of things better equipped to take control of it?

To some extent, marketing could be seen to have the dominant role to play. This function’s accustomed to conveying highly persuasive messages and communicating with a wide range of audiences – in addition, it’s quickly evolved in terms of digital media, and can generally deliver messages that are both efficient and impactful.

Having demonstrated its ability to attract, leverage and retain profitable customers, some wonder whether marketing shouldn’t also be entrusted with the employee engagement process. Meanwhile, the HR function can be seen to be more focused on information than persuasion – and is often less adept at harnessing the latest technology than the marketing team.

However there’s more of an overlap between the two areas of work than there may initially appear. Traditionally, HR has been involved in a lot of marketing-related activities – not only to promote services within organisations, but also to address potential job candidates. In the course of doing this, HR has often proved that they’re capable of being extremely innovative, and of thinking creatively to address a wide range of different audiences.

Furthermore, there’s a good argument to suggest that, essentially, employee engagement is an HR issue. When employees aren’t effectively engaged, it’s seen as an HR problem – so common sense would suggest that HR should take primary responsibility for their engagement. And in order to do this effectively, there’s far more than persuasion and technological flair needed.  First and foremost, it’s necessary to really understand the organisation itself – its challenges, strengths and weaknesses, and exactly what its employees are likely to be thinking. And nobody’s better placed to understand these things than the team in HR.

Of course – as in most cases – a team effort often pays dividends.  While the employee engagement process could be led most effectively by the HR team, harnessing the expertise of marketing colleagues could make all the difference in terms of success. By combining their very different skills, organisations can deliver employee engagement messages that have real meaning – that build and reinforce an emotional connection with employees, while simultaneously informing them and inspiring improved performance.