Any reader of the HR press will have found it hard to miss the current buzz around employee engagement since the beginning of the year. From the cover of March's HR Magazine to the talk on twitter and HR blogs, the issue has forced itself to the top of the people agenda for 2013.

But why is employee engagement just such a hot topic right now?

The cynical response might be that with money and resources tight in many organisations, a management fix which gets better performance out of employees has to be worth a look.

A more charitable response is that the main ideas – that organisations who are clear about their goals and the way their employees need to support them will get better performance– are simply good business sense.

Either way, the main worry which I have is that employee engagement is seen as a something-for-nothing fix for organisations which requires no investment of time or money.

This concern was born out in the results of recent research we conducted which found that in 73% organisations, leaders and managers don’t understand the role reward and benefits play in supporting employee engagement. That is compared to a figure of 86% reward and HR practitioners who say that benefits and reward play an important role in delivering an engagement improvement.

While this is just one area of the mix of factors which drives employee engagement alongside communications, culture, leadership, development and processes in a business, it is a critical one for organisations to understand.

Good reward and benefits reinforce the right behaviours and play a critical role in supporting the right business outcomes and it is therefore vital that these investments are applied to people in the right way with the right messages.

Get that wrong and even the best efforts at driving engagement can fall flat. Get it right and organisations and their employees will reap dividends of success.

Andy Philpott is sales and marketing director at Edenred – www.edenred.co.uk –

twitter – @andy_philpott