These practices have alwasy been an essential, and as you say ‘horizontal’, part of the personnel function (now called human resources).
The fact that this task is in many cases assigned today to the public relations function induces me in thinking that organizations are more concerned with ensuring a seamless consistency of how all their actors represent the organization they work for the outside world, more than with ensuring the quality of their productivity and committment to the inhouse performance their contractual obligations require.

Having said this, I am attracted by the way you integrate the ‘relationship cycle’, and would very much welcome more thoughts on this, as it not only refers to employees, but to any other stakeholder group.
I hope you will focus on a specific post related to this aspect so that we can all learn, compare and elaborate an area which certainly needs more intelligent rationalization, as it is highly crucial in a phase in which public relations is gradually transiting to a stakeholder relationship governance mode.

In reality these are dynamic concepts which, in my view, describe better states of relationship in an evolutionary and diachronic approach. For example, before engagement there should be involvement, before involvement there should be acknowledgment. Additionally, engagement can vary according to the moment and situation and become stronger, evolve and decline. What happens when engagement declines? Disillusion? If so, though disillusion can be a form of involvement, it’s certainly different from the original involvement.

So I think all this is very rich terrain for further elaboration.

Speaking to the point that Toni consistently raises about the spin in employee relations, here are some points about the issue:
1. corporate communications (or for the matter even HR) are not the sole owners of engagement processes inside an organization (people develop a lot of activities which engage them with the organization appart from our efforts)
2. the internal communication system can be used by these people without necessarily being controlled or managed by corporate comms (the philosophy of internal symmetrical communication systems is about creating these possibilities; the web 2.0 revolution with its growing impact in internal communication)
3. the issue of companies increasingly considering the key role of employees in change processes is in itself a positive evolution in the sense that employees are increasingly being considered as actors and not just as by standers or information consumers.
4. there are a lot of issues (for example industrial safety; ethics and compliance; etc) in which companies have not just the right but the obligation (moral, legal, economical, others) to engage their employees and in which they should be firm and strict.

With regard to the Ring model, one point not discussed by Mike is that marriage is theoretically “until death do us part” but in reality it’s more often “until the legal settlement do us part”. That’s an interesting parallel with the shift from a whole-career loyalty between employer and employee to the emerging model of greater employee mobility and even a free agent model for a lot of functions.

By touching on values, I think you have planted the seen of an entire other post!

Regarding your terminology, I’m not sure I’ve EVER heard an organization strive for employee (or other stakeholder) INVOLVEMENT, whereas many toss “engagement” around fairly cavalierly.

Kevin — It also helps when the only time we can meet is when one of us has to catch the Eurostar back to the Continent!

a: employees are only one, and not necessarily the most important (this is situational) of an organization’s stakeholder groups (in fact you do say this at the very end of your post..);

b: the is a significant conceptual, but even more, operational difference, in my view, between involving and engaging:

Involvement is a situation in which the organization allows user-friendly access, and listens carefully to input from, its various stakeholder groups about organizational activities and processes ; and this, for any responsible organization, is a must and, at the same time, the same organization recognizes that stakeholders themselves decide to be such, whether the organization likes it or not.

Engagement is, instead, a more active interaction with the more relevant stakeholders which the organization, in this case, selects to sit around a physical or digital tabel with. In this case, the worst and most often scenario is that the organization selects invitees on the basis of whether they agree or not with its positions, rather than based on their real relevance and real or potential impact on pursued objectives.

In both situations (involvement and engagement) the responsibility, and the correlated effectiveness, of the organization’s efforts largely rely on the quality of the contents and channels of involvement, and the representativeness of those it selects to engage with.

I certainly agree that a one-size-fits-all approach to these issues is as good (i.e. nil) as any other one-size-fits-all approach to any managerial issue.