If Employee Engagement is the Most Important HR Concern, What’s wrong with this Picture??

According to a survey from the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) employee engagement is the top human resource challenge organizations anticipate facing in the next three years.  With the recession and all the disgruntled employees, that in itself is not very startling news. Engaging employees should be a top priority at all times anyway.  What is startling is the other data that was shared with us in the survey.  Information that leads me to ask the above question...What is wrong with this picture? 

Evidently I wasn’t the only one startled by the revelation.  It seems that Reuters picked up on it as well.  The item?   

                “71 Percent of Companies Track Employee Engagement through Exit Interviews” 

Hello?  Isn’t this kind of like closing the barn door after all the animals have rushed out to the freedom of the open fields beyond? 

No wonder that HR professionals have difficulty in explaining the value of employee engagement efforts to the executive level when the vast majority of them use an exit interview to track it.  Frankly, if I were answering this I would have been tempted to fudge the truth a bit.  But as HR folks are always upfront with the truth they should tell it like it is.  Right?   

Now I’m certainly not an expert in such matters, but wouldn’t it make a little more sense to do some kind of employee study before they actually quit, to determine if they are engaged?. Maybe you could even save some of them from quitting?    Which by the way is the second most important issue that HR thinks they’ll face  in the next few years….RETENTION!   This should be fun to watch!