Many employers understand the importance of employee engagement and do some fantastic work in creating a great workplace in which employees seem to be engaged, but unless you actually understand how to measure employee engagement then what you think is working and what actually is working could be two very different things.
What is employee engagement?
Employee engagement can be looked at in a number of different ways but how it is defined can actually be quite simple. In the CIPD’s 2006 report entitled, Working life: employee attitudes and engagement, they define engagement as an employee’s, “passion for work”. That passion can manifest itself either tangibly or intangibly and so capturing and measuring employee engagement can sometimes be tricky. If you get it right though the information plus the qualitative and quantitative data that can be gathered by measuring employee engagement can be hugely powerful.
Measuring employee engagement
So, you understand what employee engagement is, you know that it is a good thing for your business but you’re not sure how to measure it. You could go down an academic route and use something like The Utrecht Engagement Scale in order to measure how engaged your employees actually are. This particular methodology looks at engagement and how fulfilled an employee is based on the three areas of Vigour (energy, resilience and effort), Dedication (enthusiasm, inspiration and pride) and Absorption (concentration and being engrossed in work). This can be complex though and may leave you and employees confused.
Another way to analyse engagement is to establish some key performance indicators and business objectives. These can involve business performance in terms of finances, profit and loss, but also other aspects like productivity, sickness absence rates, staff turnover and customer satisfaction. These different measures can then be pulled together into what is known as a balanced scorecard and by regularly reviewing data you can determine levels of employee engagement.
Probably the most popular way to measure employee engagement is by using a staff survey. There are plenty of online survey tools available to help you to set one up as an employer but before diving in it is crucial to take a step back and give due consideration to the questions you are going to include so that the answers and data you receive are measurable and provide you with information that allows you to take action as needed. Try to have you end goal in mind and then work backwards through the process and that will help you to formulate appropriate questions. Employers can use different styles of questions as well. For example you can use questions with sliding numerical in order to answer your questions which would provide you with quantitative data. Or allow open comments in response to your questions which would give you qualitative data. Using exclusively one or the other has pros and cons and so it is advisable to include a mixture of different types of questions to produce a rich, valuable data set.
Employee surveys are by no means the only engagement measurement tool though. Small group meetings, one to ones, exit interviews, stay interviews and other interaction opportunities with staff are great ways to gather information and data in structured and unstructured formats and should all be included in the mix of how a company measures the engagement of its employees. In addition, if you have the capacity to measure a range of HR and people related metrics such as length of service, absence and turnover data they can also provide indicators on employee engagement. If someone is frequently ill is there an underlying health issue or is it actually that they don’t actually like coming to work and they are disengaged?
However you decide to measure engagement it is also crucial that staff are aware of its purpose and value. If you ask questions, collect data but then don’t provide any feedback or take any follow up action staff will quickly disengage and this is counterproductive. By providing at least a summary of the results and what action you will take as a result, staff are more likely to buy in as they will see that their voice has been heard and that the exercise is worthwhile. It is also important that engagement surveys or other method ways of tracking engagement take place regularly and aren’t just a one off. They need to take place on a relatively regular basis with largely the same group of people, save for starters and leavers, so that you are able to look for patterns and changes and you can also measure the impact of any interventions that have been put in place.
All of the above takes time to plan, embed and come to fruition, but done correctly measuring employee engagement is powerful and should ultimately lead to increased profitability for your business and increased happiness for your team.
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Why not also check out our blog on a similar topic Measuring Employee Engagement
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