Organizations around the world recognize that employee engagement is a crucial element in a company’s productivity and effectiveness. An engaged and committed workforce will go the extra mile in terms of effort, passion, and creativity to push an organization ahead of its competitors. At the same time, employee engagement can be a vague and often subjective concept. What does it really mean for employees to be engaged? And, even if you can define what you mean by engagement, how do you measure it?
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Don’t Overthink
Many organizations have gotten very inventive when it comes to measuring engagement, but they may be missing out on meaningful data by overthinking the process. “Companies are using cool new machine-learning algorithms that crunch big data to measure employee engagement through email response times and network connections outside one’s core team, and forecast turnover risk by tracking signals like how often employees update their résumés,” write Scott Judd, Eric O’Rourke, and Adam Grant for Harvard Business Review. But, they add, “Who needs a clunky, time-consuming survey where some employees only tell you what you want to hear, and others don’t bother to respond at all?”
Building Better Surveys
Employee surveys, widely used and perhaps overused, may still hold a great deal of potential for measuring employee engagement. But, they have to be conducted properly. As Insights points out, not all surveys are created equal, and designing them is not as easy as one might think. “At first glance it might appear to be a straightforward task to measure the level of employee engagement in an organization. In the past, you may have heard people say, ‘It’s just a case of putting together a few questions, asking employees to complete them, and then looking at the results, right?’ But there’s a lot more to it than that.”
Make Sure You Know What You’re Measuring
Just because the concept of an engagement survey is straightforward doesn’t mean that the survey’s design and execution can or should be simple. Effective surveys need to be well-planned, well-communicated, and well-designed. Additionally, effective surveys need to be influenced by some level of statistical discipline. Survey results can be misleading if not interpreted properly or if the survey samples are skewed.
Employee engagement is a slippery concept to grasp, let alone measure. There’s no need to be overly complex when crafting ways to gauge the engagement of your workforce. Even “old-fashioned” techniques like surveys can be extremely effective but only if conducted and evaluated properly.