How to Measure Employee Engagement in the Right Way. For several years now, organizations have been focusing on improving employee engagement through various initiatives and strategies.
Even though such initiatives require time and effort from the organization, they can positively impact performance, productivity and retention rates. However, many times organizations fail to get the desired results even with great employee engagement strategies.
While organizations develop effective engagement strategies, they generally do little to measure results of these strategies and take corrective action. Hence, organizations need to understand that it is as important to measure employee engagement as it is to develop strategies.
The objective of employee engagement is to create a work environment where employees feel motivated towards working for organizational success. Measuring employee engagement helps organizations understand whether or not their strategies are actually working.
It also helps managers to ger better understanding of employee needs. It helps them develop a more engaged and productive workforce that can create positive business impact. However, measuring engagement is not quite as easy as it may seem. This is why organizations feel challenged in designing the process.
Today, the biggest hurdle faced by organizations in measuring engagement is the lack of a single clear definition for the same. In fact, every organization defines engagement differently. Most organizations associate it with the employee happiness, satisfaction, fun at work, and even the commitment to goals.
In fact, there is no single perfect way of measuring employee engagement.
Despite the challenges, it is possible to do measure employee engagement in the right manner using the right strategies.
Here are few such strategies that can help organizations gain a better understanding of employee motivation and engagement levels:
1. Pulse Surveys
Pulse surveys are short, frequent surveys that help organizations stay updated about the vibes in the office. These surveys are generally quite simple; employees can complete them in a matter of a few minutes. They are generally 5-10 questions to learn about how employees are feeling at work and the changes they would like.
Apart from conducting these surveys regularly, organizations should keep the responses anonymous to get truly honest views.
2. One-on-one Interaction with Employees
Most organizations encourage one-to-one meetings between employees and their supervisors only during performance appraisals. However, studies have shown that frequent one-to-one interactions between employees and managers can be an effective way of measuring engagement.
In fact, these informal chats can open up channels of communication and help supervisors to understand what employees are thinking and feeling.
3. Stay/ Exit Interviews
While most organizations follow the policy of conducting exit interviews, they rarely conduct regular stay interviews with their employees. These exit interviews provide insights into what the organizations could have done better to ensure better employee retention. On the other hand, stay interviews help them learn what is working well and what is not.
Hence, these interviews should focus on the various reasons that influence the decision of employees to leave the organization or stay.
4. Net Promoter Scores for Employees
Net Promoter Scores (NPS) were originally introduced to measure the satisfaction and loyalty of customers. But now, organizations are using this tool to gain similar information about their employees. In fact, it involves asking the employees about their likeliness to recommend the organization as a preferred workplace to their friends.
The responses are in the form of ratings on a scale of 0 to 10. The number of respondents who give ratings between 0-6 are termed as detractors. Those who give ratings of 9-10 are termed as promoters. NPS calculation uses the formula: Employee NPS = (promoters – detractors)/ total respondents.
A negative NPS score is indicative of poor engagement levels and a positive score indicates high engagement levels.
Organizations should measure employee engagement in the right way. It can go a long way in enhancing employee productivity leading to greater business impact. The above best practices can help organizations in making the measurement process simpler and effective.
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