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Employee Surveys is Still the Best Way to Measure Engagement

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Employee engagement may be a tough nut to crack, but it is definitely going to be worth your while. When you measure employee engagement, you not only identify ways to reduce attrition but also keep your profitability intact. 

Before we move further, ask yourself the following questions:

Are your employees only there for the paycheck?

Do they feel motivated coming into work every day?

Do the employees find their work meaningful?

These are a few of the many facets of employee engagement. Employee engagement can be regarded as the extent of connection and satisfaction employees experience with respect to their work and organization. Engaged employees are likely to go above and beyond to meet business objectives. This results in improved business performance and customer satisfaction. 

This guide will help you measure how engaged your employees are and how to maximize this value for your organization. Let’s get right into it! 

Why Measure Employee Engagement

It isn’t surprising that only 21% of employees globally feel engaged at work. This is an alarming figure, especially when considering the significance of employee engagement for businesses across industries.

But what does employee engagement mean, and why should it concern you?

Simply put, employee engagement is a measure of how connected employees feel to their organization and how enthusiastic they feel about their job responsibilities and day-to-day tasks. Highly engaged employees look forward to coming to work every day. They work passionately towards achieving the organization’s goals and genuinely believe in its mission and vision.  

On the flip side, disengaged employees either do only enough work to keep their job or do the exact opposite of what their engaged colleagues are doing by trying to derail the organization’s progress through negative comments, poor work, poor customer service, etc. Disengaged employees may also be searching for other job opportunities in their spare time.      

Source

5 Benefits of Measuring Employee Engagement

To ensure that employees are happy, you should monitor the engagement levels routinely. Measuring employee engagement:

  1. Provides you with the insights required to create a tailored strategy that suits the unique requirements of your staff
  2. Helps determine if your efforts are producing the expected results
  3. Keeps track of fluctuations in employee satisfaction levels
  4. Demonstrates that the organization values its employees and builds a trusting relationship with them
  5. Predict attrition rate, discover trends, and forecast growth 

How to Measure Employee Engagement

Every organization is unique, which is why when it comes to measuring employee engagement levels, there is no one-size-fits-all methodology. The most effective way would depend on the size of your organization, the type of feedback you require, and the frequency of the employee engagement evaluation. 

There are several ways to measure how connected the employees feel to the organization, and the most commonly used of these is surveys. 

Employee surveys are tools utilized by organizations to measure the engagement, morale, and performance of employees. Companies use employee surveys to collect feedback and insights from their employees using a human touch.

Watch: 6 Quick Tips to Create Awesome Employee Engagement Surveys

Regular surveys send a clear message to employees that the company values their thoughts and opinions. Employees work better when they feel they have a voice in the day-to-day operations of the company. It brings a sense of duty and ownership that increases productivity and morale.

When measuring employee engagement through surveys, make sure to include the following categories:

  1. Their understanding of the job and its responsibilities
  2. Their perception of the upper management
  3. The career opportunities available and their alignment with individual professional goals
  4. Their satisfaction with salary, perks, and benefits 
  5. The flexibility offered
  6. The working conditions and organizational culture
  7. The extent to which they trust the organization, its policies, and its capabilities 

How Not to Measure Employee Engagement 

Since employee engagement is influenced by a range of factors, it can be slightly more challenging to measure as compared to, say, a straightforward metric like employee turnover.  This is why there are a lot of ways where you could be going wrong when evaluating employee engagement. 

Here are some common mistakes to avoid during the measurement of employee engagement for your organization. 

Don’t confuse it for job satisfaction

You may mistakenly assume that employee engagement is the same as job satisfaction. While it is one of the influencing factors, it is not the sole reason employees feel engaged. Make sure that your surveys include specific engagement metrics and are not only focused on the satisfaction scores.

Don’t focus solely on quantitative data 

Engagement surveys are the perfect opportunity to dive deeper into the employee’s opinions and feedback. This is why your surveys should be a culmination of qualitative and quantitative questions. Including both open-ended and score-based questions in your surveys will allow you to capture the most valuable information from your users.  

Don’t forget to offer context

Your staff has to be made aware of the specific objectives that you are looking to achieve with your surveys. Providing context and ensuring transparency encourages more honest feedback. A clear understanding of your intention, purpose, and proposed impact, offers assurance, which in turn helps you capture more reliable information from employees. 

Don’t make it a one-off job

Over a period of time, people’s wants, expectations, and opinions can be subject to change. Make sure to regularly check with your employees on how they feel and the things that they expect from the management. If things are going great as they are at present, move on to other areas that you can improve. Do remember happier employees lead to happier customers, and that is what success is built on!

6 Ways to Measure Employee Engagement

Employees are the core of your organization. This is why ensuring that they are engaged and happy will improve your overall business performance. 

Now that we know why employee engagement is important let’s look at how you can measure it. There are a variety of tools and strategies you can use to measure how involved your workforce feels at the company.

Let’s delve deeper into the most common and effective employee engagement measurement methods.

1. Employee Engagement Surveys 

Employee engagement surveys help gauge the enthusiasm and involvement of your employees. These polls help determine how loyal and committed employees are and how willing they are to go the extra mile to meet organizational objectives.

Using a tool such as ProProfs Survey Maker will help you create effective surveys that collect the most relevant data. You can use pre-built templates and customize them as per your needs. You can deploy annual, biannual, or pulse surveys for measuring employee engagement. Moreover, you can choose from a variety of survey and question types such as NPS, numerical scale, or open-ended questions

employee engagement survey

2. Performance Metrics

Monitoring metrics such as employee performance and turnover rate also demonstrate the engagement levels of an enterprise. However, make sure not to make unfounded conclusions simply based on these numbers and carry out a thorough assessment of employee sentiment with auxiliary studies. 

3. One-on-One Meetings 

Another approach that proves to be effective for measuring employee engagement is holding meetings with them individually. These meetings facilitate a private discussion where employees can shed light on matters that carry the most significance for them. Assuring confidentiality in these meetings will help you garner trust and extract more valuable information from employees.

4. Group Discussions 

Just like meetings, group discussions with a small segment of your employees can be a great opportunity to discover how enthusiastic and engaged employees feel. These discussions can be conducted for employees with similar job responsibilities, backgrounds, characteristics, or any other attribute suiting the objective of your assessment. 

5. Exit Interviews

Employees leaving is never a pleasant experience. However, you can make the best use of this situation by turning it into an opportunity to learn more about the employee’s experience at the organization.  Find out what could have been done differently to enhance engagement for the employee and incorporate these insights into your strategy.

6. Stay Interviews

Conducting stay interviews is just as crucial as exit interviews. It enables you to determine the reason behind employees staying with your organization. These interviews will help you identify what exactly is clicking for employees, so you can include more of these techniques in your future engagement campaigns. 

6 Best Approaches for Measuring Engagement 

Having listed the various methods for monitoring employee engagement, it’s also important to highlight the approaches that you can consider. 

1. Measure engagement across the entire organization

This will help you collect organization-wide data on engagement and establish a baseline to compare future performance.

2. Measure engagement for specific teams or groups 

Create targeted groups of employees to dig deeper into what drives better engagement for employees. 

3. Individual employee engagement tracking

Drill down to further specifics by taking every individual into account when measuring engagement.

4. Monitor relationships among employees

Identify the quality of relationships between employees. Relationships with coworkers will also provide you with an account of how engaged employees feel.

5. Monitor relationships between employees and managers

Monitoring the relationship employees share with their managers will help you identify if there are any communication gaps within your organization that may be impacting employee engagement. 

6. Analyze sentiment toward the organization and its procedures 

Lastly, figure out how the employees feel about the organization and its vision. The more aligned your organization’s values are with those of the employees, the more likely they are to stay engaged. 

What to Do After Measuring Employee Engagement

So, you’ve finally done it! 

The results of your surveys are in, but you still need to utilize them effectively in order to see an improvement in your employee experience

Here are some steps to take after you are done collecting employee engagement data. 

Take relevant action  

Put the collected data to good use. Based on how you want to tackle the questions and opinions raised in your employee survey, you can have small departmental meetings to communicate and discuss the survey results. Define a clear course of action and take appropriate measures to enhance engagement for your employees. 

Choose areas to improve

Every employee would highlight certain issues where they feel the management could do a better job. Such sentiments usually run similarly among groups, and so there will be certain common issues raised by many people. Identify such high-priority issues that need to be worked upon immediately.

Involve your team

Whenever changes need to be made based on employee feedback, use it as an opportunity to discuss further and involve the employees in the decision-making process. This will not only help make the transition smoother but will also help you break apart major tasks into smaller bits handled by individual caretakers to ensure their smooth implementation. 

Evaluate changes

Most importantly, once you implement these changes, make sure to evaluate them after a period of time rather than just leaving them be. If employees are not comfortable with the changes, adjust or discuss alternative methods that can be implemented.

Stay Profitable by Keeping Employees Well-Engaged

Measure employee engagement to assess the effectiveness of your long-term growth strategy accurately. It provides you with the knowledge and the means to enhance hiring and training processes, improve employee experience, and reduce turnover.

Disengaged employees are absent more and are less productive, which costs businesses a large sum of money. This is why monitoring employee engagement and identifying disengaged employees is a critical business process that should never be overlooked. 

An easy way to get this done is via effective employee engagement surveys created using a dynamic application like ProProfs Survey Maker. Use the tool to craft delightful surveys and dig through the collected data efficiently to enhance employee engagement for your business. 

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About the author

Jared is a customer support expert. He has been published in CrazyEgg, Foundr, and CXL. As a customer support executive at ProProfs, he has been instrumental in developing a complete customer support system that more than doubled customer satisfaction. You can connect and engage with Jared on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.