If I ask you to rate your engagement with your parents on a scale of 0 to 10, what would yours be? Let’s assume you say 8/10, what would the number depict? Does it mean you are happy enough to stay with your parents even after getting married or would you be willing to leave in spite of them treating you well?To answer this you need more context. And unless and until you don’t dig deep the 8 on 10 rating would just be a mere number. What you can do instead is ask questions that infer engagement, like how often do you think about your parents or how happy are you when you are with them? By answering these you will be better positioned to tell how you truly feel about the relationship with your parents. You see where I am getting at? Similar scenario happens when you try to measure employee engagement also. You should not let your employees put a number to their engagement with employers but instead ask the right questions and infer from there.
Why should you measure employee engagement?
The more the employees are engaged the more they are aligned to your goals and vision. There is also clear research around how employee engagement can impact your company’s revenue and growth. For an employee to be engaged they need to believe that their peers/immediate higher level authorities care about them. When this happens you will see employees reacting back with increased emotional commitment to the company. If you are a HR and reading this, the fact that you are trying to understand employee engagement shows that you are genuinely interested in your employee motivations. You just need to communicate and take these below five steps to ensure a good enough employee engagement at your workplace.
Employee engagement is difficult to quantify, but how do you do it anyway?
Employee engagement is a slightly complex emotion and is difficult to measure straight forward. You never really know what your employees want. It can be happiness, it can be satisfaction, it can be personal growth. You will have to hence cumulatively calculate all these emotions/metrics to arrive at an engagement score.
4 Ways to measure employee engagement
People often think surveys are a good way to measure employee engagement. I would not really be in favour of it. Though you can infer a lot from surveys, there are other ways that are not as boring as surveys are.
1 on 1’s
One on one meetings are a great way to understand what your employees are upto. You can drive these informally, encouraging sensitive conversations if there are any. You can also give feedback if you want to but let them talk for the most while. The key is to remove that fear and create a safe space for sharing things.
Stay/Exit interviews
These are more formal in nature as you will interview employees who want to continue working or are on the verge of exiting. For the people who want to continue their tenure - ask, what are those things that are encouraging them to stay. Identify and improve on them. For people who are exiting - ask, what could be better done for employee engagement. Reflect back and see if you can make some immediate changes.
E-NPS
Asking your employees whether they would recommend your organization as a good place to work can often reveal a lot of insights. You give them a scale from 0 to 10 and ask them to pick a number - 0 being very unlikely and 10 being extremely likely.
Employee Productivity
A higher productivity is a direct outcome of an engaged workforce. So if you are unable to figure out employee engagement rates by the above 3 methods - employee productivity can be a great indicator. Measuring employee engagement is very subjective and often requires a lot of context. You will often have to think in terms of first principles as most of the data that you receive from the above will try to deceive you.
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