It sometimes takes an outside perspective to help you truly understand the way your employees feel about your brand and how committed they are to their roles. However, not everyone is in a position to hire the services of professional engagement specialists.
As such, it can be incredibly useful to understand how to define engagement levels by yourself, through internal processes and activities. This can put you in a much better position for building appropriate employee engagement solutions to match the needs of your business.
Why Measure Employee Engagement?
Assuming you already understand some of the basic benefits of understanding how engaged your employees are and proactively looking to improve this side of your business, there are various reasons why having an accurate sense of how things look can help you build a strategy that is more effective.
- Employee engagement is an abstract concept to some people and involves various mental and emotional indicators. As such, attempting to guess or causally assess engagement levels can lead to a picture that is unrepresentative of how people really think and feel.
- The act of measuring employee engagement can also be beneficial when you’re taking on board the input of your employees who may feel like you’re committed to building a better workplace and addressing their concerns.
- The result of an investigation or survey can tell you exactly where you need to invest time and money to improve things. If certain issues are highlighted as barriers to motivation, you will be able to acknowledge this with clarity and build strategies around it, rather than focusing on other areas that might not be as impactful.
- Without an in-depth look at your organisation, you may miss several hidden truths about the way people think about your company and brand. Anonymous surveys or questionnaires can reveal the hard truth that some employees would be too afraid to talk about in person.
- Having data about employee engagement can help you benchmark where you are now, so that improvement is more provable and clear in the future. Also, with better data, you have factual reference materials that can help more people get on board with your employee engagement solutions, whether that’s other company leaders or managers who are not yet convinced by your initiative.
- If performed regularly over time, whether it’s in yearly intervals or longer, having an accurate measurement of performance that is comparable to other data sets or surveys will help you to gain an important health check on where your organization is progressing, or areas that need improvement.
Ultimately, you can’t engage employees if you don’t understand what is engaging (or disengaging) them in the first place. Measuring employee engagement helps you gain insight into what your employees think your organisation does well and areas they think needs improvement.
How to Measure Engagement
As employee engagement isn’t necessarily concrete, and is influenced by many factors, you’ll need to come at this task from multiple angles to get a complete picture of how things look. While the methods used should vary depending on your circumstances, below are a few recommended techniques.
1. Create and distribute an engagement survey to determine specific engagement indicators, such as feelings and behaviours. This can be targeted at how employees perceive your brand and the extent to which they are proud of working for the company.
2. Conduct an engagement driver analysis that tries to determine which aspects of your businesses are the key drivers (or hurdles) when it comes to employee engagement. Programs can then be crafted to improve those specific drivers.
3. Develop an ongoing learning strategy where employees are encouraged to give continuous feedback about how they feel. This can be done through anonymous surveys, feedback boxes or even one-to-one meetings. As long as the process itself does not become too taxing or invasive, it can help you to track engagement in real-time rather than wait for something to break.
4. Measuring engagement across the organization so you can understand how different groups and teams compare to each other, and identify the key drivers of motivation for each group of employees. Some areas may need further investigation to understand how things work and where employee perceptions come from. This is really important in large organisations where management styles can vary between offices and departments.
Getting Started
If you need help building a strategy that incorporates the right measuring tools for employee engagement, or assistance in building a program to improve the way your company embodies its values and culture, get in touch with us at Service Brand Global.