A Little More Action: Best Practices for Measuring
Employee Engagement
What Leaders Need to Know
Before Launching an Employee Engagement Survey
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How do you measure employee
engagement? If you’re like most of the employee engagement experts I
interviewed for my dissertation
research, you’re conducting a survey. You’re asking 80-110 questions,
sometimes translated into multiple languages, including an open-ended
question. The questions you use to measure
employee engagement vary depending on which firm you are working with, and most of
your survey questions measure the drivers of employee engagement, like culture,
communications, pay and benefits, strategy alignment and more.
So surveys are ubiquitous,
and both the responses and participation rates contain valuable engagement
information. But there are plenty of other ways to measure engagement. For
example, one approach is to track if people actually exhibit engaged behaviors: participation
in and satisfaction with employee meetings and events, participation in opinion
polls and online discussion threads related to critical business issues, social
media participation, and participation in related programs like recognition
programs. Other metrics include 360 degree feedback for leaders, focus groups, and intranet story
readership.
The key idea for leaders, though, is
not that there exist several ways to measure engagement. Instead, it’s to
realize that measurement is a tool that can amplify engagement or
disengagement, depending on how the company responds to feedback received. In the words of one interviewee:
“In the area of engagement I think the big issue is, the
measurement really only matters if you do something about it. That’ s one of
our consults to leadership all the time is that don’ t measure it if you don’ t
want to do anything with the feedback, because you are only going to exacerbate
any issue discovered because they will think something is going to be addressed
with things they bring up, and when they find out nothing happens, then you are
almost worse off than asking the question to begin with.” – V.P.,
Communications, automotive corporation
In other words, measurement practices can make employee engagement better or worse! Unfortunately, too many of us know from
personal experience how demotivating it can be to invest our time and energy in
a project only to have it go nowhere. When employees complete a survey and
nothing happens, that's the effect.
The good news is, there are a few
simple things we can do to make measurement amplify engagement:
- Return results to employees promptly
- Communicate plans to respond to the feedback
- Provide regular updates on the progress of these plans over time
How is your firm measuring engagement? What best practices can you share?
2 comments:
Amen!... The worse thing any organization can do, is to set an expectation and then not deliver on it. This goes hand in hand with your previous post regarding executive leaders. Getting executives fully on-board and engaged early with any change effort greatly enhances the chances of success. As a consultant in both public and private industries, I saw the least amount of success in those areas where the leader was not engaged. When leaders are not engaged, they can (and often will) sabotage any changes, mostly in a passive/aggressive way by providing lip service to any changes, but they can also be out-right obstacles. Subordinates take their cues from their leaders, and even if they want to support the changes, nothing will happen.
Excellent way of describing!!! I appreciate the effort you made to share the knowledge. Thanks See more at:- http://www.blanchardinternational.co.in/engagement-and-cultural-change
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