Measuring Employee Engagement

Mistakes commonly made when measuring employee engagement are; the frequency of measuring, not enough follow up and the accuracy of the data collected being of poor quality. Here are a few tips to take on board when looking to measure your employee engagement.

Before you start measuring employee engagement you should define what engagement means to your business. For every business this is different and will align with your overall performance standards and business objectives. After you understand what engagement looks like you can then decide what you are looking to get out of your engagement strategy once it is in place. This will help you position your engagement measures in the right way.

In order for your data to be reliable you must measure engagement frequently. Quarterly measurements should be the minimum. It is so important to keep the data in date to get a real-time representation of how your employees feel at work right now.

If you already have a survey in place to measure engagement that you don’t think is working effectively, ask yourself why. Often engagement surveys are a list of questions which you give a rating for. Although this is a quick response which can work for some questions it will not give you an accurate overview of how your employees really feel. So instead, look at asking a mix between questions that require a longer written answer and questions that require a rating. Look at things like; feedback, recognition, happiness, relationships with peers and management, personal growth, satisfaction and wellness. This will ensure you are getting well-rounded data.

A great way to get up-to-date information from your employees is by conducting regular snapshot surveys. These can be just a simple question or if you want to capture more information, you can do these as often as you see fit, the more frequent the better. If you have 100+ employees it would be a great idea to make the surveys more specific to the different teams as well as the overall business as this will give you a more accurate representation of how people feel in the different areas of the business.

Another great and more personal approach is one to one meetings. These are more personal, so you may not get an honest overview of how people are feeling at work. Exit interviews are also an effective way to find out why people are leaving which will help with your retention strategy. Aside from this there are many tools online which can help you when it comes to measuring employee engagement but these often require a subscription to their service. You can use these tools to save time if you find it difficult to find time to work on your employee engagement strategy.   

After you have effectively collected the data, the most important part is what comes next, you must use this data to follow up. After conducting surveys it’s a great idea to arrange one to one meetings to discuss them on a personal level. This will ensure you have a full understanding of the results of the surveys and the reasons behind the answers (especially if they were anonymous). Following through with feedback will reinforce the fact that you are interested in what your employees think and that their opinion is valued at work. This in itself can help with engagement. Analyse the data and communicate the results to your employees. You can then pick up on things that need to be improved and follow up on any actions that are required from you.