Measuring employee engagement – 2

Last week, we started discussing the importance and the how to of measuring employee engagement. This is so important and your best strategy is to understand what is driving engagement in your organisation, identify weak areas within your top drivers, and implement programmes targeted at improving those drivers.

A regular survey culture of at least once a year is key to valid and actionable survey results. You may need to survey more than once a year and in different ways to capture all employee voices. Your findings will help you make smarter decisions and better strategies that impact employees and at the end of the day, your company’s bottom line..

Not every method that claims to measure employee engagement however actually does. In fact, there are a lot of ineffective ways to measure employee engagement. Try not to use only one type of survey because you need to do assessments in different directions. Some surveys collect light data and others heavier data.

Try not to restrict yourself to just a sample size. As best as you can survey every member of staff. This can be challenging because many people have to be almost cajoled to fill out surveys.

Leaving out large numbers of employees will skew your engagement results. And including a sample population defeats one of the main reasons why you’re surveying, which is to communicate that your organisation and managers care about the employees.

If you have an effective and thoughtful survey strategy, you should not have to worry about survey fatigue.

Engagement results are valuable but putting your focus on a singular data point can be limiting. An engagement survey should not be about finding a final number or score. Try not to purposely design a survey that you will do well on. Your surveys have to want to collect correct data.

Evaluating your quantitative results (data points) alongside your qualitative feedback (open-ended comments) will help you determine next steps for the best path forward.

Ensure that your survey measures essential items or else it is just measuring employee opinions on things of little consequence to overall engagement.

Surveys alone can not improve engagement. After the survey and analysis, managers and direct reports need to take action. The most successful survey follow-up leveraged employee engagement tech to create and support those habits that drive engagement.

Finally, measure engagement across the organisation. Measure engagement across teams. Once you have company-wide engagement data, you should slice and dice it in ways that are meaningful to your organisation. Consider how your organisation functions, breaking employees down into more targeted groups like division, department, job level, or location. Identify areas where you need to dig deeper with.

Read also: Measuring employee engagement in the workplace

Measure engagement among individuals .You simply can’t rely on surveys to collect and analyse individual perceptions. You need your managers to keep a constant pulse on what’s happening at an individual level.

Measure the institutional relationship. This is the relationship between employees and your organisation. It includes general sentiment and perceptions on procedures and policies, goals, company vision, management, technology and equipment, fairness, and more. It helps you understand high-level concerns that need to be addressed.

Measure both the vertical and horizontal relationships. The vertical relationship is the relationship between the manager and employee, while the horizontal relationship is the relationship between co-workers.

Employees rely on their managers for clear communication, coaching, and feedback. Managers rely on employees to get their work done, perform well, and help build a positive reputation for their team. Measuring this relationship will help you identify strong and struggling teams.

In the horizontal relationship co-workers rely on each other and expect Employees rely on their co-workers to be team players, to be respectful, accepting, inclusive, help when needed, share knowledge and resources and take ideas and projects to the finish line

Understanding all this will help you identify opportunities to align and motivate teams and individuals.

Measuring employee engagement is complex, but not impossible. In a nut shell, use an annual engagement survey, life-cycle and feedback cycles. Include feedback, one-on-one meetings, talent review metrics, goal tracking, recognition and you will be able to effectively track your employees engagement levels.

Try to have a great weekend. I don’t use the word try lightly. Many things are contending with us having a great anything but we must over come all of that. Do not let anything hold you down. Keep in mind, whatever is going on, especially the negative things…, will soon come to pass.