What is the best way of measuring employee engagement?

Citation

Stoneman, S. (2013), "What is the best way of measuring employee engagement?", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 12 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-05-2013-0053

What is the best way of measuring employee engagement?

Article Type: Metrics From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 12, Issue 6

The latest ideas on how to approach measurement and evaluation of HR activities

To succeed in today’s highly competitive business environment, companies need an engaged, motivated and action-oriented team of employees who are passionate about their organization’s success.

Employee engagement can be measured in many different ways. Fundamentally they all fall into one of two broad categories: off-the-shelf solutions and company specific bespoke systems. There is no hard and fast rule as to which type is best; it will depend on a whole variety of internal and external factors.

The off-the-shelf approach

Using generic, off-the-shelf, well proven employee engagement tools, such as Gallup Q12, enables the employer to draw on a huge database of comparative data that can be used to benchmark their employee engagement against similar organizations. This option can also be good for validating the effectiveness of employee engagement programs and is a great way to grab senior management attention. It is a hugely robust and trusted tool so it naturally attracts a hefty price tag too.

After 80,000 in-depth interviews with managers in over 400 companies, Gallup Organization said that measuring the strength of “engagement” in a workplace can be simplified to just 12 key questions (Buckingham and Coffman, 1999), as follows:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?

2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?

6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?

8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?

9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?

10. Do I have a best friend at work?

11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?

12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

A great example of a company that effectively used this tool to drive impressive improvements in engagement took place in the Netherlands, where the Gallup 12 measurement tool was used to benchmark the national arm of one of our international clients prior to and after an integrated employee engagement program. The result was a transformational impact on the business and its employees.

Before the program, the benchmarking showed our client was around the median for employee engagement compared against other organizations. The need to achieve upper quartile engagement levels was a central part of the business scorecard priorities, as highly engaged employees was a prerequisite given the scale of change the business planned to make in order to remain successful. This context explains the strength of senior leader commitment to invest in a wholesale engagement program. Following a series of initiatives, employee engagement levels had risen to such a height that our client achieved top quartile employee engagement levels. And the great news was there was hard evidence through the Gallup measurement approach to demonstrate progress and success.

Bespoke solutions

The alternative is to develop your own, bespoke employee engagement survey, with specifically-tailored questions that have been carefully crafted to measure exactly what you see as the most important elements of employee engagement within your organization.

Clearly, one of the main advantages of this approach is the absolute flexibility it provides to measure exactly what is of importance to your specific organization. The flip side, though, is that it is not possible to accurately benchmark against other organizations – either internationally or by sector. A clear picture can be obtained as to how employee engagement is evolving, by repeating the same bespoke survey at regular intervals.

The good news too is that simply by conducting an employee engagement survey, engagement and engagement scores will be driven upwards. The fact that employees are asked for their opinions – providing, of course, that employees can see their employer is taking on board their feedback and acting on it – is a sure way to increase employee engagement. Using focus groups to follow up employee engagement surveys also boosts engagement levels and enables particular areas and issues to be explored in detail. The additional insights obtained from these focus groups can then be used to inform and enhance subsequent decision making.

Less is more

A key question for HR professionals is how often should employees be surveyed? The answer is heavily dependent on the amount of information being sought. In general terms, the more questions there are, the longer the gap should be between surveys. Conversely, more frequent surveying – often referred to as “pulse surveys” or “temperature checks” – can be conducted when fewer questions are asked.

Despite the fact there are only 12 key areas (see Gallup 12 above), which can be addressed with just 12 questions, many employee opinion surveys contain upwards of 100 questions. This is too many and can be counter-productive from an employee and an employer’s perspective. A large number of questions can reduce the beneficial effect that employees derive from being asked for their views, while the excessive amount of data generated from a survey can prove difficult to analyze and action efficiently. So the mantra “less is more” is a great guide when putting surveys together.

Sue Stoneman
CEO of NKD Learning, London, UK

References

Buckingham, M. and Coffman, C. (1999), First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY

About the author

Sue Stoneman is the CEO and founder of multi award-winning learning and development agency NKD Learning. She specializes in organization effectiveness, leadership development, customer service, change management, employee engagement and learning and development. She also has a valuable breadth of experience as a board director, having held senior positions in marketing and sales, customer operations and HR in PLC and private equity businesses, including British Airways, Hyundai, Barclays and Terrafirma. Sue Stoneman can be contacted at: mailto:sue@nkdlearning.co.uk