Measure Employee Engagement: 6 Ways HR Experts Do It

Every organization strives to create a healthy work environment in order to increase employee engagement. As it is widely believed that employee engagement and organizational growth are close interrelated to each other, organizational heads want to keep the engagement levels high at all times. In order to achieve this, employers deploy various employee engagement strategies.

But how do you ensure that these strategies are effective?
To find out the effectiveness of the engagement strategies you need to measure employee engagement levels frequently. Employees need a conducive environment for professional as well as personal growth.

By understanding their requirements, you can help them achieve this growth, which in turn will help them in being more engaged and productive towards their work. Studies have shown that the greater the level of engagement in your organization, the higher the profits and growth rate.

Related: 8 Best Employee Engagement Strategies

Here’s a short video on the Best Employee Engagement Strategies:

Before you undertake any new initiative, you need to identify where you currently stand. And to do this, you have to undertake an initial survey to get a baseline data. This data is used as a benchmark against which you can monitor and compare the initiative’s effectiveness and progress after its implementation.

The result of every employee engagement initiative has to be compared to this benchmark. The initial survey that you undertake will show you how engaged your employees are currently with your organization. As you analyze this data, you will come across certain areas of improvement which you can start working upon.

This is the most common method of analyzing employee engagement. Surveys give you immediate feedback. You can conduct monthly, quarterly and annual surveys to measure different aspects of employee engagement such as happiness, job satisfaction etc. The response from these surveys will help you determine the trends and areas of improvement.

Some organizations measure employee engagement by the level of job satisfaction, whereas some measure productivity. Employee engagement is the combination of both these things and the willingness to give their best for your organization.

Pulse surveys are conducted on a more frequent basis to determine employee engagement. These surveys are short and can be completed in less than two minutes, so that employees don’t see it as an additional obligatory task.

The surveys must be kept anonymous as it will encourage employees to give honest feedback. In an anonymous survey, they are most likely to write unbiased opinion about whether they will recommend their workplace to others or if they see growth opportunities and a successful future in your organization.

Your employees most likely have an active social media presence. Watch out for the online space where employees would reveal their relationship with your organization. Posting team pictures, photographs of events held in the organization are indications of employees having a good time and that they are happy to display it on their feed for everyone to see.

Monitoring their social media activity doesn’t mean you keep a track of what they do and where they go all the time. This is only to understand their level of engagement with your organization.

Keep an eye on Glassdoor. Every employee turns to Glassdoor to vent out their feelings. It’s a platform where employees and former employees review their companies anonymously. Glassdoor is a platform where they can be open about all the positives and especially negatives about their organization. While they may not be comfortable saying certain things in organizational surveys, Glassdoor gives them an opportunity to write about the pros and cons of a company without any bias.

And that is why most employees refer to Glassdoor reviews before joining a new organization. It is seen as more trustworthy than official company websites. So, in order to keep your organization’s ratings high in terms of management, company culture, salaries, workplace environment and work-life balance on this public platform, you need to keep a track of the comments written by your current or former employees and analyze the situation at your workplace.

The only one-on-one meeting of significance as per most organizational leaders is during the appraisal period. But that’s not enough. As a manager, you need to be proactive in communicating with your team members very often, and the employees must feel that you value their work and suggestions. Having a one to one conversation will help you uncover your employees’ personal goals and objectives and you can try to align them with the organizational goals.

By having an open interaction with the employees, you can gauge their interest in other work opportunities and their plans for career growth in your organization. This meeting should be utilized as a platform to discuss their goals, expectations, and grievances as well. It’s not just the HR team’s responsibility to find out if the employees are facing any issues within the company.

With these meetings, you can measure employee engagement and the effectiveness of the existing plans and strategies by asking them questions like whether they are happy working for your organization or if they feel that their skills are not being utilized to its full potential etc.

Employees who feel disengaged are more likely to report late to work or leave early or may not utilize their working hours for productive work. This cannot be measured in numbers, but you can keep an eye out for these employees who are evidently disengaged.

Check the attendance rate of your employees, the number of unplanned or sick leaves in a month could also reveal their engagement with the company and help you measure employee engagement. Are they making an effort to learn new things or are they simply continuing with their monotonous work schedule? An employee who is actively engaged will take initiatives to learn new things and grow within the organization.

The high level of engagement will also be visible in their work, as they tend to be more productive and efficient at their work.

The disengaged employee is now leaving your organization for a better opportunity elsewhere. Although it’s too late for you to retain an employee once you’ve reached this stage, you can utilize this opportunity to obtain constructive feedback from them.

Usually, employees tend to speak about everything they ever liked and disliked about the organization during this interview, as they are no longer going to be associated with you. So, the HR teams must take this as an opportunity to find out the problems faced by the employee and note down suggestions offered by them for improvement.

By working around the problem and finding a suitable solution, you can perhaps reduce attrition. HR teams can make a note of all the common factors that employees mention during exit interviews over a period of time, and can devise a solution to tackle the problem.

Identifying the cause of dissatisfaction and the reasons behind a disengaged workforce is only one aspect of your engagement strategy. It’s what you do with this information that matters. A lot of organizations collect data and feedback from the employees and take no further action. This dissuades employees from participating in further surveys and giving honest reviews, suggestions and opinions, as they don’t see any action being taken. Here’s what you need to do next:

Once you have the results after measuring the effectiveness of employee engagement, you need to devise an action plan to increase and improve the engagement levels. You might have received a lot of suggestions during the feedback drive, but you don’t have to implement every suggestion made by the employee.

Go one step at a time. Find out what is the most pressing issue according to your employees. Is it training, skill development opportunities, commutation or something else? Draft a plan and analyze the feasibility and effectiveness before implementing it.

Once the action plan is ready, you need to act quick. Devising the plan might sometimes take months. Better implement a well-thought out and calculated plan rather than something impulsive which might not work.

But you need to try and act quickly. When employees see that the engagement survey and other initiatives have led to an action by the management team, they will be more satisfied and feel that their suggestions have been valued.

Communication is the key to organizational success. Create awareness among your employees about the new initiatives that have been implemented. Many times, employees are oblivious to the changes happening in an organization due to a lack of communication. So, ensure you have an effective communication channel.

And as mentioned above, once you measure the employee engagement, you need to quickly act upon it and design effective employee engagement strategies. Monitoring employee engagement should be an ongoing process. By constantly monitoring and taking effective measures you can improve employee engagement and develop a highly engaged and high performing workforce.

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