5 Best Practices for Measuring Employee Engagement

If you’ve invested time and effort into boosting your organization’s levels of employee engagement, you already know that engaged employees are more productive, less likely to leave the organization and lead to greater profitability.

A recent Gallup survey found that 63 per cent of workers in America aren’t engaged in their work and a further 24 per cent are actively disengaged. The estimated cost to the economy is somewhere in the order of $450 to $550 billion in lost productivity annually.

By putting specific measures in place to enhance engagement – for example, improving communication, giving staff meaningful work, recognizing and rewarding their efforts and so on – you have tangible things that you can then measure.

There are several ways you can measure the success of these initiatives.

1. Pulse surveys

A good way to get a handle on where your employees are at in terms of engagement is to conduct short surveys on a frequent basis. You should ask around five to 10 questions on how people are feeling about work and also if they would like to see anything changed.

You can also survey them to determine how specific engagement campaigns have been received.

With DeskAlerts, you can quickly survey your entire organization by sending polls direct to your employees’ PC desktops and see the results in real time.

2. The Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) was originally devised by Harvard Business Review to determine customer engagement. Many companies have adapted it to determine employee satisfaction.

A series of questions like “How likely are you to recommend this organization to others as a great place to work?” are asked with responses indicated on a scale of 0 to 10. Once responses are gathered, a score is calculated. This is a good way to determine the overall mood of your employees as a collective.

3. Regular face-to-face feedback

Instead of waiting to discuss how an employee is feeling during an annual performance review, managers should take the opportunity to regularly confer with their staff and gather honest feedback.

4. Exit interviews

Departing staff often feel as though they have nothing to lose and are therefore much more likely to give frank and candid answers to questions about the organization.

There might be some harsh truths in what they have to say, but there’s a good chance that you are losing these people because they aren’t engaged enough. Finding out straight from the horse’s mouth is a good way to benchmark and improve.

5. The Gallup Q12 Index

The research-based global performance management consulting company, Gallup, is famous for asking people all sorts of questions. The organization has also developed a tool called the Gallup Q12 Index to help businesses determine their engagement levels.

The index is 12 statements that help to predict employee and workgroup performance that were identified as core elements through rigorous research. The tool can be adapted across different organizations and industries.