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How to Measure Employee Engagement in the Right Way

How to Measure Employee Engagement in the Right Way. For several years now, organizations have been focusing on improving employee engagement through various initiatives and strategies.

5 Effective Strategies to Improve Employee Engagement

Even though such initiatives require time and effort from the organization, they can positively impact performance, productivity, and retention rates.

However, many times organizations fail to get the desired results even with great employee engagement strategies.

An essential guide to building a great organizational culture

While organizations develop effective engagement strategies, they generally do little to measure the results of these strategies and take corrective action.

Hence, organizations need to understand that it is as important to measure employee engagement as it is to develop strategies.

Why is Important to Measure Employee Engagement?

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The objective of employee engagement is to create a work environment where employees feel motivated to work for organizational success.

Measuring employee engagement helps organizations understand whether or not their strategies are working.

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It helps managers to get a better understanding of employee needs.

However, measuring engagement is not quite as easy as it may seem. This is why organizations feel challenged in designing the process.

What are the Challenges of Measuring Employee Engagement?

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Today, the biggest hurdle faced by organizations in measuring engagement is the lack of a single clear definition for the same.

Every organization defines engagement differently.

Most organizations associate it with employee happiness, satisfaction, fun at work, and even the commitment to goals.

There is no single perfect way of measuring employee engagement.

How to Measure Employee Engagement Effectively?

Despite the challenges, it is possible to measure employee engagement in the right manner using the right strategies.

Here are a few such strategies that can help organizations gain a better understanding of employee motivation and engagement levels:

How to Measure Employee Engagement in the Right Way

1. Pulse Surveys

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Pulse surveys are short, frequent surveys that help organizations stay updated about the vibes in the office.

These pulse surveys are generally quite simple; employees can complete them in a matter of a few minutes. 

They are generally 5-10 questions to learn about how employees are feeling at work and the changes they would like.

Apart from conducting these surveys regularly, organizations should keep the responses anonymous to get truly honest views.

2. One-on-one Interaction with Employees

Most organizations encourage one-to-one meetings between employees and their supervisors only during performance appraisals.

However, studies have shown that frequent one-to-one interactions between employees and managers can be an effective way of measuring engagement.

These informal chats can open up channels of communication and help supervisors understand what employees are thinking and feeling.

3. Stay/ Exit Interviews

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While most organizations follow the policy of conducting exit interviews, they rarely conduct regular stay interviews with their employees.

These exit interviews provide insights into what the organizations could have done better to ensure better employee retention.

On the other hand, stay interviews help them learn what is working well and what is not.

Hence, these interviews should focus on the various reasons that influence the decision of employees to leave the organization or stay.

4. Net Promoter Scores for Employees

Alerts and Nudges

Net Promoter Scores (NPS) were originally introduced to measure the satisfaction and loyalty of customers.

But now, organizations are using this tool to gain similar information about their employees. 

Employee NPS involves asking the employees about their likeliness to recommend the organization as a preferred workplace to their friends.

The responses are in the form of ratings on a scale of 0 to 10. The number of respondents who give ratings between 0-6 are termed as detractors. 

Those who give ratings of 9-10 are termed as promoters. NPS calculation uses the formula: Employee NPS = (promoters – detractors)/ total respondents.

negative NPS score is indicative of poor engagement levels and a positive score indicates high engagement levels.

Bottom-line

Organizations should measure employee engagement in the right way. It can go a long way in enhancing employee productivity leading to greater business impact. The above best practices can help organizations in making the measurement process simpler and more effective.

Sagar Chaudhuri

Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of experience in the corporate world and entrepreneurship. In the past, Sagar has worked with companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank, in leadership roles. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn

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HiFives is a global employee rewards, recognition and engagement SaaS platform that enables organizations to digitize, automate and transform their employee experience. It is used by 100+ large enterprises, small businesses and startups in manufacturing, retail, technology, financial services and media, across 25+ countries.