How Engaged Employees Improve the Profitability and Performance of your Business
What is employee engagement and how can we measure it?
Employee Engagement is a fascinating subject. HR seems to love it, they quote it, they rant about it, you secretly start to suspect they breathe it. There is a reason for that though, it has such a profound impact on business.
So, what is this concept of employee engagement? Well, it’s not rocket science (until you start attempting to analyse statistics and influencers then it starts to feel like it!), basically engaged employee means better business.
What is employee engagement?
Employee engagement is quite simply how engaged a person is with their employment.
The longer explanation is how much they are engaged in the company, the work, the customers, their team, their managers, and the goals of the business. The more engaged, the more ‘discretional effort’ an individual will put to their work.
Employee Engagement has been summarised nicely by MacLeod 2009 (though admittedly extensively wordy)
“Employee engagement is about the way people behave at work and how the employer and management influence that. An ‘engaged employee’ is someone who sees their job as worthwhile or interesting and is, therefore, more likely to be fully involved in and enthusiastic about the things they do. This goes beyond commitment and job satisfaction as it refers to the additional effort an employee puts into his or her work that delivers high performance, often referred to as going the extra mile.”
The engagement level of your employees can have a phenomenal impact on your business! It’s quite a simple formula:
Engaged Employees = Productive Employees
Productive Employees = Profitable Business
The opposite formula also applies:
Disengaged Employees = Non-productive Employees
Non-productive Employees = Stagnant Business
We would all like to have our employees happy and engaged. Naturally, we want our employees to have positive about us and our business, aligned to the same values and goals. It’s also nice to know that they LIKE their job, LIKE the company and LIKE us as Managers. But Engagement isn’t just about feeling good about the ‘popularity’ of us as an Employer, it has really significant benefits to profitability.
How can we measure employee engagement?
Measuring employee engagement is as simple as asking. There are two main types of Employee Engagement Surveys:
Annual Surveys
These are the big surveys that should be conducted annually to take a comprehensive snapshot of the Engagement levels of your employees. These surveys obtain in-depth feedback for analysis of the drivers of engagement and help to formulate your engagement action plans
Pulse Surveys
Pulse surveys are short questionnaires that are conducted every 2-3 months just to ‘take the pulse’ of the organization. These are just intended to measure the engagement of the organization or an individual business unit. Pulse surveys are an effective way to measure if your action plan is on track.
Even smaller businesses can ask about employee engagement factors 1-1 with their staff members without needing a formal survey.
There are many engagement survey providers and some of the top Engagement Survey Providers are AON Hewitt, Peakon and Culture Amp. However, as a small-medium business, it can be sometimes hard to justify the cost associated with these surveys. Especially when you can be putting those funds towards the activities to improve engagement (not just measure it). You can create your own surveys - or use a cheap tool such as Survey Monkey to use a baseline.
If you aren’t an Employee Engagement expert then it can be hard to know what to measure, how to quantify the results or what to do with them. The administration time that is associated with collating and analyzing the results.
If your business is an SME, check out the Employee Engagement Project as an alternative to measuring your Employee Engagement at a fraction of the investment. It’s a great way to start your businesses journey into Employee Engagement.
