Why so many organizations
are focused on employee engagement

01.09.20
Engaged employees:
your key advantage
Engaged employees look forward to coming to work, know their job responsibilities, and understand how their efforts contribute to the success of the organization.

Although most organizations know employee engagement is important, many are unsure how to improve it—or even measure it. Annual employee engagement surveys can be cumbersome and lose relevance quickly. But a modern approach to employee engagement can help your organization take action and turn your team into a powerful force for consistent, positive change.

Here you’ll learn about the core elements of a successful employee engagement program.
Measuring Employee Engagement
Measuring employee engagement can be a challenge in many organizations. An employee’s level of engagement depends on different factors, such as:
  • Relationships with managers and peers
  • Opportunities for personal and professional growth
  • Meaningful work
A thoughtful approach to measuring employee engagement helps ensure an organization successfully navigates challenges and gets the most value out of the process.
Creating a Measurement Strategy
To improve employee engagement you need to know what your organization is doing well and where you can improve. Knowing how to measure employee engagement is the jumping-off point for evolving your engagement strategy.

Some things are easy to measure because they are concrete, individual concepts: like the time it takes you to drive to work or how many red lights you can hit without being late.

Many organizations already conduct employee engagement surveys—but probably not frequently enough. Or they may not use the results to take steps towards actionable, timely improvements. In fact, many organizations still measure employee engagement only once a year. Some organizations fall into bad employee engagement habits, like being overprotective of engagement data or applying one-size-fits-all solutions to complex problems.
Synchronize your surveys with your business strategy
Just as important is to align your employee engagement measurement strategy with your business strategy. For instance, if the success of your enterprise depends on providing superior customer service or ensuring a safe work environment, your employee engagement measurement strategy should incorporate those concepts. Your employees are key to meeting those goals, and we know that engaged employees positively affect business outcomes.
When you design an engagement survey, start at the end.
Ask yourself these questions:
— Who will be accountable for following up on these survey results?
— Who will be taking action because of these survey results?
—What does that action look like?
Get nuanced engagement insights
Gaining a better understanding of what your employees need is the surest path to success. Contact us to learn more about how the Qwaybe is helping companies gather, measure, analyze, and improve employee engagement.
Pulling in the right stakeholders
Involving the right stakeholders in your measurement strategy is critical to your success. You’ll need people from across your enterprise to get involved in designing, administering, and taking meaningful action based on the input. You will also rely on multiple colleagues to determine and implement the next steps for your employee engagement program.
C-level
Buy-in and collaboration from the c-suite are critical to the success of any employee engagement program. Executives provide input to the measurement strategy so that it aligns with business priorities. They also become role models of communication, accountability, and feedback, thereby empowering their employees to make change happen.
HR team
Human Resources traditionally leads the employee engagement survey process. They should drive the survey design and champion positive change based on results. HR leaders will coach executives to be role models and build managers’ capabilities. The HR team can also promote the program across the enterprise to ensure everyone knows what is happening and when.
Line Managers
Managers take ownership of the process, facilitating ongoing conversations and a two-way approach to improving employee engagement. They see survey results as a catalyst—not a replacement—for ongoing dialogue with their teams. They know their teams well and have a good understanding of what matters to them. Overall, your managers consider employee engagement vital to your organization’s performance.
Employees
Your employees are at the heart of any engagement program. Their open, honest responses are what will drive real improvements across the organization. Leaders must let employees know that their voices will be heard and acted on, making a positive impact on the organization. This includes encouraging their anonymous feedback, communicating survey results to them in real time, and promptly making improvements in response to their feedback. This approach sets up employees for feeling a shared ownership in making improvements.
Managers also play a critical role in employee engagement data analysis. They can look at how organizational decisions, internal programs, and their own actions affect employee perceptions over time and gain powerful insight into employee motivation and morale
Employee engagement data analysis
The key to employee engagement effectiveness lies in finding the right insights from data that lead to meaningful action. Automatic analysis of pulse data immediately highlights strengths and opportunities according to the primary drivers of employee engagement, such as job alignment, sense of purpose, or opportunities for learning and growth. Managers and executive leadership can then slice and dice the data by different attributes, including business unit, tenure, location, or performance rating, while protecting individual employee confidentiality.

To unlock the full value of engagement-survey data, organizations should combine it with employee data from HR systems, as well as information from enterprise resourceplanning (ERP) systems, into a single platform that supports broad, ad-hoc analysis. This holistic view enables businesses to connect employee engagement data to the factors they care about most, such as performance and profitability.
Including both quantitative (scores, rankings, etc.) and qualitative (narrative) components in your employee engagement surveys will ensure well-rounded feedback. Because open-ended comments may number in the thousands at large organizations, transforming such a large set of unstructured data into a meaningful story can seem daunting. That’s why many organizations tend to focus only on the numbers, missing the “why” behind the scores, as well as suggestions for improvement.
When you have an effective employee engagement program, the result is an environment of continuous improvement that leads toward positive incremental change. Clearly, employee engagement is good for business, but there is no one-size-fits-all strategy.
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