Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement is defined as the emotional attachment that an employee has with their organization or their employer.  In a tangible sense, it is the discretionary effort that an employee gives to their responsibilities, to their job.  Employee Engagement indicates just how committed the employee is to what they are doing.  Companies are measuring employee engagement more and more and realizing how critical employee engagement is to an organization’s overall success.

A measure of Employee Engagement or an example of Employee Engagement is going the extra mile when there is a deadline, a product launch or a major project that needs to be completed by a certain time.  It is the extra effort such as coming in early and leaving late that people invest because they really care about what they are doing.  They care about the team’s success, not only their own success.  They really commit themselves, their energy, their time, their best problem solving, their best knowledge and skills, to the success of the group.  That group can be their immediate work team, it can mean their department or it can mean the success of their company overall.

Employee Engagement is something that can be measured and many companies now are focusing on ways to quantify employee engagement.  There have been a number of studies by Gallup, Towers Perrin and Kelly Workforce that have demonstrated how closely employee engagement ties to the company’s success.  In fact, we are seeing that companies with high employee engagement have been able to demonstrate its very positive impact on key business performance indicators, such as operating income, net income growth rate, and EPS growth rate over a 12 month period.

So, we are able to quantify employee engagement.  It is often measured through employee surveys; employee satisfaction surveys, or pulse surveys as they are sometimes called.  These are surveys that are conducted on a regular basis, often annually, and then the findings are compared across a period of time to give an indicator of how committed people are to their jobs and any trends or changes in this over time.

An indication of the degree of Employee Engagement would be responses from survey questions such as “I enjoy the work I’m doing.”  Sometimes the indicator is graded according to a scale; ‘to what degree do you agree with the statement’ and then it maybe ranked on a 1 to 5 point scale.  1 – meaning strongly disagree, 5 – meaning strongly agree and with the variation between.  So, a question might be “I’m proud of the work that I’m doing, I use my best skills on my job on a regular basis, I’m willing to go the extra mile” or maybe something more tangible, “I’m willing to put in extra time when necessary to contribute to the success of my team.” When responses to these sorts of questions receive a high score; ‘strongly agree’ or ‘somewhat agree’ responses, it indicates high employee engagement and conversely low agreement, ‘strongly disagree’ or ‘slightly disagree’ would be indicators of low engagement in those areas.

Survey data shows that companies with average engagement deliver a certain level of business outcomes and companies that have high engagement have notably better business outcomes.  The survey data is compiled across multiple companies and industries.  Business leaders, executives, and HR leaders, depending on the size of the company, need to be aware of the impact employee engagement has on their outcomes.