Employee engagement is more than improved productivity. The best level of employee engagement is going to help an organization in the long run. But achieving the desired level of employee engagement is becoming tougher day by day. The market is filled with competition, on the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit us badly. In such a situation, if anything is suffering badly that is employee engagement. You are not alone whose organization is suffering this way but also there are a lot of entrepreneurs who are suffering in the same way and searching for effective solutions. In order to help you all, today, we are going to discuss more on how to measure employee engagement and boost the engagement level along with productivity.
When it comes to improving employee engagement, you should start with how to measure employee engagement. If you do not have any idea of how to measure employee engagement, the level of your employee engagement at your organization you will not be able to understand. Being the owner of the business, you know the areas where your business is truly performing well and where you need to focus more. If you can properly measure your employee engagement it will be easier for you to prepare an employee engagement strategy that will be completely effective as well as future-proof.
Now you can say that you have prepared employee engagement strategies with the help of experts. And you are quite satisfied with that and you do not feel the need of measuring employee engagement. If you do not measure employee engagement, there is no way to understand the actual level of employee engagement of your organization. If you are still reluctant about measuring the level of employee engagement, the below paragraph is going to help you.
Why should you measure your employee engagement?
You know that employee engagement is actually the strength of the mental and emotional connection that an employee feels towards his/her workplace. According to research, organizations that are successful in having increased employee engagement also enjoy nearly 17% higher productivity and 21% profitability.
But if you do not have the right idea about how to measure employee engagement, you will not be able to get insights into what your employees are thinking and doing for your organization. There are some prominent benefits of measuring employee engagement on a regular basis. Let’s explore those in the below section-
Easy identification of strengths and weaknesses- if you measure employee engagement on a regular basis, it will be effective in successfully tackling obstacles before they take the form of problems. Using engagement data, you will also be able to identify your strengths and weaknesses and make the required decisions as soon as possible.
Build better trust- when you ask for feedback from your employees as a part of your employee engagement measuring process, it creates an environment of care and trust. You can make your employees feel valued at your place. They get the sense that you are always there for them to hear their issues.
Make all understand the scenario- there is no value in knowing the actual condition of your organization alone. Managers, team leaders, and even front-line employees should know what they are doing together and what’s the present condition of the organization. When everyone can understand the actual scenario, they all will take some initiatives in order to form a better work culture that will result in increased productivity also.
Better understand the trends- You need to keep a close eye on the market and industry trends so that you can ensure the constant growth of your organization. Along with this, you need to track what’s happening in your organization by team, location, overtime, and so on and you need to tally them with the industry benchmarks. In this way, you will be able to understand the places where your organization is not making good progress.
For all these reasons you should concentrate on how to measure employee engagement in 2021 and in the near future. Now, it comes to how to measure employee engagement. You should follow some truly effective ways. In order to measure employee engagement, you have to conduct some in-house surveys so that you can get error-free data and make the required action plan as soon as possible.
Please note that the employee engagement survey is not only about random questions and curiosities. We can say that it is a designed measurement mechanism that includes some important components. You need to consider these elements while measuring employee engagement in your organization.
How to measure employee engagement at your organization?
Set the engagement outcomes- an engagement outcome is nothing but a survey question that properly represents the behavior and feelings of an engaged employee. These questions are aimed to measure perceptions of pride, advocacy, and intent to stay in the organization of an employee. Here, you may not find any direct or specific action. But these engagement outcomes will help you in easily identifying targets that your organization should maintain in order to improve the employee engagement level.
Find out important things to your employees- there are a lot of things that are truly important for your employees. While preparing the employee engagement survey plan, you should consider those facts well. While conducting the survey, you have to ensure what is truly important for your employees and their engagement. There are some things that you should consider such as teamwork, career development, personal development, trust in leadership and coworkers, confidence in the present and future, career development, compensation and benefits, value and recognition, and so on.
All these elements or drivers truly impact employee engagement. We must say that some elements leave a bigger impact than others on the employee engagement of your organization. While designing your survey plan, you should ensure that it has covered a wide variety of topics that can truly impact the engagement level of an employee. In this way, you will also be able to understand how your organization is valuing your employees. If you find a flaw from your side, you will get a chance to conceal the loopholes and activate the best programs as soon as possible.
Conduct driver analysis- via the driver analysis, you will be able to understand which drivers are the most powerful and leave a strong impact on the organization. In this way, you will also find out some employees prefer to rate some specific drivers and those employees are more likely to be more engaged.
You have to understand via this process what is actually driving engagement in your organization, wear areas of your organization, and so on. When you have all these data sets, you will be able to easily prepare effective employee engagement strategies.
Listen to your employees- employee behaviors and preferences change over time. And that’s why you should conduct surveys on a regular basis. While preparing your survey plan, you should give special room to the practice of listening to your employees. In order to listen to what they actually feel about you, you need to conduct various surveys in various ways. You can take the help of the technology in order to gather real-time feedback on any important topic of your organization.
Apart from this, you can also conduct a lifecycle survey in order to successfully measure perceptions at key moments in the employee journey. In this way, you will be able to gather more findings that will help you in making smarter decisions and better strategies that will easily impact the level of your employee engagement.
There are some things that you should not commit when it comes to how to measure employee engagement. Not every measure you find on the internet is going to help you. We have seen that many organization owners took the wrong turns and ended up having improper data and preparing ineffective employee engagement strategies. So, you have to actively ignore some ways. What are those? Let’s explore below-
Ways or elements to consider when it comes to how to measure employee engagement
Do not rely heavily on the pulse surveys- we cannot deny that shorter and frequent surveys play an important role when it comes to how to measure employee engagement and prepare the best employee engagement strategies. When you are designing the best strategies, you should not heavily rely on pulse surveys. Or we can say that pulse surveys cannot be the foundation of your employee engagement measuring process.
The annual survey programs will help you in seeing the big picture across your entire business organization. It will also help you in tracking valuable people trends over time. In this way, you will get real-time and super effective data sets that are truly helpful in developing an overarching strategy that lets you easily meet all organizational requirements.
It is not that you will completely skip pulse surveys, you can use pulse surveys in order to collect lightweight feedback from your employees. Here, you can set any topic and see what your people are saying or feeling about that organizational topic. The results will offer you a real-time view of the employee engagement level of your organization along with their ability to respond and adapt to any change.
Don’t commit sample surveys- we have seen that many organizations only conduct surveys only for a specific part of their entire employee base. It is not a proper way, it’s a kind of a guessing game and you will not get the best results. If you do not include the majority of your employees, it will just screw your engagement results. And that’s why we always suggest including the entire employee base for a survey when it comes to how to measure employee engagement.
Don’t only prioritize quantitative results- You know that employee engagement survey results are important for your decision making procedure. These results ultimately help an organization in understanding the success of efforts that the organization is putting in order to improve the employee engagement rate. But if you pour all your concentration only on a singular point, you will just derail your employee engagement efforts.
You have to remember that an employee engagement survey is all about obtaining employee feedback and opinions. Here, you should not concentrate on getting a final number or score. In order to get the best results and to make the most effective decisions, you should properly evaluate your quantitative results along with qualitative feedback from your employees. Both of these things will help you in successfully designing the next steps.
Don’t depend on surveys only to improve engagement- without any doubt, the right employee engagement measurement is a vital part of an employee engagement strategy. But it is not everything; it is just a single and initial step of the entire process. Only frequent surveys cannot improve the entire situation, you have to take the help of other software systems in order to improve the overall employee engagement.
Apart from all these, there is one thing that all organizations should consider when it comes to how to measure employee engagement and improve productivity, that is employee tracking and performance management software solutions. HRMWARE is an ideal example of such a cloud-based software solution. It comes with all the best employee tracking and human resource management features.
Organizations that are running with up to ten employees, can use this solution free of cost. This is an amazing initiative by Vyrazu Labs in order to make small businesses and startups grow and enjoy increased employee engagement and productivity. So, if you too are concerned about how to measure employee engagement and improve productivity during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, you can take the help of this blog and this amazing employee management software solution. Here, you will enjoy all the best cloud benefits, real-time data, and error-free reports. And you know that all these things are truly important in order to measure employee engagement and improve overall organizational productivity.