The concept of employee engagement as a core human capital management goal has been echoed repeatedly, but one of the main challenges is how to measure it.
Traditionally it has been treated as a very subjective practice where nothing more than a simple 1 to 5 rating (where 1 is poor and 5 is excellent) can be used to measure employee engagement. Based on this arbitrary rating, companies look at "5" companies and see how much more they have accomplished compared to "1" companies.
Rather than simply use ratings, companies have the opportunity to take a much more data-driven approach to employee engagement. As analytic capabilities have continued to advance and the amount of data collected for each employee continues to increase, companies potentially have a wealth of information to determine how engaged an employee truly is within the organization.
What is Employee Engagement?
Before defining the types of metrics associated with employee engagement, it is first necessary to define employee engagement.
In this case, engagement is not a standalone concept based on collaboration and feedback. It is not sufficient to simply interact with co-workers regularly and be well-liked. True engagement depends on a number of factors: two-way communications with management, co-workers and direct reports; appropriate compensation; career development; clearly defined performance parameters; and corporate loyalty (if that still exists anywhere!) also are factors.
At the end of the day, engagement leads optimal performance and, ideally, to serendipitous and extraordinary opportunities for corporate improvement.
Points of Engagement
So, how can companies measure the value of high engagement? First, companies can start by identifying the key work tasks that employees conduct that are most related to revenue and production. (Although profit is technically more accurate for corporate productivity, only employees who can directly affect their cost structure and have true P/L responsibility should be goaled on profit.)
Look at the employees who are top producers. From a sales perspective, this may be a very easy task based solely on seeing who has overachieved based on quota. For a line worker, this may be based on the number of recalls associated with that station. For service, this may be associated with direct upselling or the future purchasing behavior of that customer. This initial metric should be based on performance.
However, individual performance cannot be a pure measure of engagement. The employee's work context matters, so an underpaid and inefficiently managed employee will always be less engaged than a similar employee paid at full market value who is well managed. By tracking salary, manager and whether an employee has been promoted in the last two to three years, companies can place employees in risk categories associated with what their engagement should be expected to be.
The ability to work with other employees also matters. Although tracking email and calls may both challenging and illegal, depending on your geography and infrastructure, companies can look at three different categories of activities: core employee responsibilities, individual ideation and innovation, and group innovation.
By tracking these activities in conjunction with a core performance metric, companies can gain a better idea of whether an employee is actively contributing new and interesting perspectives or may actually be harming the company despite superficially impressive performance metrics.
This starts leading to an analytic approach that combines core HR, enterprise applications, social activity and business outcomes. To track core responsibilities, companies can look at ticket requests, sales or service opportunities, project plans or other basic work efforts handled in full compliance and with every step completed.
If steps are regularly being skipped, either the employee isn't engaged or the step needs to be reviewed and eliminated. Either way, specific behaviors and processes can be red-flagged quickly through a structured analysis of core work. Engaged employees may also work more hours, although this trend must be watched very closely to make sure that after-hours work is just as good as any other. If longer hours lead to quality issues, these extended hours are worsening employee engagement with corporate goals.
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Source : cmswire[dot]com
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