I recently surveyed my 200-member Engagers group, asking them what’s their biggest need-to-know regarding employee engagement.
Tops on the list was how to measure degree of engagement among employees.
Glad to hear that because it’s something I’ve been pondering and researching for some time. (Here’s a tidbit: what hyped my curiosity about measuring engagement is the common misconception that surveying employee satisfaction will tell you if/how much your employees are engaged. Not so, but that’s for another posting!)
Back to the topic for today: a Quick and Easy start to measuring how much, how well your employees are engaged in their work, their team, their company, its customers…
In a nutshell, ask a standard question of your employees. Simple, eh?
OK. It requires more than an off-the-cuff question. Here are 5 steps I suggest you follow:
Brainstorm lots of questions. This is a brainstorming exercise. Expose yourself to a quantity of potential questions so you can then pick the one quality question to ask. (For a list of sample questions to get you started…)
Review your questions. Invite others to look at your questions and give their opinions. Let your questions to interplay with what you want to discover. (Hint: you want to know more than just how engaged your people are.)
Pick your single question. Set it aside. Let your comfort and confidence with that one question gel as you practice asking it. Practice makes perfect. You do want to ask the question perfectly identically time after time after time.
Schedule this oral survey. Write your completion date: I’ll ask 100 employees by Friday, February 19. Write your attainment plan in a calendar: Five asks a day OR 50 asks a week OR Ask for 2 hours each of the next 4 Wednesdays. These are, of course, examples!
Receive your employees’ input. Listen openly to their answers. Write down both the objective responses and your subjective interpretations of what you hear.
Those are the tactical steps. Here are some behavioral points:
Have fun. Let employees be at ease answering your question.
Be consistent. Strive to ask the question in the same way to every employee.
Allow silent time for the employee to answer…then to elaborate.
Detail your notes. Distinguish the answer received and your interpretation of the answer. Both have value.
Draw conclusions from the data.
If you will build a clear picture of what comprises your business’s current employee engagement, increasing that engagement can follow easily. Any reason not to have more employees actively engaged in their company’s success?
Remember you can get a list of Sample Measurement Questions
Feel free to contact me for assistance.
Tags: Employee Engagement, Measurement
