With people working from home long before 2020-21, employee engagement is more important than ever. How do we know how our employees feel? How can we make sure that they feel aligned with what we do? These are important questions as it is proven that employee engagement increases productivity. When employees feel involved and cared about, they work more efficiently and harder than employees who do not. With companies working from home, engagement is a hard thing to measure. Luckily, there are tools out there you can leverage to find out.
Measuring Employee Engagement
There are multiple ways that you can measure engagement. A qualitative research approach is having one-on-one conversations with employees. Listening to their concerns and stories helps you to paint a picture of the situation. What is going well? What can be improved? This can be a strong way to improve engagement. With larger organizations, however, this becomes more difficult. To better understand all their needs, a survey could be leveraged.
Employee productivity is one of the important management topics of the last year, with significant research attention from several scholars, and is considered a primary mechanism to enhance organizational success. Knowing what the key factors are that influence productivity is vital to ensure long term performance.
A recent study examined the effect of work engagement on employee productivity in the higher education sector. To accomplish this purpose, the surveyors collected from a sample of 242 employees at public universities in Europe using an online survey method. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS and Structural equation modelling on AMOS. The results indicated that work engagement had significant positive effect on employee productivity. Moreover, this study provides an evidence that all of the dimensions of work engagement namely vigor, dedication, and absorption have significant positive effects on employee productivity.
Engagement Surveys
The surveys that focus on engagement take into account all dimensions that involve the employee, ranging from wellbeing to the company’s vision and mission. When you select a third-party provider such as Effectory, you can also leverage their dashboards and analytical capabilities to analyze the data. Based on their experience, they can pinpoint areas of attention to improve and help set-up a roadmap to get there.
Creating an Index
With lots of companies leveraging employee engagement surveys, it becomes possible to create an index. This helps to understand which companies are doing well (and more importantly, why they are doing so) and which companies can improve. The employee engagement index also provides insights into the different sectors. How does a Technology firm differ from a company in the Utility sector? Do employees also have different drivers for their engagement?
Understanding the employee engagement index helps your organization to focus on what matters. Zoom in to your industry and learn best practices from firms that do well. In this way, you can increase engagement and in turn boost productivity and have happier workers in your firm.
How do you Keep Employees Engaged?
Monetary incentives are one thing, but surely not the most important. It is often the way the company is perceived, both internally and externally. What is the company’s mission? Do I feel aligned with this mission? Are my concerns being addressed when I raise them? Can I participate in the decision-making process? All valid questions that employees can raise. The employee engagement index can provide insights into the typical questions that are relevant to the industry. Learning from industry leaders in the field of employee engagement has never been easier.
