Engagement Measurement

Employee engagement is not the same as employee satisfaction. Employee Satisfaction only indicates how happy or content your employees are. It does not address their level of motivation, involvement, or emotional commitment. For some employees, being satisfied means collecting a paycheck while doing as little work as possible.

Measuring employee satisfaction and making changes to increase employee satisfaction will not necessarily lead to increased performance. In fact, the conditions that make many employees "satisfied" with their jobs are likely to frustrate high performing employees. Top performers want to be challenged and to challenge the status quo. They embrace change, seek out ways to improve, and want all employees to be held accountable for delivering results. By contrast, low performing employees often cling to the status quo, resist change, and avoid accountability whenever possible.

Also following results of a survey on what employees in 27 countries value overall in the workplace reveal that employees care most about “competitive compensation” and “bonuses and merit-based rewards.”

What are the components of Employee Engagement?

In my other post, I shared framework of employee engagement which is based on 4 components as it is explained very well here.

In order to measure the engagement and execute what Engagement framework, I am using my self-made product called theLeader.io (got featured in Entrepreneur and Forbes magazines); the idea that I am perusing is tracking feedback and measuring leadership effectiveness, not only in your company, but industrywide. theLeader.io helps identify sources for disgruntled rumblings within your organization so you can nip them in the bud before they sprout into full-blown resentment. On theLeader.io every week system collects answer for following question:

Then the leader can have following engagement measurement and report on his dashboard of theLeader.io.

In above image which is coming from my own department, it clearly shows that majority of my colleagues are leaning towards following reaction: “somewhat agree, agree and strongly agree” to this statement:

I will encourage and recommend my friends to join our team

On theLeader.io I have implemented three versions of feedback, which each of them has different impact on leader and also helps to more appropriate measurement and evaluation.

Feedback Type #1. Scoring & Leadership Metrics

I’ve came up with 11 metrics that I thought it is important for each leader to be measured by, then theLeader.io periodically collects the scores from employees. The following figure depicts what are these metrics and the frequency of scoring collection.

As soon as the event is triggered employee will get an email like below so she can simply score the leader on that topic on scale of 1 to 5, quite similar to CES.

Then the leader can have this view on his dashboard which can help him to track overall or each metric independently on last 6 months:

Feedback Type #2. Anonymous Free Text Format Feedback

Then after score, it is the turn to collect free text format feedback. It means the employee can submit any feedback he likes to leader.

Feedback Type #3. Questions

This is the my internal #askChris campaign. Basically on every week basis employees will get an email like below:

Then they can submit their questions anonymously and leader will reply it publicly.