The concept of “employee engagement” continues to be a hot topic among organizations looking for a competitive advantage, and it made the top four in Deloitte’s recently released 2016 Global Human Capital Trends. In fact almost 9 in 10 (85%) of the executives in the survey rated engagement as important or very important, yet only 8% of them actually measure it with any real frequency (at least monthly). What fascinates me about this topic is that like the concept of culture, everyone deems engagement to be critical to success, yet few can define what it is (and even fewer do an effective job of measuring it outside of basic survey tools).
We explored this topic late last year in an article published in TLNT, as we highlighted the opportunity for HR to be more involved in both defining and impacting employee engagement. We have traditionally thought of it in terms of the emotional commitment one has to the organization, which is frequently displayed through dedication of time and discretionary effort. And the obvious metric that is still used more than any other is an “employee satisfaction survey,” which seeks to understand how individuals feel about how things are going at their employer. I can sense our accounting friends cringing as we attempt to correlate feelings with financial returns.
Some organizations have already figured out that annual surveys no longer suffice, and have taken to using “pulse” surveys such as those offered by Culture Amp. And while more frequent requests with simplified (mobile) tools are a great start, the real opportunity to define (and measure) engagement lies buried in the bits and bytes of data residing in our human capital systems. After all, people are fickle—data is not.
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