Employee engagement is a popular concept among many managers and advisors of human resources. According to the research literature, an organization with higher employee engagement rates can make better achievements such as a larger number of loyal customers, better performance, wider business growth. What does it mean? Why is it necessary to measure it? How can it be measured? What are the significant indices of it? How is it related to other concepts such as job satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and employee loyalty? You can find the corresponding answers in the following:
What is employee engagement?
There are various definitions of employee engagement, all of which share two aspects:
- Employee engagement pertains to eagerness, interest, sacrifice, energy dedication, and effort of employees.
- Employee engagement is an organizational goal, which is not traced back to all of the organizational departments.
Engagement exists when employees are committed and when the organization fulfills all of its goals. Engagement lets employees have the incentive for going to work every day and allocating whatever they can to organizational success. Engagement differs from satisfaction among employees and human resources. Employee engagement is a kind of intrinsic attachment and desire among individuals who dedicate their efforts, energy, and concentration to organizational success. Employee engagement pertains to the emotional attachment and relationships between employees and their organization. Therefore, employee engagement measurement means evaluating intrinsic parameters rather than dealing with the workplace and external dimensions.
Different Types of Employee Engagement
There are three types of employee engagement:
Innate Engagement: This type of engagement refers mostly to people’s attitudes toward life. It determines whether people have a positive attitude toward life. It shows if they are innately and naturally interested in the surrounding environment.
Situational Engagement: This type of engagement indicates the intrinsic feelings and energy of employees, affected by the innate engagement and different workplace dimensions such as job independence, diversity of tasks, managerial and leadership behavior, and human resources procedures.
Behavioral Engagement: This type of engagement refers to a kind of optional effort made by employees to help their organization achieve success. It is mostly observed among the organizations whose performance levels have usually exceeded expectations.
Situational and behavioral engagement depends on occupational and career factors such as:
A Meaningful Outlook on the Future of Career: Employees should have a proper perception of organizational outlooks and goals to know their roles in achieving them. Mere knowledge of outlooks and goals will not suffice. An in-depth perception means that employees know how they should invest their energy and time on organizational goals.
Perfect Communications: There will be a high engagement rate among employees when they feel a sense of companionship and friendship and consider themselves part of a larger team and purposeful plan.
Employee Engagement Measurement Indices
A problem that human resources managers face is the complexity of human resources questionnaires and employee surveys, which usually include too many items addressing a variety of indices. As a result, the response rate drops, and the result analysis will be ambiguous. Now three models are proposed for employee engagement measurement. The first two models are very easy to implement; however, the third model requires more concentration and accuracy.
1) Gallup Model
In this model, a 12-item questionnaire is distributed among employees to divide them into three groups: unengaged, engaged, and highly-engaged.
A Gallup Engagement Questionnaire Sample
According to Gallup research, this questionnaire predicts business profitability and employee departure rate.
2) Temkin Model
In this model, employees are asked to respond to only three items: I perceive the general mission of the company; the company asks me to provide feedback and acts accordingly, and the company provides me with the necessary training and tools required for my success.
These three items are scored on a scale from 1 to 7 (1: totally disagree, 4: no comments, and 7: totally agree). Total scores are divided into four employee engagement levels: scores 19 to 21 show high engagement; scores 16 to 18 indicate average engagement; scores 13 to 15 show low engagement; and scores below 13 indicate no engagement.
According to the research results, this model predicts higher levels of employee loyalty and more appropriate customer experience.
3) Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES)
This scale is not as simple as the two previous models. It measures employee engagement through three factors.
- Energy and Power: High levels of energy and mental flexibility at work, willingness to spend energy on work, and resilience to upcoming problems.
- Sacrifice: High levels of involvement and commitment to work tasks, willingness, pride and motivation for tasks
- Concentration and Attraction: full concentration and attraction to work
These three factors are measured through 17 items on a scale from 0 to 6, then the mean score is calculated. The items in this questionnaire predict employee performance and customer loyalty.
Conclusion
The adoption of a specific employee engagement scale depends on how much you know your business and workplace. There are no clear instructions. What matters is that you should measure employee engagement regularly at specific intervals. Also, your organization should be committed to improving employee engagement over time.