Measuring Employee Engagement

As employers realize that they have “engagement issues,” many are trying to quickly assess the state of their workforce. Many will buy a “ready to go” survey that includes an engagement index. This is fine, but there are lots of options.  I will write about a few.

What sort of engagement is important for your organization?
There are many types of engagement. Consider, does your organization need better engagement with safety, with customers or with the mission of the organization? I have an engineer friend who tells me he always is engaged.  He loves his profession designing manufacturing controllers, but he has very stormy relationships with employers. As a result, this skilled and valuable engineer is constantly changing jobs.  If this personable guy had closer relationships with his boss and co-workers he might stick around. A focus on retention is missing in his employers. Be clear on what is strategically important to your organization.

Your organization may be more interested in engaging certain types of employees—high potentials, hard-to-staff skill groups, or generational groups (e.g., Boomers, Millennials). Knowing what is strategically important to your organization is critical to measuring engagement.

Surveys
Most organizations will choose a survey to understand workforce engagement. At first blush, this is an easy choice. Surveys results are easy to stratify by demographic category (such as age, education-level, or department). These stratifications allow fine grained review and comparison of different groups. This helps to target intervention and to provide useful feedback to managers.

Surveys, however, do require expertise to write, implement and interpret. The difficulty in developing surveys goes beyond the technical aspects of writing and implementing surveys. Surveys are difficult to write because they require the developer to understand the dimensions of workforce sentiment that are important to employees and the strategy well enough to ask intelligent questions.

“Census” surveys, which invite the entire population of employees to take part, are most common. In addition to the time it takes to have all employees take part in the survey, asking about engagement can raise employee expectations that “something is wrong,” or “something is going to change” around here. It is critical to act upon survey results; raised expectations can actually reduce engagement!

Standardized surveys, such as Gallup’s Q12, the Great Places To Work Institute’s Survey and Sage Assessment’s REALI-Index are easy solutions in that they are research based and have evolved through use in multiple organizations. They often include norms that allow you to compare your organization to others. Ultimately, comparisons within your company are more useful, but people are often curious about “how do we compare?”

Successful organizations have a unique strategy, which suggests a need to develop your own survey. Yet, this is time consuming and requires experience and skill in developing surveys. Perhaps the best balancing act is to use a standard survey and add a handful of custom questions to ensure that your specific culture and strategy are included in the survey.

Focus groups
Compared to surveys, focus groups are blunt instruments. But, not all projects call for razor sharp precision—sometimes a more general tool is needed. Stratification and contrasts are not really possible with focus groups, rather you learn about general sentiments. While surveys do extremely well at slicing data, focus groups allow a nuanced understanding of the issues that matter to employees. Focus groups can be easy to conduct-- and can give you a quick directional sense of engagement.

Surveys are primarily static questions to which employees respond. Focus groups are more generative— groups of employees can frame the issues that matter to them.

Years ago I ran focus groups at a large organization with very high engagement. Most employees in this pharmaceutical company truly believed they were working in alignment with the words of one of the founders: “… medicine is for the patient. It is not for the profits...” While consulting, I was genuinely impressed by the engagement in the organization. It was a joy to be in this organization—employees were excited about their work and excited about their organization.

In the midst of the scheduled focus groups, however, a key product was pulled from the market.  The media suggested the organization knowingly endangered patient safety by recklessly selling the product despite knowledge of deadly side-effects. The impact was immediately obvious in the focus groups. Focus groups were markedly different before and after the recall.  Individuals whose self concept was built on working for an ethical company were wracked with doubt. Suddenly, employees in focus groups started doubting the company, distrusting management and disengaging. Concerns about management were voiced.  The abrupt changes provided insights into how to proceed with a culture change initiative. I learned that informal focus groups tell you lots about engagement and they provide you with insights that you would never learn from a survey.

You can run a focus group of the key talent group to understand the engagement of small fractions of employees. This will provide you with insights into specific strata without a survey.

Remember Engagement, Not Measurement, Matters
Regardless of how you do it, I encourage you to understand engagement in your organization. I’m a measurement guy but I have to say the goal is not measurement.  The goal is to understand and improve engagement.  It is a mistake to focus too much on measurement perfection—what matters is engagement.

I’d like to hear about how you are measuring engagement. Please comment!

Charley Morrow
www.sageassessments.com

Engagement and the Workforce

From reading the news and blogs one has to ask—"is there really a crisis of disengagement in the workforce?" Many are concerned about this. As most readers will know, employee engagement is related to customer satisfaction, company productivity, and retaining good employees. So, it is a problem if engagement is down in a company. 

And, it seems like we are getting close to disengagement of crisis proportions. This is an acute concern to HR professionals. Let's look at the data in terms of employees leaving –quitting as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calls it and in terms of engagement and satisfaction with jobs.

Engagement and Moving Jobs

Anecdotally I've heard many say – "I'd leave now if I had an option." Well, it turns out that the "quit rate" of last year was extraordinarily low. I did a little poking around at the (BLS)—last year voluntary quits (excluding retirements) is was at the lowest level since they began keeping records in 2001. Typically some 24% of American "quit" in a year. The chart below outlines the percentage of employed Americans who quit in a year—it looks like people do NOT have options—they are not leaving voluntarily right now!

Total US Total (nonfarm) Rate of Quitting

But, job security is not gone. I was surprised at a Gallup poll from August 2009 that found American workers are not as concerned with job security compared 2003. In 2009, 50% were completely satisfied with their job security. It is as if many employed workers are not threatened that they will be forced out; employed Americans do not seem terrified of being laid off.

Gallup Poll of Satisfaction with Job Security

The parallel nature of the Gallup and BLS trend lines is interesting—job security and quitting seem related. People are more apt to quit in times of higher job security.

We are slowly getting out of this recession. I wonder if increasing job security will lead to future quitting? No one knows the future, but it sure seems as if there might be a spike in quitting later this year or the next. Of course, every company is different.

Given that many feel they "can't move" jobs right now, you might think that psychological job engagement would be down. Simply put, stuck people disengage.  Everything I see is pointing to this trend—anecdotes and many converging surveys. To understand, I looked at some current surveys on engagement.

National Engagement Surveys Converge: Employee Engagement and Satisfaction is Down

A senior HR official at a fortune 100 technology company told me that when the recession first started measures of employee engagement went up—as if employees were happy to have a job. As the recession has worn on, however, engagement in her firm has dropped. It was as if the work load and stress has worn the spirits of employees down. National polls seem to echo this concern.

In a rare convergence of national polls, all data suggests engagement is down. Individuals have told me about divergent data, but I can't find it. As far as I can tell all sources say the same:

Right Management Consultants found that sixty percent of employees intend to leave and an additional one-in-four are networking and updating their resumes. They predict that turn-over will skyrocket this year. Here is the survey question/distribution of the survey of approximately 900 workers in North America:

Do you plan to pursue new job opportunities as the economy improves in 2010?
60% - Yes, I intend to leave
21% - Maybe, so I'm networking
6% - Not likely, but I've updated my resume
13% - No, I intend to stay

http://www.right.com/news-and-events/press-releases/item1954.aspx

Gallup found employee engagement plummeted in 2009, much of this driven by job satisfaction. The Gallup organization's Work Environment Index includes four items: job satisfaction, ability to use one's strengths at work, trust and openness in the workplace, and whether one's supervisor treats him or her more like a boss or a partner. Gallup only asks these item questions of respondents who are currently employed by others. American workers' decreased job satisfaction (from an average 89.0% in 2008 to 88.0% in 2009) contributed most significantly to the decline in the Work Environment Index overall.

The Work Environment Index saw the largest year-over-year drop, declining to 49.2 in 2009 from 51.4 in 2008, a loss of 2.2 points overall.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/125060/Americans-Lose-Ground-Areas-2009.aspxc

The Conference board, based on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households reports that only 45 percent of those surveyed say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61.1 percent in 1987, the first year in which the survey was conducted.

http://www.conference-board.org/utilities/pressDetail.cfm?press_ID=3820

Untangling Engagement

In the technology company I mentioned above, management is aggressively addressing engagement by sharpening strategy and making sure that every employee understands how they contribute to the company's success.

I've heard from other consultants and clients fearing engagement and what it means for retaining top talent. This is the time to think about it—before resumes get out there and top talent are offered good deals.

What is engagement anyway?  What can improve engagement? Is it just related to business cycles? What kind of engagement matters for different organizations? There are so many related questions. Please comment on this post and I will be back next week with more research, viewpoints and models as I attempt to answer these questions.


From Jackson NH
Charley Morrow
www.sageassessments.com