What Is Employee Engagement?

what is employee engagement?

Employee Engagement describes the way employees demonstrate commitment, ownership, and discretionary effort toward their work, team, and organization. How people feel about their jobs, working conditions, management, compensation, and a host of other factors determines how well an organization performs.

Engaged employees are loyal and committed to the organization. They are far more likely to deliver above-average performance. In addition, engaged employees are more likely to stay with the organization, be more productive, customer focused, resilient, innovative, and be star performers.

Employees who are not engaged may be productive, but they are not psychologically connected to their company. They are less inclined to give the best of themselves to the organization. They are more likely to miss work days and more likely to leave. Employees who are actively disengaged are psychologically absent, are unhappy with their work situation and insist on sharing that unhappiness with their colleagues.

Why Measure Employee Engagement?

Measuring employee engagement with an effective, proven measurement tool will provide an organization with a snapshot of the current landscape. It will identify areas of strength, weakness, and what the drivers of engagement are for an organization. In addition, when surveying with TalentMap, clients receive Benchmark data of comparable organizations so that you get a sense of how your organization is doing compared to others. This will help provide context and focus to your organization.

High employee engagement levels increase an employee’s odds of success. Teams that get engagement right improve the odds of having higher performance on the important outcomes that organizations care about most. When comparing top-performing teams against bottom-performing teams in Gallup’s database, the average differences were:

  • 10% higher customer ratings
  • 22% greater profitability
  • 21% greater productivity
  • 25% less turnover (high-turnover organizations)
  • 65% less turnover (low-turnover organizations)
  • 48% fewer safety incidents
  • 28% less shrinkage (theft by employees)
  • 37% less absenteeism
  • 41% fewer patient safety incidents
  • 41% fewer quality defects

The statistics show that the greater the percentage of engaged employees and teams in an organization, the more likely it is to meet – and potentially exceed – its business goals. This is why measuring employee engagement is so important.

How do we Measure Employee Engagement?

Below is a list of 13 core dimensions that measure employee engagement. We also measure Diversity & Inclusion, Mental Health and/or Safety if required.

Work environment measures how comfortable an employee is with their ability to perform in their role. It assesses an employee’s view on whether your organization provides them with the right tools, equipment, and training to do their job.

Professional growth refers to the attitude that an employee has toward personal growth, development and career.

Performance feedback measures employees expectations on how they will be evaluated and if they feel that they receive fair and regular feedback.

Immediate management determines how your employee feels about their relationship with direct supervisors (manager, foreman, etc.).

Compensation measures if your employee is satisfied with their compensation when compared to market conditions.

Work/life balance measures whether an employee feels that they have a good work/life balance. Do they feel they have control over their workload?

Teamwork explores if your employee feels that there is fair cooperation, collaboration, and team spirit at your organization.

Diversity & inclusion measures how your employee feels about diversity and inclusion. Are employees of a different race, gender, age, sexual orientation, or religion being treated differently?

Innovation explores whether your employee thinks that your organization is committed to high quality work. Can they learn from mistakes? Are they afraid of trying something new out of fear of being blamed for mistakes.

Information and communication measures if your employee thinks that they have the right information to do their job.

Senior leadership assesses whether your employee respects your organization’s leaders.

Organizational vision explores if your employee feels a sense of purpose in your organization. Do they understand your corporate goals/targets? Do they feel that they contribute to the goals?

Engagement measures six attitudes, that together are the best predictors of an employee’s willingness to contribute extra effort simply because they want to.

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