Measuring Employee Engagement

In recent times, one of the most talked about and very easily misunderstood term in the HCM world is Employee Engagement. There are technology vendors who talk of importance of Employee Engagement and how their products enhance or facilitate better engagement. And there is the eco-system of analysts, observers, writers and bloggers like me who talk of Employee Engagement and how it impacts / facilitates an organization in its quest to excel in the market place.

How do you measure employee engagement?

It is important to think of what is employee engagement in terms of “outcome”. The engagement is actually the result of experience of employee(s), and this engagement drives certain outcomes in the organization’s collective performance. As a result, the engagement itself is an outcome of employee experiences in an organization. Now this does not end there. 

The Positivity or Negativity of these engagements drive outcome in other aspects of employees’ interactions with the organizations – it may be in setting and achieving goals, it may be in compliance, it may be in continuous voluntary upskilling etc.

One of the easiest and foremost measure of engagement that HR leaders can use is Employee Referrals. If you can measure the percentage of Hires that are coming through Employee Referrals, it gives you an indication on the influence your network (your employees) has on the extended network (your employees’ networks).

The higher the percentage, you reasonably assume that the employee engagement is higher. However, you need to remember that this is only one measure that is easiest and available to you without any surveys or complex modelling. An organization still needs to measure other parameters and look to improve the employee engagement holistically.

Employee Referrals as the percentage of overall Hires can be used as an immediate metric to measure an organization’s Employee Engagement parameter before and after engagement interventions. This can also be used as a signal that shows that Engagement interventions are necessary.

But then you also need to look at another dimension of this parameter. What is the duration of “stay” of these Referrals.