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. 

Moving to Cloud HCM - Beginning not an End

With the help of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), Mobile, Analytics and other technology innovations, organizations have started leveraging the “Digital” revolution and adapting to “Digitalization” at a much faster pace.

When we talk of Digital in HCM, we need to keep in mind that the Consumerisation of enterprise IT or HR-IT in an enterprise perspective is still evolving. While companies adapt to SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud) faster, a comprehensive Digital HCM is still in its nascent stages in many of the organizations.

To actually achieve a comprehensive Digital HCM, there are 3 fundamental prerequisites to achieve success:

1)      Digital HCM Strategy – a clear understanding and visualization of what and how of the future state of HR-IT (how the organization wants to leverage its investments in SMAC, beyond the low hanging Self Service or Anywhere/Anytime, what it wants to provide to its employees as user experience, how it wants to engage with the employees, how it would like the employees to use it, etc)

2)      Milestones - a timeline map of “What” and “When”- Digital HCM is pervasive across the entire HCM processes and hence the What and When matter if you want to achieve success. A bits and pieces adaption without coherency in its theme of digitalization is bound to let you down.

3)      Transformation & Innovation – not merely an acceptance, but a transformational outlook to the entire HR processes and a mindset to innovate. This is based on a constant feedback that comes from both user intelligence given by the systems themselves as well as the users.

In the public space, the applications like Google or Amazon or Facebook that we use, not only provide user experience in terms of the User Interface (UI), but they are also intelligent to understand the users and accordingly keep the user experience richer.

For a successful Digital HCM in HR-IT, a continuous feedback loop needs to exist to ensure constant innovation and transformation.

This feedback loop coming out of the user intelligence is an important piece in public consumer applications. When applied to enterprise HR-IT, this translates into user analytics as a necessary component be it from an employee portal or any other Anywhere, Anytime application functionality.

A simple use case could be user analytics from a Learning application – when users are provided with a Learning portal, apart from the usual self-services like enrolling for courses, approvals and e-learning, the portal should also be used to track and present choices of learning curriculum / courses based on the job profile of the employees automatically.

Another option could be to present users with information on what courses are being actively pursued by other employees. A tag of “See what your peers are learning” could be a tool to motivate learning. Another use case is about mobile learning. The business benefit of “Mobile enabled” or “Wearable enabled HR” is not from providing an app to approve leave of absence or travel expenses.

These are already being practiced in many organizations. And this is a step in consumerisation of IT in enterprises. The consumerisation here is not about pay-per-use but about the user experience and enhancing it to consumer grade experience similar to a public consumer application to increase employees’ engagement and connect with the organization.

The user intelligence is based on usage pattern over a period of time. Hence we have to understand that the entire process of actually digitalizing HCM is a journey and not a one-off exercise. The importance as well as the success of Digital transformation lies not in migrating to Cloud or mobile enabling. These are not end by themselves. Digitalisation is a journey and involves continuous innovation as well as adapting faster to changing paradigms.

The success of a digitalisation journey for an organization is not based solely on which Cloud product they are adapting. It is more about use cases of “how to use”. This is invariably where the HR leaders need to think beyond traditional boundaries and innovate.

Disclaimer: Some of the wordings like Systems of Record / Systems of Innovation etc are reused from already existing materials on the internet. Thanks to those creators.