How do you measure employee engagement? And is that good? Better than average? How do you know?

And what does it actually mean to be an engaged employee anyway?

If you run any type of employee survey or sentiment tracker, you are likely trying to gauge the level of engagement in the workplace. To bust some jargon, employee engagement is the strength of mental and emotional commitment employees feel toward their employer. Survey questions that try and quantify this include:

• How likely are you to stay in the next 12 months
• How likely are you to recommend your employer to a friend or family member
• How proud are you to work for your organization
• The organization shows a genuine interest in me
• I feel my contribution to the company is valued and recognised

Surveys are useful, but the data they provide can never be taken at face value. I have held communications reviews with teams, who say they do not feel psychologically safe enough to be honest and will provide artificially high scores in their survey responses simply so that they avoid becoming a focus for managers. “If we just send back high scores, they’ll leave us alone”, was the matter-of-fact response I got from an employee.

Of course, any good manager would quickly spot the gap between high surveys scores and an obviously unhappy and unproductive team, but I’ve no doubt in workplaces where tick boxes matter more than facts, it’s an easy win to gloss over and move on.

So, what to do? The answer lies in observing deeds, not words.

1:  Employee-run interest groups

Do your employee have active interest groups that they have set up and organise for themselves? Running club or football team? Craft or DIY groups? Fantasy football league or online gaming? Interest groups that appear organically are a clear sign of engagement. In larger companies these might not be company-wide, so if they are occurring in certain areas, what else are those teams doing really well?

As part of engagement plans for clients, I always advocate seed funding for interest groups. It speaks volumes to employees about the appreciation you have for people beyond the work they do, and it’s a great semi-official communication channel for internal communications too.

2:  Health & Safety near miss reporting

Employees who care enough to not only spot a potential H&S issue before it happens, but also make the effort to report it, is a clear engagement indicator. It means they:

• Are thinking about the person next to them, and care what happens to others
• Believe that if they report something, someone will listen and act.

Providing multiple routes to reporting H&S near misses, or issues is essential – anonymous if needs be. Once employees see that action is taken, and no-one is punished for it, it becomes a positive spiral of being prepared to speak out (and think about how many other aspects of our working lives where that could be beneficial).

3: What ISN’T being said

For this we do actually need to go back to your survey data, but not the scores, we’re going to the comments section at the end.

Think about all the employee-engagement projects that have taken place over the last year and look to see how many of these are mentioned in the comments. Are they talking about the new benefit you launched? The wellbeing programme? The events you ran? If employees are reflecting back in their survey about these things, the likelihood is it’s genuine appreciation, as it’s simply too much effort to remember engagement activities that you DON’T appreciate simply to quote them back come survey time.

Where these appear in the comments section, look and see if this is across the company, or in certain pockets. If it’s company wide, fantastic, your communication channels are working well and the engagement activities are being valued. If it’s pockets, then you can start investigating why these were successful in these areas to support and replicate in others.

Thinking about your employee engagement and communication activity?

The first step is to know what’s going on – which is where an independent communications audit can really help. Contact Waddington Brown on enquiries@waddingtonbrown.co.uk to find out more about how we run comms audits and the outcomes it gives our clients.