Why is it important? And how do you measure it?
Employee engagement is a measure of how employees feel about their employer; when they are engaged, they will stay, strive and thrive. In other words they will not only stay with you and perform well, they will actually go above and beyond what their job descriptions tells them to do.
There are obvious benefits of this; for example they will recommend their Company to friends and family, they will try hard to exceed expectations, and they will think for themselves and use their own initiative.
Interestingly there seems to be a trend to move slightly away from measuring employee engagement in the work place to measuring trust. If you think about it, you are highly unlikely to be fully engaged at work if you don’t trust the Company or your line manager. In other words, trust is a key driver of employee engagement.
Stephen Covey has written an interesting book on the subject entitled ‘The Speed of Trust’ in which he talks about the impact that trust has on the speed at which things get done in an organisations; and the correlation with cost. As trust increases so does speed of execution; and costs go down, conversely as trust decreases; so does speed of execution and costs go up.
So how do you measure either engagement or the amount of trust employees have in their employer? Well one way is to carry out an anonymous survey of all employees; asking them a series of questions about how they feel about how certain things are done in the organisation.
My advice would be to get a third party, such as Recruit and Retain to do this for you. The reason being, the less trust there is, the fewer people will either complete the survey or complete it honestly, if it is administered in house. A third party provider can also construct the right questions, interpret the results and help you implement a meaningful action plan.
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