How to measure employee engagement?

According to a recent Gallup study, 85 percent of employees are either not engaged or actively disengaged at work.

It is not difficult to figure out that this leads to loss of productivity and retention. Measuring engagement from time to time will help eliminate the loss of productivity. So how does one measure engagement within the ranks, and how can companies use it for improving their overall work culture?

There are multiple ways in which employee engagement can be measured. These include

Using Employee listening tools;

There are dozens of tools in the marketplace which allow you to measure employee sentiment. The Employee Listening Landscape published shown below gives you a sense of the scope of tools available for you.

Run Internal surveys

There are a lot of tools including within the technology landscape shown above including Survey monkey that can be used to run quick and simple frequent surveys. These surveys when delivered with the right questions can provide valuable insights into the engagement level of your employees.

Take online review sites like Glassdoor very seriously

When people take the trouble of publishing content about your website, it is important to take that feedback very seriously and try to remedy the issues highlighted. At the same if there is positive feedback, this should be communicated within the organization in the form of praise to managers or departments so that there is some sense of positive reinforcement.

Look for feedback from apps like Blind

In the case of Facebook and its on-going controversy, apps like Blind have played a serious role in spreading discontent. One cannot and should not try to limit anonymous opinion. Instead, these apps provide a real time view into the issues that your employees are facing, and their anonymous opinion. In the case of Facebook, the app provide a real counter story for the management to follow — apologize, course correct and make management changes. Facebook sadly did not make any changes and this has further fueled employee discontent.

As seen above — it is not very difficult for a company to measure employee engagement and course correct. The days of guesswork is over and employers should take full advantage of the available tools to carefully (without resorting to creepy methods), measure and improve employee engagement.