A Comprehensive Approach to Measuring Employee Engagement

Engaged employees perform better, drive innovation, and move the organization forward. With all of the evidence that engagement levels are directly correlated to profitability and productivity, especially in years of economic downturn, it would be remiss for companies to ignore this significant factor of success.

Quantifying employee engagement is a crucial task that goes beyond measuring standard job satisfaction among employees. While an ENPS survey can be a great pulse check, it’s hard to build a whole employee engagement strategy around one question.

Several key elements play into the engagement levels of a workforce including:

• employee attitudes towards leadership
• motivation
• autonomy
• connectedness
• respect and belonging
• access to growth opportunities
• and much more.

Measuring employee engagement through comprehensive engagement surveys

It’s important to gather a holistic view of engagement in order to get a more granular view of what areas need improvement, and where to take action. In addition to our ENPS bundle, we’ve created a 22-question Employee Engagement Survey bundle which serves as a more targeted way of evaluating engagement.

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The questions have been compiled from a variety of sources, including Culture Amp, Decision Wise, SHRM, and others, to represent best practices across the industry. We felt it was also important to add statements about remote working practices, respect, and belonging, due to the challenges all of us are facing in today’s unprecedented environment.

The Employee Engagement Survey is composed of 18 statements to be ranked by employees using the Likert scale (Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree). All of the responses are collected anonymously, however the results will be aggregated into a composite score which managers can use to gain an understanding of overall employee engagement.

Each response corresponds to a number between -2 and 2, respectively. The values of the responses are summed into a field called engagementCalc. Based on the engagementCalc, we derive the Engagement Score bucket. The Engagement score spits out a number from 1-5, which we have labeled for clarity as follows: Not Engaged, Slightly Engaged, Neutral, Very Engaged, Extremely Engaged.

The great thing about this survey is that it’s incredibly customizable, so you can add anything else that may be relevant to your company.

Breaking down engagement to spot biases

It is very important to understand and breakdown this data by gender, ethnicity, generation, level, among any other variables that are important in your organization (location, department, cross-functional teams, etc.) The Employee Engagement reports we’ve built include snapshots of current engagement levels broken down by the main dimensions above and can be customized to display any company-specific metrics. This will provide insight into how different aspects of engagement are valued by different populations of employees.

We’ve also included time-series charts, so once you implement this survey regularly, you can begin to track responses over time. The reports provide transparency into how engagement differs across the organization and can help leaders determine potential next steps. They also provide accountability for the changes that need to take place and a friction-less way of tracking said progress.

Utilizing the Employee Engagement Bundle

This new functionality is comprised of various assets that bring all of this together. With custom forms, fields and reports, we're able to create an experience that stores, collects and analyzes this important data for you.

Collecting employee engagement data via a survey

There is a Custom Form titled "Employee Engagement Survey" with 22 questions designed to measure employee engagement levels and evaluate contributing factors.

The questions are laid out as statements and an employee can choose from the following options:

• Strongly Disagree
• Disagree
• Neither Agree nor Disagree
• Agree
• Strongly Agree

At the end of the survey, there are 4 long form questions where employees can provide feedback. This is an excerpt of how the survey will appear to employees, and they can access the survey from their individual profiles from the “Complete Forms” button:

To customize any wording in the Engagement survey, you can go to Custom Forms and edit the form entitled Employee Engagement Survey. If you would like to add or remove questions, we will need to adjust the algorithm on the engagement score calculation, so we recommend reaching out to us at success@charthop.com before you add/delete any questions on the form.

Storing current and historical employee engagement data

We've created a number of Custom Fields for storing engagement data and calculating engagement, including:

• Survey questions which assign a numeric value based on response.
• A smart calculation field which takes the inputs from the survey and provides an overall "Engagement Score."
• A smart bucket field which takes the Engagement Score and categorizes Employees into the following:
  • Not Engaged
  • Slightly Engaged
  • Neutral
  • Very Engaged
  • Extremely Engaged

Disclaimer: All data gathered from the Employee Engagement survey is anonymous. The “anonymous” setting on the custom form will hide the name of who filled it out, but the data is tied to a person/job, which allows ChartHop to aggregate responses to build out reporting analytics. Other org members and managers will not be able to view responses (with the exception of those who have access to sensitive data).

Analyzing and understanding employee engagement across groups

This bundle also contains aggregated reports measuring overall company engagement, as well as breakdowns by gender, ethnicity, generation, and level. Analyzing this data can provide deep insights into how different groups have different levels on engagement - we suggest really diving deep here.

Feel free to customize reports based on your locations, your departments and your own variable names.

Keeping a pulse on engagement is more important than ever

As our workplaces continue to evolve, employee engagement has to remain a top priority. Understanding how your employees are feeling and the areas where you need to make changes is paramount to a great retention program. Have your employees fill out this engagement survey semi-annually, so that enough time occurs between each submission for strategic initiatives to take effect. Our ENPS bundle can be used as more of a regular pulse check for engagement.

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