Engagement 101
A Guide to your Employee Engagement Program
Hi, Friends,
We did HR Dashboards 101, Turnover 101, Org. Design 101; time to speak a bit about Engagement. And, more specifically, Employee Engagement.
Why do we care about Engagement, however?
It’s an indicator of employee happiness
It is a competitive advantage
And, believe it or not, engaged employees are also productive employees
For example, this meta-analysis found a huge correlation between Engagement and task performance (ρ = .483) and a moderate one between work engagement and absenteeism (ρ = −.171). In lay terms, engaged employees are almost 3x more likely to show high performance and 1.5s less likely not to show up to work.
So, in other words, the effects are massive and likely obvious at your company, too. You can see them.
Hence, you need to pay attention to Engagement. But paying attention is not enough. You also need to measure it.
Hence, we dive into Engagement as follows:
What it is
How to design your engagement surveys
How to deploy them effectively
How to interpret the outcomes
The impact they have on the workforce
Let’s dive in! It’s a long one today.
1. What is Engagement?!
Oh man, we start with a difficult question right away.
But we like definitions, so let’s give it a go.
The word “engagement” comes from the word “engage,” which comes from the base “gage” in French, meaning pledge something. Later, of course, it became pledging oneself to do something—no wonder we use this word to promise our hearts and souls to our loved ones for an “I do.”
So, what are employees pledging themselves to do?
Well, they pledge to be involved in their work.
And though a pledge sounds rather unemotional and contractual, no one enters into a pledge without some internal force directing them.
Hence, we can say that employee engagement is people’s internal pledge to get involved with your company and work.
So far, so good.
Then, of course, we must ask ourselves: What does it look like?
And this is where we get into the world of employee engagement:
Happy
Satisfied
Connected to work
Connected to the company
Connected to co-workers
Motivated
Committed
Feeling a sense of ownership
Actively participating
Positive
And the list can go on and on.
Although we understand approximately what Engagement looks like, it can be so many things, depending on what you as a leader are interested in.
And this ultimately will determine how you might structure your engagement strategy and surveys.
My favourite categories are simple:
Overall Engagement: A holistic sense of how a person feels about their work and the company
Company sentiment: How does a person feel about the company specifically
Work sentiment: How does a person feel about the work they are doing day-to-day, specifically
Communication sentiment: How does a person feel about their connection with others at work
These categories are a simple start; they are also fairly discrete from each other, focusing on the specific context of the employee experience, and they do not tap into employee moods and preferences that we as an organization cannot control, at least not directly.
Now that we have the definition, we want to start designing the survey.
2. How to design an engagement survey
The first question, of course, becomes what kind of survey?
Here, you can start with a full-blown engagement survey that details each aspect of employee experience. We call it Engagement, but this large survey should be called an employee experience survey as it covers Engagement and other aspects of their experience at work. These usually have:
50-100 questions
5-10 levers
30-day administration
1 time a year
Detailed report with data breakdowns by group
Follow-up focus groups
These are also usually anonymous
The next set of surveys is the lifecycle survey. They are less anonymous and focus specifically on an individual and their experience at different points of their employee lifecycle. We might start these with onboarding surveys, followed by 1-year experience surveys, then by lifecycle surveys, and finishing with exit interviews. When designing these surveys, we need to be mindful of a few things:
Usually, 10-20 questions
3-4 levers
7-day administration
Happen connected to events in the employee lifecycle
Simple output to HR, Leaders, and managers
Not anonymous
Follow-up is done by managers directly
The next set of surveys covers pulses. These are short and snappy surveys explicitly designed to track employee experience over the year. These surveys are there to help you gauge how your workforce is doing and what you can improve for them. These are characterized by:
Frequent assessments (quarterly, monthly)
10-15 questions
Happening multiple times a year
14-day administration
Dashboards with self-service breakdowns for different groups
Anonymous
Same questions throughout to see trends over time
The survey design process is a simple one:
Start with an objective in mind: Why are you doing a survey?
Next, pick a survey type you will use
Define the areas you want to assess
For each area, draft 5-10 questions and keep in mind:
Keep the questions short and simple
Write in Grade 6 English—No fancy words allowed
Make the questions relevant
One idea per question (no double-barreled questions)
Make them actionable
Make them into statements
Use the same scale for evaluation (1-5 Likert type works fine)
Think about employee experience taking the survey
Don’t lead to the answer you want
Read them out loud
Include 2-3 open-ended questions for these
Allow them to elaborate on scalar questions in the comments
Once you have the questions, show them to others to get feedback
Then, finalize and deploy them
Once you have completed the survey, assess the correlations to see:
Reliability
Do questions hang together well
Do they measure what they were supposed to measure
How do they correlate with overall Engagement
Prune to make the survey shorter and more targeted
Repeat steps 5-9 at the next iteration
9 simple steps for an excellent survey design at work.
Check out my Practical People Analytics Certificate for a step-by-step design you can apply immediately.
3. How to deploy them effectively?
We spoke about frequency already and the idea that the same questions must be assessed over time. This is because you want to keep a pulse on your business and intervene as needed.
But there are other considerations, of course:
Communications
The survey never should be a surprise.
Your employees should know it is coming to their mailboxes to complete, and their managers need to help you achieve a high response rate.
Err on overcommunication here:
2 weeks before: Let managers know the survey is coming
1 week before: Let employees know the survey is coming
The day of: Remind employees to complete the survey
Throughout: Send reminders to people who have not completed the surveys
Throughout: Ask managers to allocate time in people’s calendar
Throughout: Send an optional calendar hold for employees for the survey
After 1 week: Be quick at survey close
After 3 weeks: Read out the results and next steps
Want employee trust? Be ready to overcommunicate.
Set expectations
This probably can go to communications, but you must set expectations for the survey. This can be several things, including the number of responses you seek, whether the survey is anonymous, and how to provide feedback.
This will help you to ensure:
People know clearly how many responses you want
Who will see the responses, and in what form (e.g., aggregated)
How to provide feedback in a respectful manner
Technology
There is a scenario where you might want to buy the survey from a technology vendor or a consulting firm like Tskhay & Associates (yes, I am being cheeky). If you are doing that, you need to make sure you:
Clearly indicate to your staff the use of external services. This will help you establish an arms-length relationship and render interpretation of results to be unbiased. This will also help your staff conceptualize which information they want and don’t want to share.
Check your technology: Test it a few days before to ensure it works, and contact your IT support to confirm the survey emails are coming through without issues.
Leave a section on the thank you page to provide overall feedback on the survey experience. This will allow you to improve the survey with each iteration.
4. How to interpret the outcomes.
Wow! I did not know this letter was going to be this long.
But hang in there.
When it comes to interpretations, first of all, remove all the bias from your head. Remember, you asked for it, so don’t get defensive here. Just take everything you see as information and help your employees offer to make things better.
Think of it as if you are AI:
Take in the data and summarize it first.
Here is my process:
Start with organizing the data overall in your preferred data processing software (for most here, it will be Excel or Sheets)
Compute all high-level metrics you will use
eNPS - standard metric to use
% Positive - easy to understand metrics
Averages - a more precise view of the world for a more advanced audience
Create data cuts and render them into a deck
Overall
By Lever
By Department
By Group
Perform statistical analyses if using
Reliability
Factor Analysis
Regression Modelling (if using)
Triangulate the data to see patterns that emerge
Calibrate the audience to understand what they want and need
Write an 8-10 slide executive summary—this is where your interpretations come in:
Objectives of the survey
Approach + Methodology
Themes
Theme 1
Theme 2
Theme 3
Recommendations
Next Steps
Validate the themes with your strategic partners
If you are using the pulse survey, the process is the same. But the goal here is to create a dashboard instead. This way, you don’t have to redo all the math again. Instead, you just need to upload the data and let the machine do its thing.
5. Let’s now finish with the impact.
Every single thing you do in a survey is to help employees engage with your company and their work and to produce the results.
You and your employees want exactly the same thing when you run a survey.
They want to see results, which means:
What did you find out?
What are you going to do to make things better?
How are you going to do it?
And, of course, when?
Your survey is about action, and you need to make sure you action your survey promptly and quickly.
One of the biggest mistakes I have seen companies make is running the survey and then interpreting and analyzing the results for several months.
Sure, you are getting somewhere.
But in the meantime, you are losing employee trust.
Act quickly, or don’t do surveys at all.
If you want to learn more about setting up your surveys hands-on, check out my Practical People Analytics Certificate program here or reach out to me for help!
Konstantin
Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
If you’re still looking to get started in People Analytics, I recommend starting with my affordable course:
Practical People Analytics Certificate: Build data-driven HR programs to 10x your professional effectiveness, business impact, and your career. This comprehensive course will teach you everything from building an HR dashboard for business results to driving growth through advanced analytics. Join your peers today!
If you are looking for support in your Human Capital programs like Engagement, Retention, and Comp & Ben and want to take a more data-driven approach, hit me up for some consulting services at Tskhay & Associates.
