Voice of Employee – Employee Engagement

Want to know everything about employee engagement?

Then you’ve come to the right place! Below you will find all information about what employee engagement means and many tips on how to measure and improve it. And what tools do you need to put this into practice. Motivate and activate your employees continuously!

• What is Employee Engagement?
• Why are engaged employees important?
• How do you measure employee engagement?
• How do you increase the involvement of your employees?
• Employee Engagement Survey Software
• Key features for employee engagement software

What is Employee Engagement? A definition

Employee engagement indicates the extent to which an employee is emotionally involved with the company or organization. Higher engagement means higher productivity, greater satisfaction and better performance and contributes to a customer-centric culture.

Why are engaged employees important?

Organizations with a high employee engagement that know exactly how to charge the battery of their employees have a big advantage. They know how to attract and retain talent, motivate employees, which increases productivity and reduces absenteeism. And all of this also has a positive impact on customer satisfaction. You can no longer manage with secondary conditions such as a good salary, pension and bonuses. Employees are increasingly motivated by self-development, delivering ever better performance and contributing to a ‘higher’ goal. That’s what energizes them and keeps them loyal to companies that drive employee engagement.

18% are ‘actively not involved’ and 67% are ‘not involved’

According to the Gallup “State of the Global Workplace” report, employee engagement worldwide is very low, at just 15%.

Books such as ‘Flow’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and ‘Drive’ by Daniel Pink are based on many studies in the field of positive psychology and its influence on the work ethic of your employees and the organizational culture. They argue that intrinsic motivation and a healthy company culture are the biggest factors to get into the ‘flow’ and give a ‘drive’ to your employees, which increases employee involvement in your organization.

How do you measure employee engagement?

There are several ways to measure employee engagement:

• Employee Energy Pulse: How much energy does your employee have at a given moment?
• Experience Culture Scan: What do you think employee of the organizational culture?
• 360° Employee Feedback: What do employees think of each other?

Energy Pulse: The energy level of your employees

If you feel ‘drained’ after a long boring day at work, it’s not a good sign. On the other hand, if you love your job and you feel energized at the end of the workday, that’s a great feeling. The energy level of your employees says a lot about the involvement within your organization.

Mapping the amount of energy an employee has at a given moment gives a good indication of his/her employee involvement. This measurement method is referred to as the proverbial ‘finger on the pulse’. No heavy, one-time recurring annual survey, but a short questionnaire that can be sent out regularly. You don’t ask employees whether they feel ‘involved’, a question that is difficult to answer because it is not clear what it exactly means. Instead, ask the employees how much energy they get from the work they do.

Experience Culture Scan

The organizational culture forms an important part as the basis for customer focus. It is striking that organizations with highly engaged employees and a customer-oriented culture have a number of values in common. For example, these organizations are often ‘flat’, they have little hierarchy, there is often a strong focus on social skills and successes are celebrated. In addition, employees are given the opportunity to take responsibility themselves and come up with solutions.

The eXperience Culture Scan is the way to ask your employees how customer-oriented they think your organizational culture is. This score results from a number of ‘grouped’ statements based on 4 basic values. Each statement describes some aspect of the cultural values underlined by companies with high employee engagement and customer focus.tspraak beschrijft een bepaald aspect van de culturele waarden die onderstreept worden door bedrijven met een grote medewerkersbetrokkenheid en klantgerichtheid.

360° Employee feedback

People naturally like to receive and give feedback, provided it is done in a positive and constructive way. Positive feedback helps people to become more confident and grow in their work. One-dimensional feedback is a one-way street, in which the manager assesses the employee. If there is room for the employee to respond to the feedback, you can speak of 180⁰ feedback. With 360⁰ feedback, more than two people give their opinion about the employee. Think of managers, coaches, colleagues or even suppliers or customers. This gives the employee a complete picture of his performance without being judged on it.

With 360° employee feedback, the employee himself is at the helm. He determines who and when he asks for feedback.

How do you increase the involvement of your employees?

Conditions for taking the step from measuring to improving

To take the step from measuring to increasing the involvement of your employees, it is important to set up your organization in such a way that you can continuously improve on the following three levels:

Strategic

Make sure you don’t put the results on the management agenda once a year, but regularly. Decisions you make can have an unexpected effect on your team.

Tactical

Discover trends in your organization based on driver analyses. Make improvements that directly affect the energy level of the organization, in every management layer and targeted at specific departments. Guide managers and departments with their own challenges.

Operational

Ensure that employees are involved in their own development on a daily basis. Give your employees what they deserve, tools to get a little better every day.

• Do not ask for feedback once a year, but continuously
• Don’t ask endless questions, just ask a few at a time
• Focus on intrinsic motivation, not external motivation
• Let go of hard factors such as salary and perks, focus on soft factors such as organizational culture
• Make it easy, make it fun
• Give people the space to give you feedback at any time if they want to
• Reply to the feedback

Employee Engagement Survey Software

The ideal employee engagement survey software not only measures how your employees feel, but also provides insights into why they feel that way. It is important that you regularly ask how your employees are doing without lengthy employee engagement questionnaires or unnecessary questions. Send the questionnaires via a mobile app so that it becomes a little difficult to answer the questions. And ask automatically, at random moments, only a few questions each time. Then you can be sure that at the end of the day all questions have been answered without your employees feeling that they are being over questioned. Visualize and make results manageable in your software system via, for example, a dashboard or attractive infographics, so that analyzes and priorities are easily transparent to be able to take follow-up actions.

Key features for employee engagement software

• Automated and continuous research
  Automatically and continuously get the right insights into the involvement of your employees, so that you can make the right decisions.
• Ask your target group as intelligently as possible
  Let the software remember who has already answered which questions and automatically send out reminders. Give employees the opportunity to complete the questionnaire at a later date or to complete fewer questions if they have limited time at that time.
• Focus on energy and reduce absenteeism
  Use the Energy Pulse Scan to continuously measure the energy balance of your employees and gain automated insight into what you can do to increase this.
• Measure how customer-oriented your culture is
  Get a complete picture of your organization’s customer focus by submitting automated statements to your employees on a regular basis.
• Visualization of data
  Make data visually appealing via dynamic infographics so that it is manageable and fun to work with the results.
• Make training courses easily available and track progress (online training)
  Translate the priorities for business improvements into (online) training courses to structurally increase the knowledge and know-how of your employees.
• Focus on fun and positivity
  Bring numbers and objectives to life with gamification and challenge employees to learn from each other and to motivate each other.