This week the ILF came across a truly eye-opening article on employee engagement published by Harvard Business Review. While much has been published about the impact of employee engagement on company performance this article provides a simple framework that can be used to measure it. There are many factors that contribute to employee engagement — ranging from corporate culture to management style to competing priorities outside of work — and the pertinent factors are different for each employee. However, the article suggests that companies should start by analyzing the following key behaviours:
- The amount of work that occurs outside of normal working hours (e.g., evenings and weekends). This is a good indicator of discretionary effort.
- The number of network connections and time spent with people outside of immediate team or region. Building of broad networks beyond core team is a sign of high engagement.
- The percentage of participation in ad-hoc meetings and initiatives vs. recurring meetings and processes. Participation in only highly structured events can be an indicator of low engagement.
- Time spent collaborating directly with customers outside of normal scope of work. This and other measures like it can indicate people are highly engaged enough to help their colleagues even though they might not get credit for it.
This analysis can help finding out whether employees have resigned month before they actually hand in their resignation letter.
Original article published on Harvard Business Review by Ryan Fuller on the 17th of November 2014. Read the full article here
If you’d like to delve further into the topic of engagement, here an article that will help:
7 steps for companies to assure high employee engagement at workplace
Brief Summary of Article:
Employees are an integral part of any organisation. To help them grow, an employer needs to understand their type and the respective ways, with which they can be boosted towards consistent growth. This article serves both the purposes right by providing an explanation of the employee types. Further, it talks about how a happy employee can be converted to an engaged employee, thus increasing the employee engagement ratio at the office premises.
Added 30.10.2020
Another very useful article about how to engage your employees has been pointed out to us:
Step-by-step guide to improving your employee engagement, by Veronika Mazour (12th June 2019) which can be found on the eXoPlatform.
Added 20th April 2021