Daniel Nesbitt | Marketing and Administrative Specialist | People Factor, LLC
Employee engagement is often seen as HR’s responsibility, but it is the responsibility of everyone in the company, especially leadership. Having an engaged leadership helps to set the tone when it comes to how employees look at the company. If a new hire looks at upper management and sees they are not engaged or enjoying their time at the company, then that employee is far less likely to engage in the happenings of the company as well.
Before we can increase employee engagement, leadership must ask some questions like: What inspires my employees? What bores them? What makes them stressed? When do my employees need my support? When do I just need to get out of their way and let them run with it? These questions will define what employee engagement means for your company.
After employee engagement has been defined for your specific situation, the next step is to measure it, but why even bother measuring employee engagement?
Measuring employee engagement allows the person reviewing the results to best direct their resources to where they are needed most. The largest set of data you can collect not only increases the accuracy of the information you gathered but it can also help
identify trends from within the company about certain topics, departments, or demographic groups. These trends can identify problems that have been occurring internally in your company, and can even occasionally offer a solution. Including as
many employees as you can that can provide relevant information will give you the best chance of identifying a multitude of different problems within the company. Once these problems or issues have been identified, you can begin to address them.
A Likert scale can also be a helpful tool when measuring employee engagement. Using a Likert scale on certain questions is beneficial because it allows the person responding to share their level of satisfaction on a 5 point scale, rather than just a simple “yes” or “no”. While the Likert scale can provide good insight, sometimes open ended questions are needed to allow the employee a chance to elaborate more.
