Employee Engagement Research…Why Not Just Engage Them?

Surveying employees about their thoughts on a variety of issues is a time worn tradition within the HR world.  Today they are used mostly to establish a benchmark measurement for employee engagement levels. The research output is then used to respond with an enterprise level remedial plan to improve on those outputs.

If you are at the stage where you believe you have an employee engagement issue, you probably do.  And if you do use some type of employee research to determine your engagement level, what does that really tell you?  What should your employee engagement score be?  Is 100% employee engagement possible…of course not.  It is a constantly moving target. 

The concepts of "employee engagement" have been with us for many years. More than 30 years ago Gallup and other companies pioneered the concept of the "engagement survey." The roots of these surveys started in the late 1800s when Fredrick Taylor, a pioneering industrial engineer, studied how people's attitude impacted their productivity in the steel industry.

Today there are hundreds of different vendors who provide you with validated benchmarking tools to assess your employee’s level of engagement.  The problem is however that most companies feel these are not keeping up, not detailed enough, not in real time.  And they don’t consider all other work related issues which are drivers of employee commitment.

Building a highly engaged workforce takes combination of many things, each impacting people in different ways.  One thing we do believe is that employee recognition and engagement are inextricably linked.  If you have the money to research an expected employee engagement problem, why not spend your budget attempting to improve it instead?  That way the money will get into the hands of the employees where it will probably do more good than just knowing what “level” they’re on.

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