How do you show stakeholders the value of Employee Engagement?

Defining your goals or objectives is both important and often overlooked. While there's plenty of evidence to suggest that "engaged" employees perform better overall, you need to think about what you want to see as outcomes, what behaviours and mindsets will most align to your business goals rather than just getting a "better" engagement score. The science of Employee Engagement isn't particularly mature or settled, and it's also quite a limited construct. What I mean by that is that there's more to both motivation and performance than (basically) enthusiasm and commitment. What about creativity, innovation, collaboration, customer centricity? These require us to think about 'how' we engage people, rather than 'how engaged' they are.

Many organisations fail to evaluate the impact of their employee experience initiatives as they lack one of more of the following key steps to measure the impact of their engagement initiatives: 1. Define a clear strategy or business case for your employee surveys with clear outcomes. 2. Ensure your survey data analysis is effective. 3. Link employee engagement measures to business performance. 4. Implement a mechanism for continuous change and evaluation. Things to consider when defining your employee survey business case include what are the key challenges facing your business?, What are the people implications of the business challenges?

A useful model to think about is that data needs to be turned into information, information needs to be turned into insight, insight needs to be turned into action. Look for trends in your engagement survey scores. Measure engagement outcomes as well as satisfaction levels in your employee surveys. Correlating how people respond to your engagement outcome questions with how they respond to the other questions in your employee survey will reveal the specific questions that have the biggest statistical relationship to overall engagement. These are your engagement drivers, the things that are tending to drive levels of engagement.

The gold standard for evaluating your employee engagement initiatives is to be able to demonstrate how improvements in engagement drives improvements in business performance. To do this you need to go back to your original business case and outcomes that you defined for your survey as this will give you a big clue about what to measure. There is a caveat though. As employee surveys represent a snapshot in time it can be difficult to draw firm conclusions about the effect engagement is having on business metrics. Having said that, measuring engagement over time should enable you to identify trends in the data.

I would add that it's important to understand what each of your stakeholders is looking for as far as "results" and how they prefer this data to be communicated to them. The manner in which you present information is arguably even more critical than the value that data offers. Take the time to ask your stakeholders what their preferences are so that the results you offer are both well-received and impactful.

It is unlikely that you will be able to achieve total employee engagement in the short term. There are likely to be many opportunities to improve engagement that will take time, effort and investment. As such, you should view your engagement initiatives as part of a long-term continuous improvement process. Some initiatives will have an impact, others won’t. Also, things change. The business environment will change, employee expectations will change etc. We recommend you circle back to your employee survey strategy and utilise ongoing surveys to continuously monitor the impact of your engagement initiatives.