Performance | Employee engagement: Why you're measuring it in the wrong way

Recently, we ran a webinar on the subject of performance and engagement. One of the polls we put to our audience asked how often they conducted engagement surveys. The comfortable majority - almost 60% - said annually. 

There’s a lot to be said for measuring employee engagement annually. It’s deeply satisfying to present the board with a 2% uplift in the engagement score, showing the context of the efforts you’ve gone to in the past year. It shows that things are working as they should be and, in this rather hazily defined world, we’re doing what we need to do. 

But what is engagement actually for? What is the purpose of making people more engaged? We know we want people to be engaged. Every business looks for ways to motivate its employees. It touches on that tricky subject of non-financial rewards: how can we motivate people beyond the pay rise? How can we make this a better, more rewarding place to work? 

The operative word in that last sentence is “work”. It’s what we spent most of our time doing, after all. If we want to measure the right thing, we need to focus our engagement efforts on making the work better. We need to measure work engagement.