Measuring Engagement – Assess Actions or Ask for Declarations?

The popularity of survey-based engagement studies shows no signs of fading. Annual surveys have become a permanent fixture in the corporate calendar, like the pre-holiday office party or the periodic performance review. But in an era of dynamic technological development, isn't it time to look for tools that monitor engagement online – and based on real behaviours that bring value to the organisation, instead of survey declarations?

How do we measure engagement?

Engagement studies are, by design, meant to assess the organisation comprehensively. The questions usually touch on topics such as:

• level of satisfaction
• level of loyalty
• level of motivation;
• the hierarchy of employees' needs and their connection with the company's effective operation;
• assessment of managers and colleagues.

The essence of the study is the "engagement index", usually expressed as a percentage.  It is defined on the basis of selected, universal issues raised in the survey, which makes it possible to benchmark the result against market competitors or companies operating in other industries or cultures. Looking into the structure of this index, we will notice that various authors of this type of research most often equate the assessment of the conditions created by the organisation for employee engagement (this is how the engagement index should be defined) with a recurring group of factors:

• overall job satisfaction,
• interest in applying again,
• colleagues' motivation/satisfaction
• willingness to recommend the employer to people in one's circle.

From the above, somewhat encyclopaedic summary of what engagement studies are,  something resembling a panacea for all organisational ailments emerges. The principle seems simple: once a year  we collect comprehensive feedback, select what is most important or rated lowest, improve it, and as a result everyone will be happier and more engaged. The interest of the respondents (employees) also seems obvious: it stems from the hope that something will change for the better, and curiosity about how our unit compares to other parts of the organisation.

Can we measure better?

In practice, various shortcomings of this kind of extensive diagnosis come to light, including:

• the difficulty of "processing" the extensive material and consistently implementing the postulated changes, which often recur in subsequent years;
• distortion of results through pressure or fear – internal competition among managers, pressure to win the ranking organised by the research company, fear that participation is not fully anonymous;
• the one-off nature of the study, which does not allow monitoring of engagement variability – we will probably rate the organisation differently after a bonus payout than during a period of imminent redundancy risk.

The big periodic engagement study, in an era when more and more analytical processes happen in real time, may soon end up in the open-air museum of social research.  In its place, various kinds of applications and systems are already appearing – or will appear soon – that can support engagement monitoring. Their distinguishing feature will be daily online feedback, based on the analysis of employees' behaviours rather than declarations. At the same time, these will be/are technological solutions that are not a study in themselves, but a tool focused above all on delivering one of the organisation's key functions, which further increases the value of such solutions. Especially since the cost of implementing them is much lower than that of a comprehensive engagement study.

Referrals = engagement

An example of such a solution, which directly relates to the scope of engagement research in its current formula, is the ShareHire INSIDER referral recruitment management system. It was created to make organising candidate referrals easier in such a way as to encourage employees to recommend job offers to friends on the one hand, and to minimise the effort of handling such a process on the other. Thus, this application corresponds in a simple way with one of the key engagement factors measured in the current formula – the willingness to recommend the employer to people in one's circle. ShareHire INSIDER, equipped with a statistics module, makes it possible to assess employees' activity in the company referral system practically on a daily basis. It provides information about employee engagement with the possibility of historical analysis and searching for correlations with other factors. At the same time, the cost of using the application and the benefits of using it (referrals are by far the most effective recruitment tool) increase the system's competitiveness against the research apparatus of companies specialising solely in surveys.

The application in question draws directly on the phenomenon of crowdsourcing*. In this case, employees expand the circle of in-house recruiters and can replace the services of recruitment agencies, delivering decidedly better quality results. At the same time, activity in the system is direct evidence of how willing employees are to genuinely (not just declaratively) promote working at the company – read: how much they themselves consider the job attractive and worth recommending to friends.

Looking more broadly, crowdsourcing in the internal dimension of an organisation can be a testament to engagement fit for modern times. Referrals are just one of the possible dimensions of adapting the society-wide phenomenon of crowdsourcing to corporate purposes. More and more organisations (including HP, IBM, Philips)  are implementing internal systems that, in an open, egalitarian way, activate employees in the creation of innovations, resource sharing, or financing socially beneficial activities of the company or its employees.

Perhaps we are on the verge of a breakthrough: the emergence of new forms of employee engagement coupled with the automatic ability to measure it based on concrete behaviours rather than annual declarations. The periodic snapshot of the company, which the engagement study in its current formula undoubtedly is, will probably not disappear from the HR professional's toolkit any time soon, just as the need to take photos has not been displaced from everyday life despite the ubiquity of online video technology.

Nevertheless, the shift towards community-based, technology-driven solutions cannot be stopped. It is worth watching their development and drawing conclusions – before the competition does.

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