One study found that less than 50% of employed Americans feel that they have a good job.
Employee satisfaction is a key component of productivity, which in turn affects every aspect of your business. So how do you know if your employees are happy with their job or not?
The first thing you need to do is learn about measuring employee engagement. By keeping a pulse on how engaged your employees are, you can implement realtime changes that make their job more satisfying.
Below we talk about the importance of measuring employee engagement and three ways to do it. Keep reading to learn more.
Why Measure Employee Engagement?
Engaged employees are more productive, and that helps your business thrive. Meaning that, finding a way to keep your employees engaged is crucial to the success of your business.
Improving engagement starts with measurement. It gives you a starting point from which you can track what you’re doing well and what you can do better. And by measuring employee engagement regularly, and implementing the feedback given to you, you’re showing your employees that you’re committed to making them happy.
Three Ways of Measuring Employee Engagement
Below are the three most common ways of measuring employee engagement. These include surveying your employees, having regular 1-on-1’s, and starting a process of stay interviews. Each of these should give you great feedback from which you can start improving employee engagement.
1. Surveys
Surveying your employees is a great way to measure employee engagement. You can create in-house, pulse surveys, or have a provider do the work for you.
Pulse surveys are short and frequent employee engagement surveys. They give you a chance to consistently monitor employee engagement and check in on how implemented changes are received. All you need are 5 to 10 survey questions that ask about how employees are feeling and where they see room for improvement.
While in-house pulse surveys are easy to administer, reading the data can be difficult. Alternatively, you might hire a survey provider to conduct engagement surveys on a bi-annual or annual basis. They’ll take care of everything from logistics to reporting on the results.
2. 1-on-1’s
In 1-on-1 meetings with employees, you can have more of a conversation around employee engagement. These informal chats should be about an hour long and should involve all the members of your team, from regular employees to management.
The one difficult thing about 1-on-1’s is building trust with your employees so that they feel safe to open up. Create an environment where the employees feel safe and where they know the conversation is kept private, and you can get a lot of detail about what’s going on on the floor.
3. Stay Interviews
Exit interviews are a common practice in most businesses. These are interviews conducted when a person leaves the company. It gives you a chance to find out what the person liked about the job and what you could have done better.
Instead of waiting until a person leaves to conduct these types of interviews, why not consider conducting them while the employee is still with you? That means talking to employees that are happy with their job. You can find out what you’re doing that makes them want to stay as well as where you can improve.
More Game-Changing Advice
Regularly measuring employee engagement gives you plenty of opportunities to keep your employees happy. And happy employees are productive employees. All you have to do is find which one of three measurement tools works best for you: surveys, 1-on-1’s, or stay interviews.
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