How tech is shaping the future of employee engagement in 2021

By Ian MacRae & Hejab Azam

Tech solutions to measure engagement

Employee engagement surveys used to be more of an annual headache than an effective way to measure employee well-being. Once a year people might be asked vague questions about general satisfaction, happiness, or how likely they would be to recommend their company to a friend.

When some people think of engagement surveys they might think of the often “unengaging” annual surveys that are carried out. Some organisations will be familiar with eNPS as a proxy to measure engagement (or more accurately, eNPS measures loyalty to the company).

But the psychology of work engagement and the technology to measure it has come a long way in recent years. Instead of taking an annual snapshot from a survey, organisations can have a real-time dashboard of employee well-being, using metrics that have been demonstrated to measure not just well-being, but to predict employee productivity.

Moving beyond traditional engagement measures

Our understanding of work, and what helps people be productive and effective at work has rapidly evolved over the previous decades. In this history of workplace psychology it’s only within the past 20 years we’ve moved from trying to prevent burnout, and mitigating its  worst effects, towards boosting engagement. We care about work engagement not just as a ‘nice to have’, but also because there is robust scientific evidence that boosting engagement improves productivity and workplace outcomes.

Early attempts at measuring employee engagement using tools such as the eNPS were a step in the right direction. They acknowledged that employee well-being is good for people, and good for the company. However there are a few problems with approaches like the eNPS that purport to measure engagement, but actually measure something else (loyalty).

1. The eNPS is a great way to measure loyalty, but employee engagement is about much more than loyalty so it may not necessarily be the best way to measure engagement.
2. Most employee engagement surveys are done once or twice a year. How you feel on the day you take the survey, may not be a reliable reflection of how engaged you actually are. For example, if you are engaged in your work, but are having a particularly stressful week, this could be reflected in your overall answers. Alternatively, you might feel really unmotivated with your work, but are having a great week, in which case your survey answers are likely to be positive and not a true reflection of how engaged you are in your work.
3. Employee engagement surveys that are done once or twice a year, are often long, cumbersome—and unengaging! If your employees don’t want to fill them out, then you don’t get an accurate picture of how immersed, purpose-filled or energetic your people might be feeling—all key aspects to measure when looking at employee engagement.

What’s the best way to measure engagement?

The most effective, and well-validated way to measure engagement was developed by the Utrecht model of work engagement. Work engagement is a “positive, fulfilling work-related state of mind”.  People with high levels of work engagement have: energy in their work; a sense of purpose in their work; and feel immersed in their work (similar to a state of ‘flow’).

HR tech is moving fast though, and companies like Clear Review have adapted the best available psychological research to create tools that measure engagement using a combination of psychometrically validated tools and tech that offers business real-time insight into employee well-being. Clear Review’s “My Mindspace” directly measures engagement in the flow of work. Every month, employees get a nudge to fill out a short engagement check to see how they are doing. Because it’s done in the flow of work, it is a much more accurate and reliable measure of employee engagement. It gives a much clearer view of what’s going on and enables managers or teams to react much more quickly to changes in engagement levels.

A good environment for engagement and well-being is one in which an employee understands the purpose of their work and the role their job plays in the organisation’s success. My Mindspace, specifically looks at work engagement rather than just loyalty or job satisfaction. It’s about the psychological state the person is bringing to work, not just how much they like the company they work for. This is a far more accurate predictor of individual and team performance than employee loyalty or job satisfaction.

Clear Review has created a measure of work engagement in just three questions which capture work engagement more accurately. Having fewer questions also makes it easier to get employees to report their engagement, because it only takes seconds and is embedded in their regular workflow.

Often when we think of engagement, we might think of it as a happiness measure. However, that’s not necessarily true. You may be happy, like your manager and your colleagues, but you may not be engaged or motivated by the work you do. My Mindspace looks at the key factors that affect work engagement: Purpose, Immersion and Energy. These regular measures of engagement allow employees to be more aware of work engagement and well-being levels in the flow of work.

My Mindspace allows you to answer these questions and then provides self-motivating prompts depending on your answers, putting engagement back into the employees’ hands.

Deeper insight into work engagement levels

One of the major advantages to measuring engagement continuously is it gives up-to-date information about the engagement of employees. Taking a snapshot of engagement levels once a year might be better than nothing, but it gives a pretty poor picture of the organisation’s health in time to make many relevant changes.

People don’t have a constant, unchanging level of engagement year-to-year. Employee engagement levels fluctuate based on job demands, job resources as well as other factors. This means during challenging times where employees have the resources to meet those challenges, they tend to have high engagement levels. When people are faced with overwhelming and insurmountable difficulties, their engagement levels plummet.

For example, by looking at Clear Review’s data from thousands of people in dozens of companies across the UK, we can get a snapshot of what happened to people’s work engagement levels in 2020.

Engagement levels will naturally fluctuate, but we can see from the engagement data that sharp, sudden drops in engagement can be directly related to external factors. In the case of early November, we can see work engagement levels immediately fall off a cliff on November 5, when the UK went into lockdown.

The question for businesses, in monitoring engagement levels should be: what is affecting engagement levels within the company? How can we keep engagement levels high, and what can we do when they are low. Real-time monitoring of engagement levels offers great opportunities to test whether company changes, new policies or initiatives affect employee well-being.

Without monitoring engagement levels, it’s difficult to know what is really going on with employee well-being. Whereas measuring and managing work engagement using the most innovative HR Tech allows businesses and leaders to have their finger on the pulse of the whole company and teams within the company, and take action accordingly.