UPMC administers surveys to all 80,000 employees across 20 different hospital systems, doctors’ offices, clinics, and long-term care facilities to understand the employee voice.
There are basically 5 factors at play in the US economy that are radically changing the job market and influencing how organizations are competing for top talent.
6 Best Practices in Creating Employee Engagement Surveys
In the VIDEO:6 Best Practices in Creating Employee Engagement Surveys I cover six ways to form questions in order to create a survey that will obtain the best and most accurate responses possible. By creating a powerful employee engagement survey you will accurately measure your organizations levels of engagement like never before.
Use a subset of anchor questions to measure overall engagement.
The most accurate way to measure employee engagement is to use the average score from a subset of validated anchor questions. We then use the score from the anchor questions to place employees in one of four different groups from Fully Engaged to Fully Disengaged.
Use a variety of questions to measure employee perceptions regarding their work, their team, their boss, and the organization overall.
These items will be used to determine unique perceptions among the different engagement groups of employees. Also include items to measure the five major drivers of employee engagement, which are: Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact, and Connection.
Use proper question structure and formatting:
Good questions are actionable, meaning that it is obvious what actions to take based on the item. So avoid vague or general statements that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Also, don’t use double-barreled questions which are items that contain two ideas in one question. Finally, use questions that are positively worded with a consistent rating scale.
Customize the survey so that it is relevant to your organization.
Every organization is unique, so make sure to include items that evaluate recent changes, alignment with company values, or other pertinent issues. But don’t go too far. If you customize too much, you won’t be able to utilize industry benchmarks on similar questions.
Use two or maybe three open-ended questions.
We recommend asking: “What are the areas that need the most improvement in our organization?” and “What are the greatest strengths of our organization?” These two items will generate good qualitative feedback that provides context to the scores on the other survey questions. Don’t use too many open-ended questions because it makes the survey run long and it doesn’t provide any additional feedback.
Use between 40-60 questions total.
A survey with 50 questions takes about 8 minutes to complete. If your survey is too short, then it doesn’t provide enough information to make specific conclusions and it becomes in actionable. If it is too long, employees will not finish it and you could also end up with too much information with leads to data paralysis.
To compile this report, we surveyed HR professionals from over 200 organizations around the world on what they were doing to address employee engagement.
For one of the questions, we asked, “Based on any employee survey results over the past 3 years, has the overall level of employee engagement in your organization trended upward, stayed the same, or gone down.” 32% of organizations reported engagement trending upward, 28% stayed the same, and 17% reported engagement had actually decreased.
When we looked at the 32% who reported engagement trended upward over the past 3 years, here is what we found:
Most companies with rising levels of employee engagement have measured it at least every year for the past three years or more.
2. Successful companies do better at involving managers in the action planning process.
Companies with upward trending levels of employee engagement also reported that more managers are involved in action planning.
3. Successful companies train managers on employee engagement.
Training managers on employee engagement, and training in general, were two similarities among companies with rising levels of engagement. So investing in the development of your managers pays off in increased engagement.
4. Successful companies measure the ROI of employee engagement.
Specifically, companies that compare their engagement efforts to retention and other performance metrics do better at increasing engagement overall.
5. Successful companies work with an outside provider.
Almost 60% of companies with rising levels of engagement report that they partner with service providers to enhance employee engagement. So if your employee engagement program has stalled, you may benefit from the expertise of outside engagement professionals.
Want to learn more? Download our 2016 State of Employee Engagement Report to learn about other best practices and to see how your organization compares. This 58-page report shows specifically what organizations are doing to measure and increase employee engagement.
Take a look at more videos to assist in building a better organization:
Employee satisfaction is the extent to which the employment contract is fulfilled. Employees feel satisfied when basic hygiene factors are met. These factors include pay, benefits, job training, safety, and the tools and resources to do the job. Other things that drive satisfaction are perks such as free lunch, day care, or working from home.
Satisfaction elements help to attract new employees and retain existing employees. For example, if your company offers the best healthcare benefits in the area, you will probably receive more job applications and employees will be less likely to leave and forfeit their health plan.
Employee satisfaction is very important because it creates the foundation upon which engagement can thrive. Employees must first be satisfied before they can be engaged.
We define employee engagement as an emotional state where we feel passionate, energetic, and committed toward our work. In turn, we fully invest our best selves—our hearts, spirits, minds, and hands—in the work we do.
The five drivers of employee engagement are Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact, and Connection. Meaning is finding purpose in the work you perform. Autonomy is having the freedom to do your best work. Growth is feeling stretched and challenged in your job. Impact is about making a difference and getting things done. And Connection is about belonging to something greater than yourself.
So where satisfaction helps to attract and retain employees, engagement also helps with retention but it is the main driver of performance. Engaged employees want to do their best work and deliver results for the company.
Satisfaction is more transactional– you pay me and I do my work- engagement is transformational – where I love my job and want to make a difference.
Both concepts are important. No matter how engaged employees are in their work, if they feel under-compensated, a satisfaction element, their engagement will suffer and they will probably look for other job opportunities.
If you would like to learn how to measure both the satisfaction and engagement levels of your employees, download the DecisionWise employee engagement survey. Thanks for reading or watching and best of luck in your efforts to create an engaging workplace.
Take a look at more videos to assist in building a better organization:
It’s a simple concept: when we are able to throw our hearts, spirits, minds, and hands into the work we do, we produce better results. We are happier, healthier individuals, and more successful organizations. So, why are some organizations engaging, while others aren’t?
Through our research of over 14 million employee survey responses across 70 countries, we found some surprising results. Bottom line? It’s… well… MAGIC!
It’s not foosball tables in the breakroom. It isn’t pet care, free haircuts, and free food. It’s not even lucrative employee stock programs. Although those things are pretty cool (who wouldn’t love Taco Tuesdays?), and are often the “price of admission” (if the basics aren’t there, employees certainly won’t be satisfied), they don’t create engagement.
Employee Engagement isn’t something that you buy with perks. Rather, it’s a two-way process where the organization creates the environment that allows engagement to foster and employees choose to engage. While that environment looks different to each of us, there are some clear commonalities that create a culture in which we choose to engage.
As we poured through the data, searching for common concepts that were related to both overall engagement and team performance, five themes became very clear. They’re M-A-G-I-C:
Meaning – Your work has purpose beyond the job itself.
Autonomy – The power to shape your work and environment in ways that allow you to perform at your best.
Growth – Being stretched and challenged in ways that result in personal and professional progress.
Impact – Seeing positive, effective, and worthwhile outcomes and results from your work.
Connection – The sense of belonging to something beyond yourself.
When these elements are present, organizations and employees tend to be significantly more engaged. In fact, when looking at those organizations scoring highest in these five keys, the top quartile had overall engagement scores that were 74% higher than those in the lowest quartile.
So next time you try to solve your engagement woes by adding a soda fountain to your breakroom, ask yourself how carbonated sugar addresses one of the five keys of engagement. You might save some employees (and teeth) in the process.
Let’s talk about our research on the Influence of Managers on Employee Engagement.
We recently conducted the largest study of its kind to compare the level of employee engagement of managers to that of their direct reports. This study included data from 22 companies, almost 19,000 employees, and 2,300 managers.
We first measured the overall level of engagement for each individual using a set of research-based anchor questions from their annual employee survey. We then grouped managers and employees according to their level of engagement into four categories: Fully Engaged, Key Contributors, Opportunity Group, and Fully Disengaged. Then we compared the level of engagement of managers to the employees they lead.
For the 808 managers that were Fully Engaged, we found that 36% of their employees were also Fully Engaged, 48% were Key Contributors, 12% were in the Opportunity Group, and only 3% were Fully Disengaged.
For the 1154 managers who were Key Contributors, the level of fully engaged employees drops to 24%. So the percentage of fully engaged employees increases 50% from a Key Contributor manager to a Fully Engaged manager.
For managers in the Opportunity Group and Fully Disengaged categories, only 14% of their employees were fully engaged.
So you can see that fully engaged managers lead more engaged employees. That finding, in of itself, is not very surprising, but what is important, is that the percentage of fully engaged employees increases 163% from Opportunity Group managers and Fully Disengaged managers to Fully Engaged managers. That’s a huge difference.
So how do you engage managers? Here are 3 best-practice recommendations:
Happiness isn’t the same as engagement. It’s an outcome of engagement. When you’re engaged at your workplace, you feel better about your life. You feel appreciated, recognized, and connected to the people with whom you spend the lion’s share of your day.
Thanks to the growing field of positive psychology, it’s become trendy to study what makes us happy. As a result, we’ve found out that happiness is important in the workplace: Research reported by the Wall Street Journal shows that happier workers help their colleagues 33 percent more often than unhappy employees, and are 36 percent more motivated in their work.
However, happiness isn’t the same as engagement, and it’s important that we not confuse these two concepts. As mentioned above, it’s an outcome of engagement. Part of happiness is being engaged at work. We talk to a lot of people about work–life balance, and we’ve found that true engagement promotes happiness at home, not just at work. When you’re engaged at your workplace, you feel better about your life. You feel appreciated, recognized, and connected to the people with whom you spend the lion’s share of your day.
We often pursue what we think will make us happy––money, security, status––but find that those things actually make us unhappy. In fact, happiness may not be something that we can even aspire to. A study conducted at the University of Denver found that the more study participants valued happiness for its own sake, the more they felt disappointed and unhappy when confronted with even minor life stresses of setbacks. The researchers concluded, “Paradoxically, therefore, valuing happiness may lead people to be less happy just when happiness is within reach.”1
Happiness & Meaning
Researcher from Florida State University, the University of Minnesota, and Stanford University dug deeper into the importance of happiness in a study published in 2013 in the Journal of Positive Psychology. In surveys of 397 adults about happiness and meaning several eyebrow-raising results emerged:
The factors that predicted a person would be happy were different from those that predicted the same person would find meaning.
Satisfying one’s needs and want increased happiness but was irrelevant to meaningfulness.
Happiness was based largely in the present, while meaningfulness was linked to thinking that integrated past, present, and future.
Taking, not giving, increased happiness, while giving rather than taking increased meaningfulness.2
The clear conclusion is that happiness, while important, has little to do with meaning. Aid workers toiling in sub-Saharan Africa under harsh conditions may be temporarily unhappy with the heat, mosquitoes, and poor sanitation, but these same people inevitably find their work deeply meaningful and engaging.
1 I.B. Mauss, M. Tamir, C. L. Anderson, and N. S. Savino, “Can Seeking Happiness Make People Unhappy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness,” Emotion 11, no.4 (August 2011):807-15.
2 Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, Jennifer L. Aaker, and Emily N. Garbinsky, “Some Key Differences Between Happy Life and a Meaningful Life,” Journal of Positive Psychology 8, no. 6 (2013): 505-16.
How engaged are you at work? Do you knock on your boss’s door, complain that you’re not feeling engaged at work, and demand that he does something about it? Of course not. The process begins with you, not your employer.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “Wherever you go, there you are?” Remember, you are the only constant that you take with you from situation to situation. The auto-disengaged person in one organization will be the auto-disengaged person in her next organization.
You are responsible for your ability or inability to engage, regardless of your position within your organization or your organization’s efforts to “get employees engaged.” The truth is that some people will find a way to engage no matter what. The interesting thing here is that workplace engagement often spills over to home-life engagement. While we may try to separate work and personal lives, the fact is that we are whole individuals, rather than tidy segments; home life, community life, work life, social life, and so forth all flow into one another. If you are disengaged at work, chances are you’ll be disengaged in other areas of your life as well.
If you’re saying to yourself, “This company isn’t an engaging place to work” take a look in the mirror. Engagement is a 50-50 proposition between employer and employee. But the individual has as much power to drive employer engagement initiatives as the top decision makers do. You can’t wait for your employer to come to you, because doing so presupposes that your employer (1) fully understands engagement; (2) realizes that you and others are not engaged; and (3) knows the unique factors that will engage you, the individual.
Remember, the employee engagement process begins with you, the employee, not your employer. To assist you and your fellow employees in accurately measuring your current levels of engagement, we’ve create a free tool that can be used anytime and as often as you choose. It’s called the ENGAGEMENT MAGIC® Self-Assessment. MAGIC is the acronym for the five essential keys needed to obtain true employee engagement: Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact, and Connection.
Take 10 minutes and dig into the assessment. When you know more about how engaged you are, you’ll have a much clearer idea of how engaged you wish to become and what to do about it.
Employee Engagement is a Spectrum
Employee engagement is not absolute. It is a spectrum, not an absolute state. You are not going to feel engaged all the time in your work or personal life. Can you imagine feeling exalted and in the flow when you’re, say, changing a toilet paper roll in the office bathroom? Of course not. But it’s an illustration of the fact that you will not feel 100 percent engaged 100 percent of the time. No one does. Your level of engagement will rise and fall from moment to moment depending on:
• What you’re doing
• How you’re feeling physically and emotionally
• Your life outside work and its relationship to your work
• How well your satisfaction and motivational needs (compensation, perks, physical security, etc.) are being met
• The levels of meaning, autonomy, growth, impact, and connection (ENGAGEMENT MAGIC®) present in your organizational culture at the time
• A myriad of other factors, some not even related to the organization you belong to
Those are all fluid states, so at a given point in time the snapshot of your engagement level will also be fluid. That doesn’t matter so much. What does matter is your level of engagement over the long term. Over months and quarters, the ups and downs even out and a clear picture emerges. Patterns take shape: Your work brings you strong meaning, but you have few mechanisms to determine your impact. That’s correctable, and as long as your level of engagement is generally positive and trending upward, it’s fine if on a given day you don’t feel like an employee in a company where you are racing around on a scooter, listening to house music, and celebrating your stock options.
“Employee Engagement is an emotional state where we feel passionate, energetic, and committed toward our work. In turn, we fully invest our best selves––our hearts, spirits, minds, and hands––in the work we do.”
The heart is about meaning, passion, fulfillment, even finding joy in what you do. Spirit is about attitude, energy, and excitement. It’s something that can be felt when you walk into a room or work with a highly engaged team. Heart and spirit imply that we must feel the work that we do.
Unfortunately, that’s where most engagement models stop, and that’s a mistake. There is more to engagement that just “feeling something.” The mind is about intellect, interests, curiosity, and creativity. The hands are about effort, productivity, and self-determination- using your skills and sweat to produce something of value. Mind and hands imply that we must do something. In order to be fully engaged, we must act. To put it simply:
Heart and Spirit = Feeling
Mind and Hands = Action
Engagement requires that we bring both our emotions and our actions to the table- our hearts, spirits, minds, and hands. To be engaged, we must feel something and take action on what we feel. Take one away and you don’t have engagement. You can think of feelings and actions as two oars in a rowboat. They are complementary opposites. Both are necessary. Row with one and you’ll travel in circles. You might work up a sweat and feel as though you should be getting somewhere, but you won’t. Pull with both at the same time and you’ll make progress.
Think of this in terms of your own experience. Have you felt the energy that comes with doing something you feel is worthwhile, something that really floats your boat? How did it feel? What did it cause you to do?
