Driving employee engagement higher

Research has shown that employee engagement is linked to improved productivity and commitment, higher levels of employee retention and reduced absenteeism, not to mention enhancements in service quality, customer satisfaction and overall performance. It’s easy to see why organisations want to drive engagement to a higher level. The question is, how do they do it? Let’s start by defining the term. At Kenexa, we see employee engagement as: "The extent to which employees are motivated to contribute to the organisation’s success and are willing to apply discretionary effort to accomplish tasks that are central to the goals of the organisation." In order to measure engagement levels, we break engagement down into a combination of pride (I’m proud to tell people I work for my organisation), satisfaction (I’m satisfied with my organisation as a place to work), advocacy (I would recommend my organisation to others as a good place to work) and retention (I rarely think about looking for a new job with another organisation). By averaging the percentages of favourable responses in these areas, it’s possible to create an employee engagement index score.