Breaking The Shackles Of Tradition

From corporate culture to management style to competing priorities outside of work, there are several factors that contribute to employee engagement, and, they vary with every employee. It is such complexity that creates a challenge out of understanding and measuring engagement in an actionable way.

- Pallavi Jha

From corporate culture to management style to competing priorities outside of work, there are several factors that contribute to employee engagement, and, they vary with every employee. It is such complexity that creates a challenge out of understanding and measuring engagement in an actionable way. A typical approach is an annual engagement survey where employees are asked to rate/outline their own level of engagement. Assuming your employees give you honest responses, such an approach provides valuable inputs into how engaged they perceive themselves to be. However, it does not gather objective data on how engaged they truly are. Questions as to whether individuals are flexible to change, or are generally aware of strategies, may receive affirmative responses, but this does not reflect an employee's day-today conduct in any manner. To further complicate your results, such a snapshot of an employee's feelings and state of mind is delivered weeks after the survey was recorded. When the time comes for the HR team to examine the results, one cannot say for sure whether or not those views and feelings are pertinent, and, it would take additional time for HR to devise an action plan to tackle the results of the survey.