Employee engagement is one of the HR buzzwords these days, and I often wonder how do organisations measure their employees’ level of engagement, or commitment, to the organisation? There are of course many formal methods of measuring engagement and you could spend much time and effort conducting focus groups, surveys, questionnaires, etc. and analysing it all to try to come up with some quantitative measure of your employees’ engagement.

I was recently discussing the results of some work I did with a client and he told me that, although they have not conducted any formal work to measure engagement since we worked together, they had over 95% attendance at their Christmas party last year, versus a usual attendance of around 80%. Attendance at all-staff meetings is on the increase month on month and the response rate to the annual employee survey is up 8% this year. Measures such as these, although informal, will give you an indication of employee engagement in your organisation without carrying out much work at all. Look for the subtle signs as well as the obvious metrics such as sickness absence and staff turnover, and you’ll get a good feel for what you need to do next.