Employee engagement or satisfaction at work is an important human resource metric for organizations to measure and analyze on a regular basis. In short, happier employees are more productive employees that are most likely not considering quitting their jobs. Employee engagement has been shown to correlate with employee productivity as well as employee turnover rates.
Despite its importance, there is actually no single method of evaluating and calculating employee engagement or satisfaction. For example, there is the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) and the Gallup Workplace Audit (GWA) as well as perhaps less rigorously defined methods such as Employee Satisfaction (ESAT) and the Employee Engagement Index (EEI). However, all of these methods have similarities. With all of these methods, employees are asked to respond to a survey of questions and rank their answers to those questions on a scale. The number of questions on the survey as well as the scale can vary wildly between methods. For example, UWES uses 17, 9 or 3 questions while GWA uses 12. Scales also vary from UWES's 0 to 6 scale to Gallup's 1 to 6 scale to other scales that rank answers from 1 to 5.
This recipe will demonstrate how to create calculations regarding employee engagement using a generic format for questions and scale. In this way, the recipe can be easily adapted to any particular employee engagement methodology. In our recipe, we will use 3 questions numbered 1 to 3 and a ranking scale from 1 to 5 with 5 being the best, most positive response and 1 being the worst, least positive response. We will not list specific questions or specific scale categorizations due to the copyrights held by various legal entities that have developed proprietary methodologies for employee engagement and satisfaction.