valtera white paper employee engagement

WHITE PAPER

Employee Engagement

Everything You Wanted To Know About Engagement But Were Afraid To Ask

Benjamin Schneider, Ph.D. | William H. Macey, Ph.D. | Karen M. Barbera, Ph.D.Scott A. Young, Ph.D. | Wayne Lee, M.S.

Peek into any executive suite and it won’t be long before you hear someone bring up the term employee engagement. Engagement remains a hot topic because of its proven links to critical business outcomes like productivity, retention, and customer satisfaction and loyalty. Everybody wants to have an engaged workforce because it can forge a path to competitive advantage.

On the surface, the concept of engagement appears simple and intuitive. But ask five different people to define engagement and you’ll likely get five different answers. Better yet, ask five providers of employee surveys, and you may find that each has pulled together a different combination of traits under a single umbrella they refer to as employee engagement.

The lack of a clear and precise understanding of engagement is more than just a semantics issue—it affects how engagement is both managed and measured. Engagement surveys based on a clearly-defined concept zero-in on attitudes and behaviors that directly affect the bottom line and on ways that identify how to make improvements.

The purpose of this short paper is to raise common questions about employee engagement and to provide answers that Valtera has discovered in our own research on the topic.

© 2006 Valtera Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

About ValteraValtera is an HR consulting firm that helps global companies align their people and service delivery to their core business strategy.

Contact847.640.8820 (main)847.640.8830 (fax)[email protected]

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Better Organizations Through Better Science®

Better Organizations Through Better Science® © 2006 Valtera Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Satisfied Employees

Satisfied employees feel pleasant, content, gratified,

and that their needs have been fulfilled.

Engaged Employees

Engaged employees feel energized, passionate, involved, dedicated, and committed.

How do I know if my employees are engaged?The only way to identify engaged employees is to observe their behaviors. Engagement behaviors are the crux of all the positive aspects of having an engaged workforce. From a managerial perspective, it is the behaviors that make engagement a desirable trait in employees. If you only remember one thing from this paper, remember this: Feelings and attitudes do not identify engagement in an employee. Without the behaviors, there is no engagement.

That said, there are certain key feelings and attitudes that underlie and promote engagement behaviors, and these emotional factors are critically important if you are trying to increase the level of engagement in your workforce. They are critically important because without them you do not get to observe engagement behaviors. (The section on the engagement model delves deeply into these factors.) But if you just want to know if a particular employee is engaged or not, look for the following types of behavior:

• High levels of effort.

• Persistence at diffi cult tasks over time.

• Helping others.

• Going beyond the norms or expectations of a work place (like investing in self-development on one’s own time).

• Voicing recommendations for change to improve things.

• Expanding one’s role or responsibilities in response to a team or organizational need.

• Adapting to and even facilitating change to improve the work, the work place and organizational effectiveness.1

Is engagement the same as job satisfaction?No, engagement is vastly different from job satisfaction. In simplest terms, an engaged workforce positively affects the bottom line in a way that a merely satisfied workforce does not. The difference hinges on those important behaviors of an engaged workforce.

But even if you ignore the behaviors, you’ll see that the feeling and attitudes of a highly engaged employee are very different from a disengaged, but potentially satisfied employee. Feeling engaged—which shows internal motivation to do and to strive—is quite different from feeling satisfied—which can reveal itself in complacency and acceptance of the status quo.

Engaged employees feel involved in, committed to, and a central part of the organization’s accomplishment; and they feel they are a valued part of the organization. They feel safe, meaning they feel safe to disagree with a boss without fear of reprisal, for example because the boss has earned their trust through fair treatment. They feel they have the personal resources to accomplish their work goals and meet the needs of the organization.2

The big difference is that engaged employees not only feel a certain way, they also behave a certain way, and behavior is, after all, what matters. Satisfaction allows for no such behavioral inferences.

UNDERSTANDING ENGAGEMENT


Are there any employee surveys already in existence that measure engagement?This is a very good question and it requires a two-part answer. First, the answer is “Yes,” we do have existing measures that capture the engagement concept but they are not the usual employee survey—even though some employee surveys may ask some similar questions.

Items that measure engagement usually fall into one of two categories, those that measure attitudes and those that measure behaviors. Most existing items measure aspects of attitudinal engagement.

Attitudinal measures capture the individual feeling of being engaged. Two sets of measures have widely been adopted, one having to do with organizational commitmentand the other having to do with job involvement.

Organizational CommitmentOrganizational commitment speaks to how people feel towards the organization that employs them in terms of pride in working there, loyalty to the organization (e.g., feeling hurt when others criticize the organization), a sense of identification with the organization (e.g., seeing the organization and the self as sharing the same values and goals), and being willing to extend oneself in ways that promote the good of the organization (e.g., feeling that long hours for the good of the organization are worth the effort). So, the emotional experience of commitment is the sense of willingness to do what is necessary to defend and to enhance the organization because by doing so one’s own self as well as the organization is enhanced.4

Unfortunately, most measures of commitment that we have seen used in practice on organizational surveys have focused on pride and loyalty, without going further to address the part of the commitment construct that is most similar to engagement and likely most important to the organization. These are the parts about feeling one wants to extend oneself and do things to promote the good of the organization--and then actually doing something about it.

Why do measures of employee engagement look like measures of job satisfaction?As the notion of employee engagement became popular, managers wanted to measure it to find out the degree of engagement that characterized their work force. Typically, existing employee surveys were simply relabeled as engagement surveys, some without any modification at all. The fact that many of the items in the older surveys asked for people’s satisfaction was apparently not seen as a problem, since people often confuse employee satisfaction with employee engagement. This confusion is problematic, because satisfied employees are not necessarily engaged employees.

So, engagement differs from satisfaction both in terms of the inner experience of feeling engaged and the effortful behaviors that follow from that emotional experience.

A few examples might make the point clearer.

Feelings of engagement are beyond satisfaction and into energy; behavioral engagement of the work force is how people in a work group see the level of engaged behaviors that characterize their co-workers.3

Job Satisfaction Item “My work load is about right.”

Engagement Item “I feel energized by the work I do.”

Job Satisfaction Item “How satisfied are you with your relationships with your co-workers?”

Engagement Item “My co-workers and I help each other out when the going gets tough.”

MEASURING ENGAGEMENT


Job InvolvementJob involvement concerns the feelings of being invested in one’s job—the work itself. These feelings include the sense that one is working on something important, that one is challenged by the work, that the work has considerable variety, and that the work permits the use of knowledge, skills, and abilities that are personally important and valued.5

The good thing, as noted earlier, is that many employee surveys already ask questions about the degree to which employees experience organizational commitment and job involvement. The bad thing is that the items used to measure satisfaction are mixed in with the items designed to measure engagement, so when reviewing the survey results, the two get confounded. Careful researchers ensure that the two issues are not confounded in their employees surveys.

Isn’t satisfaction correlated with commitment and involvement?Yes. But the fact that they are correlated does not mean they are the same thing. After all, height and weight are correlated but they are not the same thing and they do not in turn correlate in the same way with other things. For example, height is a stronger correlate of success at basketball than weight is while weight is a stronger correlate of success at weight lifting than height is.

In the case of engagement and satisfaction, for years we have known that satisfaction is not a strong positive correlate of productivity. The evidence, even with the unsophisticated measures of engagement that exist, reveals that engagement is related to productivity—and to customer satisfaction and revenue generation. When more accurate measures of engagement are adopted, who knows how strong this relationship to important outcomes will be?

THE

PATH

TO

EN

GA

GEM

ENT

The path to engagement begins with shaping

the work environment and then nurturing

engagement attitudes.

This leads to engagement behaviors— those

behaviors linked to critical business outcomes like productivity, retention,

and customer satisfaction.


THE ENGAGEMENT MODEL

Are engagement behaviors the only thing we are really interested in?No, not really. It is true that behavior is what you are ultimately interested in. But it is a mistake to focus solely on behavior when your goal is to increase engagement behaviors. Here is the rule: Behavior does not just pop out of people for no reason—it emerges from what they think and feel. Therefore you want to know what people think and feel because it affects how they behave.

One way to influence how people think and feel is to change the conditions in which they work. Conditions set the stage for why people feel emotionally engaged or not and it is on the basis of these thoughts and feelings that they behave the way they do. If you alter the work conditions appropriately (and we will have more to say about what those conditions are later) and gain higher levels of engagement attitudes (those emotional experiences we discussed earlier) then you will have an impact on the behavior in which you are interested. The point is that people are not like electric bulbs that go on when you flip a simple switch; you must understand what actually permits the switch to turn on the lights so you can create the right conditions to make engagement happen.

You already know where we are going with this so let us refer you to the picture on the previous page and the model below, and then get on with the discussion of engagement behaviors:

Engagement behaviors are characterized by high levels of energy and initiative, conscientiousness and persistence in pursuit of work goals and helpfulness to others, defense

of the organization when it is under attack, loyalty behaviors (low to no absenteeism, alcohol and drug abuse), and adherence to both the rules and the spirit of safety, honesty, and ethics as promoted by the organization. So, engagement behaviors concern both task performance and other kinds of behavior that serve to enhance organizational performance; both task and organizational performance follow from a psychologically engaged work force.

We have played a little trick on you here by always talking about the work group or the work force when we bring

up the topic of engagement behaviors. That is, we are always concerned with an engaged work force, not an engaged individual one at a time. In an era when teams and work groups have become so important to the success of the company, it is what happens in those work groups and teams that is critical. To the

degree that we can create a team with individuals who have strong feelings of engagement, the work group as a whole will be characterized by engaged behaviors.

Are engagement behaviors the same as organizational citizenship behaviors?Some readers might recognize something in the description of engagement behaviors that rings a bell—organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB). OCB is a concept that has generated huge amounts of academic research in the last quarter century and this work has revealed that units where OCB is higher are also more productive units. OCBs are acts that are in support of organizational preservation and enhancement that are generally not connected to a specific job description. For example, helping others, or not taking long breaks, not complaining when things get changed, and so forth.6

The OCBs that have been measured in the past are mild forms of the kind of engagement behaviors we are speaking about. We think this is true because the idea of OCB originally emerged in the 1960s where manufacturing

Behavior does not just pop out of people for no reason—it emerges from what they think and feel.

Conditions For Engagement

Engagement Attitudes

Engagement Behaviors


jobs in union environments typified work; where relatively strict rules and guidelines characterized work whose characteristics rarely changed. In today’s world of work there is less formality in job descriptions, flatter hierarchies, more teams of self-managed people, and much speedier changes. This requires a more nimble and agile work force—one that is engaged to meet the new challenges of a dynamic and changing work environment.

If management wants to see a work force that is emotionally and behaviorally engaged, it must create the right conditions. This requires some rethinking about how jobs must be designed and how people must be managed.

Does the design of jobs influence engagement levels? Yes. Some jobs capture the minds and hearts of the people doing them. These jobs demand of people that they use their full capabilities and talents to do them. A job that demands less than this is not one that is involving for people; it does not energize them; it does not absorb them; and it does not offer them the opportunity to exercise creativity and innovation in what they do and the way they do it while still accomplishing work goals—that they may have participated in setting. When jobs provide for these kinds of opportunities then people’s minds and hearts are engaged and their engaged behavior follows.

People’s hearts are engaged when the goals toward which the organization is working are goals that they share. At the level of work this is revealed to workers by them being asked to do work that is meaningful; they feel that the work they do has some benefits beyond monetary achievements. For example, when employees know that the work they do well helps keep tens or hundreds of other people employed the work has more meaning. Or when employees know that a percentage of sales go to support summer camps for deprived children then the work they do takes on more meaning. In some companies, of course, the meaning is more direct: nurses see people survive, social workers see people get better, teachers see kids make progress, and pharmaceutical researchers see the fruits of their labor help thousands of people feel better and live longer. So, the challenge to management is to make all jobs, not just those with direct meaningfulness, have larger meaning. When this happens the hearts of employees are also engaged.

When people’s minds and hearts are engaged a strange thing happens: employees have a spring in their step, are

excited about what they are doing, find the day passing quickly, and can adapt to and deal with change, pressure and tension without blinking an eye.7

But it takes more than just changes in the work people do to have them be fully engaged.

What is another condition for engagement?We’re going to have to set the stage here by discussing in some detail something we slipped in and then slipped by earlier. This is the concept of safety; employees feeling safe to let their minds and hearts be captured is important for feeling and acting engaged. Safety is one of the conditions that must be present before employees can be truly engaged.

It goes like this. Suppose you worked someplace and saw that there was a better way to get the work done than the way it was being done now. The question is this: Would you tell your boss that there was a better way the work could be done? You would if you felt that your suggestion would be accepted enthusiastically and that it would be carefully considered, and that at a minimum you would be thanked for the idea. So, you would make the suggestion if you felt it was safe to do so. This issue of feeling safe applies to all of the engagement behaviors we have spoken of thus far: Taking initiative, being involved in the work, voicing ways to do things better, and in general being engaged. If you feel you will be slammed for doing things differently, for helping others who need help, for doing more or working longer than you usually do (you can also be slammed by co-workers for being a rate-buster), then you will not be engaged.

You already know the answer to the next question but let us ask it anyway: What kinds of management practices make people feel safe enough to take these risks? The answer is that when workers trust their manager to treat them fairly, they feel safe; and when workers trust their coworkers to treat them fairly, they feel safe. Feeling safe permits engagement to flower; being fairly treated leads to the trust that is at the very foundation of feeling safe.8

What is fair treatment? First, it is making sure that people get recognized and rewarded for their accomplishments based on the significance of their accomplishments. This means that people are rewarded differently if their accomplishments are different. Second, it is making sure that people are


treated interpersonally fairly; that some are not picked out as favorites to receive special attention unless those favorites are picked based on work accomplishments. Third, it is ensuring that procedures are followed fairly for all who the procedures affect—who gets to go to training, gets to go on vacation at which times, and so forth. Academics talk about distributive fairness (how rewards are distributed), interactional fairness (how interpersonal relationships get played out), and procedural fairness (how processes get carried out); all are important in the creation of trust.9

You must admit this is a different way to think about the most important things managers can do. What happened to setting goals, and span of control, and planning? They are still tasks that need doing, but a lot of what used to be a manager’s job now resides at the level of the team—workers participate in setting goals, they plan how they will accomplish those goals, and they work without direct supervision. And they will do these all much more effectively when they feel safe because their manager has earned their trust by being fair.

Are there other conditions required for engagement?Yes. The third required condition (after the work itself and fair treatment by management) will seem quite mundane: The resources necessary to do the work well.

We have learned that management is great at setting out strategic goals and then kind of assuming employees will be committed to them and engage in the behaviors necessary to make the goals happen. What management forgets is that employees require the resources to achieve goals. What kinds of resources? Technology, training, support. Let’s briefly consider each.

• Technology—there is no free lunch. In today’s technologically sophisticated world, the company that is not using the most effi cient technology is going to fall behind. But effi ciency is not the only issue; the issue is usability. So, employees must have useful technology—technology that performs well for them—to achieve their work goals.

• Training—as engaged as they may be, people are not infi nitely adaptable and fl exible. When new goals are set and new ways of getting the work done are necessary, training is a very important sign to people that management thinks this is really important. But the training must be timely—not 6 months before it is going to actually be required

on the job. Training gives people skills and having the skills empowers people.

• Support—the new thing makes everyone nervous. People need the support of others when trying new things. Teams that have a chance to chat about being nervous and how the new thing is going to work will then support each other when the new actually must be done. Another kind of support concerns staffi ng levels when the new requires additional people to make it happen. Some companies behave as if people are liabilities so they fail to add the staff necessary to make the new actually happen. But people are only liabilities on the balance sheet and should be treated as assets by management.

The rule is, don’t forget the mundane.

When workers trust their manager to treat them fairly, they feel safe. Feeling safe permits engagement to flower; being treated fairly leads to the trust that is at the very foundation of feeling safe.


ENGAGEMENT BRINGS RESULTS

Is engagement the cure-all for every organization?We were afraid you would ask that question. The answer is that having an engaged work force does not compensate for poor strategic decision making, downturns in the economy, and it probably is more important to have an engaged work force in some industries than in others. If you make the strategic decision to be the low-cost provider as a local supermarket and then Wal-Mart moves nearby, having an engaged work force is not likely to help. If the economy goes south and you are into selling mid-priced cars, having an engaged work force is not likely to help. So, your work force may trust you and be engaged by the way you have designed tasks for them and they will keep working at it but you still might go bust. Our metaphor is the buggy whip manufacturer who had the most engaged workers making the best buggy whips but the business folded anyway.

Let’s talk a bit about when having an engaged work force is likely to be more versus less important. People who work in assembly line jobs that are going to stay that way have constraints on how engaged they can be. People who work in jobs with great autonomy and flexibility have fewer such constraints so it is very important in such environments for the conditions for engagement to exist. Now everything is relative. Even in assembly line jobs in companies that manage to create a safe environment for their employees, there are likely to be more suggestions for improvements in the production process, in quality controls, and so forth—and they will also likely have less absenteeism, turnover, and accidents.

So, while the absolute level of engagement for assembly line workers may be lower than one finds in pharmaceutical research labs, those assembly line companies that do better than others vis-á-vis engagement conditions can expect to be superior performers. As you have heard, everything is relative. And those who have the better relatives are better off!

How long will it take to improve engagement in my organization?It depends on the trust levels that already exist within the organization. But be forewarned, it requires patience to see returns from the changes that many managers must make in the work environment to create the conditions for engagement.

Often managers have dug themselves into a hole, or are working in one that someone else has created. When that’s true, it will take considerable effort and time before employees feel secure that the work environment has actually changed; and it will not change by what they get told because actual behavior is the only message that counts. Far too often, we see and hear of managers who

feel unappreciated for their efforts to create trust in the work place. These managers simply haven’t translated what they already know about relationships and trust in the non-work world to the world of work: it takes time and consistent behavior before others accept change as real and permanent. One good deed doesn’t undo months or years of contrary experience. That experience can come from other places as well;

we don’t simply forget everything that’s happened to us in our prior work lives when our manager decides it is time for change.

You could even say that most employees are cynical when they hear things are going to be different; we like to say they are appropriately cynical. Most employees have seen a hundred attempts at change go away after a few weeks so why should they be “engaged” by the latest attempt which, too, will disappear. This is why change must be pursued rigorously and vigorously through behavior over long periods of time with astonishing levels of patience if it is to have the desired effects—and this may be especially true when it comes to creating trust.10

It takes time and consistent behavior before others accept change as real and permanent.


Aren’t some people just more likely to be engaged than others?Yes, it’s true that some people are more likely to respond positively in terms of engagement to the kind of conditions we’re talking about than others. However, without the right kind of environment, even employees predisposed to engagement can’t flourish.

People who have a basically positive outlook on life are more likely to be engaged when conditions encourage it; people who think the world is the way it is and it will never get any better are less likely to be highly engaged. In technical psychological terms, we compare people who are high on positive affectivity with those who are high on negative affectivity. There is consistent academic research to show differences in how these people feel at work and how involved they get in their work.11 The chances of taking a person high on negative affectivity and making them high on positive affectivity are small but not nil. If you create the right conditions—promote fairness and trust; design jobs to make them more challenging and meaningful, and provide the resources needed to perform effectively—then both kinds of people will be more engaged than they would otherwise have been.

Can data from my employees tell me something about productivity in my organization?Absolutely. Not only that, employees can tell you whether you have the right conditions for engagement! It is now perfectly clear that collecting the right kinds of data from employees at work can tell you lots of important things about how your organization is performing—in terms of productivity, customer satisfaction and loyalty, turnover, reputation in the business community and so forth.

Data gathered from employees is important to your business. For some managers, that means they must dispel the old myth that employee opinion surveys are kind of nice to have—everyone has them so we should have them too—but they are not particularly useful for understanding important organizational outcomes. Forget that. Survey results do matter.

Starting in the early 1980s evidence began to appear that has grown dramatically over the years with the following conclusion: employees are excellent and valid diagnosticians of the conditions at work and the behaviors at work that make for effective unit and organizational

performance. First, there was the work on service climate in organizations which showed that employee reports on the service climate in which they worked correlated significantly with customer satisfaction and loyalty. Then there was the work on organizational citizenship behavior which showed that units characterized by high levels of OCB were also more productive units. And more recently, there is research that shows employee reports on their work conditions—the kinds of conditions we think create engagement—are significantly related to unit productivity, turnover, and customer satisfaction.12

What we have learned is that by asking employees the right questions we get valid information. And that is where we began this note: assessing engagement is not the same as assessing satisfaction. Employee surveys must be as carefully designed as the computers you use to process data; they must be designed to do the job you want them to do. You do not buy any old computer or any old software—you have to use computer technology and software specifically designed for your purposes. The same holds true for the surveys you administer—make sure your employee surveys are designed to give you the information you need to know. If you want to know how engaged your work force is and if you want an engaged work force, you will need the right kind of employee survey data to see how you are presently doing and what you need to change to make improvements. Engage your work force in meaningful surveys, and you, too, can have an engaged work force.

Information from employees on their work conditions—the kinds of conditions we think create engagement—are significantly related to unit productivity, turnover, and customer satisfaction.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 For an early excellent statement on employee engagement see the paper by Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33, 692-724.

2 See Macey, W. H., & Schneider, B. (In Press). Employee experiences and customer satisfaction: Toward a framework for survey design with a focus on service climate. In A. I. Kraut (Ed.), Getting action from organizational surveys. New York: Wiley.

3 This can sound like we think employee job satisfaction is unimportant and that would be unfortunate. Job satisfaction is correlated with lots of important organizational outcomes like employee absenteeism and turnover, for example. We think it is good to have a satisfied work force and to have an engaged work force; the two can exist simultaneously in the best of circumstances and they will not be independent of each other because feeling engaged and being behaviorally engaged can be very satisfying.

4 Organizational commitment (sometimes also called Organizational Identification) has profited from two long-term streams of research. For excellent introductions to this research see: (1) Mowday, R. T., Porter, L. W., & Steers, R. M. (1982). Employee-organization linkages: The psychology of commitment, absenteeism, and turnover. New York: Academic Press; and (2) Meyer, J. P., & Allen, N. J. (1997). Commitment in the workplace: Theory, research and application. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

5 Job involvement has a relatively long history of research beginning with early work by Lodahl and Kejner (Lodahl, T. M., & Kejner, M. (1965). The definition and measurement of job involvement. Journal of Applied Psychology, 49, 24-33). More recent work on the topic shows its continuing relevance and relationship to important outcomes, including job satisfaction and some facets of work performance; see: Cooper-Hakim, A., & Viswesvaran, C. (2005). The construct of work commitment: Testing an integrative framework. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 241-259.

6 For a comprehensive review of the history of work on OCB and its current status, including reviews of research on OCB as a correlate of organizational performance, see: Organ D. W., Podsakoff, P. M., & MacKenzie, S. B. (2006). Organizational citizenship behavior: Its nature, antecedents and consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

7 For example see the work on job design and work motivation by Hackman J, Oldham G. (1980). Work Design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

8 There has been considerable interest recently in trust at work. For two examples, see Ambrose, M. L. & Schminke, M. (2003). Organization structure as a moderator of the relationship between procedural justice, interactional justice, perceived organizational support, and supervisory trust. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 295-305, and Dirks, K. T., & Ferrin, D. L. (2002). Trust in leadership: Meta-analytic findings and implications for research and practice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 622-628.


9 Douglas McGregor in his early and important statement on a new vantage point for managerial behavior stressed the importance of fairness as the basis for supervisor-subordinate relationships (see McGregor, D. M. (1960). The human side of enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill). For a comprehensive review of the current status of justice research and practice see: Greenberg, J., & Colquitt, J. A. (Eds.) (2005). Handbook of organizational justice. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

10 On psychological issues in organizational change see Burke, W. W. (2002). Organizational Change: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

11 On positive and negative affectivity and their importance at work see Brief, A. P., Butcher, A. H., & Roberson, L. (1995). Cookies, disposition, and job attitudes: The effects of positive mood-inducing events and negative affectivity on job satisfaction in a field experiment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 62, 55-62.

12 For research revealing how important employee reports can be for these issues, see the following for service climate (Schneider, B., & White, S. S. (2004). Service quality: Research perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.), the following for OCB (Organ, Podsakoff, & MacKenzie, op cit), and the following for the employee reports on work conditions related to engagement and unit performance (Harter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L., & Keyes, C. L. M. (2003). Well-being in the workplace and its relationship to business outcomes: A review of the Gallup studies. In C. L. Keyes & J. Haidt (Eds.), Flourishing: The positive person and the good life (pp. 205-224). Washington, DC: A. P. A.

Valtera’s Employee Engagement Surveys

Valtera uses a strategic approach to measure engagement. Following themodel described in this paper, our comprehensive surveys include measuresof engagement conditions, engagement attitudes, and engagement behaviors. Though all engagement behaviors are desirable, Valtera surveys are designed to pinpoint the specific engagement behaviors that are aligned with your organization’s strategic goals. This approach to the design of engagement surveys can make the most difference in helping your firm gain competitive advantage.

To learn more about ways to increase engagement levels in your organization, please contact us at 1-847-640-8820 or via email at [email protected].

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