Employee engagement

Employee engagement describes how motivated and emotionally connected employees are to their work, team and organization, as distinct from simple job satisfaction, which measures contentment rather than the discretionary effort engagement is meant to capture. It is measured mainly through periodic surveys asking about topics like recognition, growth opportunity, manager relationship and alignment with the organization's mission.

Engagement is usually summarized as a percentage of favorable responses, or an index score, and reported at the company, department and manager level, since engagement varies more by immediate manager than almost any other factor survey research consistently points to. A short pulse-survey metric, employee net promoter score, is often used between full engagement surveys to track sentiment more frequently.

Low engagement is a leading indicator watched alongside attrition risk and absenteeism rate, since disengaged employees tend to leave, or disengage further, before turnover shows up in the numbers; by the time employee turnover rate rises, the underlying engagement problem is usually already old. A common pitfall is running engagement surveys without acting visibly on the results, which reliably depresses response rates and trust in the next survey cycle. Some organizations pair survey data with organizational network analysis to see how engagement relates to actual collaboration patterns.