Increasing Employee Engagement

Increasing Employee Engagement

If you search the internet for how to measure employee engagement, there are multiple sites suggesting multiple tools, including the need to define what you mean by ‘employee engagement’.

That last part is what got me thinking about how you expect mentoring [and your mentors] to increase employee engagement in your organisation, and how you will determine whether mentoring has actually influenced this. So, here’s my view of how you can position mentoring as one of your arsenal of professional development tools for increasing and improving employee engagement.

First:

Clearly define what you mean by employee engagement, otherwise how do you know what it is you want to increase or improve? Like any other objective which is attached to mentoring influencing its outcome, employee engagement needs to be clearly defined, understood and then measured.

Second:

Establish the objective to increase and/or improve employee engagement.

Third:

Develop KPIs (key performance indicators) for this objective, i.e., what will illustrate that employee engagement is happening – staff satisfaction levels, staff retention, participation in organisational initiatives.

Fourth:

What are the success metrics to measure the outcome of ‘increasing employee engagement’? This is where you get more specific, such as: staff retention rates increase by 25% over the next two years, 90% staff participation rate in the mentoring programme each year.

Completing these 4 steps stipulates a purpose and direction for your mentoring programme. Importantly, it also provides your mentors and mentees with a purpose and guideline for their mentoring conversations and what they can focus on in the mentoring meetings to achieve value for time, and contribute to achievement of the organisational objective of increasing employee engagement.

In their research on measuring the benefits of employee engagement, Kumar and Pansari (2015) developed The Employee Engagement Scorecard, a tool for employees to rate their experience with the organisation. From the responses, managers can identify the areas of employee development that require their attention, and the organisation can then allocate their resources to the specific things employees need. Here is the link to their article: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/measuring-the-benefits-of-employee-engagement/

Lastly, have a look at these 8 ‘definitions’ suggested by Jacob Shriar (2017) in his article on how to properly measure employee engagement. When you think about some of the reasons why a mentor is supporting a mentee, do they sound familiar? Any one of these topics can lend itself to a very worthwhile, beneficial mentoring conversation between the mentor and the mentee.