The commitment assessment is a process by which organizations measure the affective bonds that its employees have with their workplace. This measurement is important, because employee commitment can mean the difference between success and failure, between standing out or going unnoticed among the competition and, even, employee commitment has a direct impact on customer satisfaction.
A committed employee will be aligned with the objectives of the company and will fight to achieve them, becoming emotionally involved with the interests of the company. Consequently, the workers are more productive and better perform their duties. And they will not do it just for the money, but because their work matters to them, because they want to offer the best.
Aware of this fact, companies are beginning to pay attention to this aspect, since, according to a study by Brandon Hall , 70% of organizations rated employee engagement as the highest importance and its assessment as important or extremely important.
Why Companies Need to Assess Employee Engagement
What cannot be measured cannot be improved. If having employee commitment is important, knowing how to measure it properly is even more so. A good assessment of commitment allows organizations to:
- Detect the needs of employees in time and solve them before they become a major problem.
- Get feedback about the organization and the employee experience.
- Detect strengths and areas for improvement, to promote the first and correct the last, and lead the organization in the correct direction.
- Obtain reliable data to support decision making.
Now, are companies evaluating the commitment of their teams in the right way? If your answer to a good practice is to do an annual survey, then we must warn you that you may not be doing it right.
The annual employee engagement survey is an insufficient resource, so it is normal to don’t obtain the expected results and that everything ends up becoming a useless process.
Those organizations that are not achieving results should ask themselves:
- Are we evaluating employee engagement regularly enough?
- Do we really measure what we need to assess?
- Are we using the correct indicators?
- Is the data reliable?
Advantages of having employees committed to the organization
- Greater job satisfaction. An employee committed to his/her job finds satisfaction in what he/she does. When employees are satisfied, they work more and better, increasing their performance and productivity, which translates into benefits for the company and customers.
- Talent loyalty. Engaged employees have a strong bond with the organization they belong to, so they will be more reluctant to change their jobs. This benefits companies, because it reduces the turnover rate saving time and money costs.
- Increase the feeling of belonging. Engaged employees feel part of the corporate culture and will help spread it. There is no better brand ambassador than an employee who is committed to the cause.
- Higher profitability. Being committed to your work makes you get more involved, take on greater responsibilities and offer a higher quality service. This will be reflected in happier customers, who will not hesitate to return and recommend the company to family and friends.
- Fewer accidents. According to this study by Gallup , work commitment reduces health problems derived from the job by up to 70%, resulting in less absenteeism.
Next, we will explain you how to make the employee engagement assessment becomes from a futile process to effective management.
How to do an effective employee engagement assessment
1. Increase the frequency of assess
As we say, one of the main problems is the frequency of commitment assessment. With a single annual survey once a year, what you get are long and tedious surveys, which many employees are reluctant to complete and which also does not provide reliable data because the responses will be influenced by recent events, regardless of the entire year.
By the other hand, increasing the frequency of sending surveys will reduce their length, making it more likely that employees will answer them, also increasing the quality of the feedback and data obtained.
But above all, a constant frequency of commitment assessment allows us to track history and see the fluctuations resulting from our decisions, thus enabling agile management capable of solving problems almost immediately.
How to increase the frequency of asses without affecting the workflow? With digital tools that automate the process, such as Team Insights.
Our platform allows you to send employee engagement surveys to the entire workforce automatically in the period you want to schedule. These surveys are delivered directly to the email inbox, every 15 days, every month, quarterly … you decide.
People Analytics technology takes care of the statistical part and data analysis, showing you in a very visual way everything you need to know to make the best decisions.
With Team Insights, you can assess a team’s engagement in minutes.
2. Use the right indicators
One of the most common mistakes companies make is asking for satisfaction rather than commitment.
Although they tend to go hand in hand, satisfaction and commitment are not the same and therefore, the same indicators should not be used to evaluate it.
The satisfaction is a dimension very susceptible to rapid variations, it’s unstable and it is influenced by extrinsic factors. The commitment, on the other hand, is a stable and sustained dimension over time that, once achieved, will be little influenced by the external environment.
Team Insights is designed to assess both dimensions separately, so you will always make sure to measure what you really want to asses.
In addition, the Team Insights model for measuring commitment was designed after extensive research, analyzing the best studies in the market and isolating the key variables that affect engagement.
The result: reliable, valid and efficient data.
3. Let your teams express themselves freely
When making assessments, the fear of employees being judged generates a bias response that adversely affects the quality of the information obtained.
It is important that employees can respond to the engagement surveys with complete freedom, otherwise the decisions that we could make would not be based on the reality of the organization and, therefore, be useless.
That’s why Team Insights commitment surveys have the option of being totally anonymous , so your teams can speak their minds.
Many organizations are reluctant to honest and transparent feedback from their employees, but how can you improve engagement without knowing the state your teams? Without data, it is practically impossible.
4. Motivate your team
What if is the employee participation failing? Do your employees know that you care about them?
Instilling the value of workers’ opinions should be part of the organization’s culture.
When employees are aware that their opinions are heard and taken seriously, they will be more motivated to respond to engagement surveys, increasing participation of the assessment.
5. Make it count
Ultimately, these evaluations will be a totally useless process if not used. Having the information is not enough. Action is needed. And employees should notice that action is taken.
The ultimate purpose of employee engagement assessment is not to obtain feedback on the status of the teams, the main objective is to make timely decisions that improve well-being and serve to drive that engagement that makes employees perform better and be more productive.
If you want to improve your employee engagement assessment process and get better results, try Team Insights for free.
