It’s hard to warm up to employee engagement.

It’s a tough concept to get your head around, at least from my perspective, mainly because it is so difficult to define and measure. I’m also skeptical of a lot of the surveys and studies pertaining to engagement because I’m not always sure of what they are measuring. Here is one that seems to be able to get past that issue by comparing engagement across generations and age groups.

Also, this year’s WorkTrends Report by the Kenexa Research Institute resonated with me because it actually seemed to talk about engagement and make some sense.

According to the survey, you can summarize employee engagement with these four primary principles, or drivers, that show that workers are engaged by:

• Leaders who inspire confidence in the future.
• Managers who respect and appreciate their employees.
• Exciting work that employees know how to do.
• Employers who display a genuine responsibility to employees and communities.

Kenexa has also come up with the Kenexa Employee Engagement Index, which comprises “four key components—pride, satisfaction, advocacy and retention,” according to a Kenexa press release. “Employee engagement, therefore, is not strictly happiness, excitement or the willingness to work long hours. Engaged employees align with their organization’s goals and are personally vested in the outcomes.”
 
This employee engagement index, or EEI, is “57 percent across all surveyed countries … [and the] EEI score for India, the top-ranked country, is almost twice that of Japan’s, the lowest-ranked country,” according to Kenexa. There’s also this additional bit of perspective: “In general, EEI scores for North American employees are higher than EEI scores for European workers—the Netherlands is the exception. Outside of India, other Asian and Middle Eastern countries score lower on the EEI. As economies strengthen in other low-ranking countries like Russia and China, EEI scores could increase in future surveys.”

“Organizations can make changes to align with these critical drivers,” says Jack Wiley, executive director at the Kenexa Research Institute. “Doing so makes good business sense because it not only improves employee engagement but also drives higher quality and customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and the company’s profitability. Time and time again we see that an engaged workforce delivers superior business results.”

It’s hard to dig into this survey, since you need to jump through a few online hoops to actually buy it, but many of the findings that Kenexa touts in the press release are not exactly breakthroughs. For example, “according to the WorkTrends data, if employees are confident in their senior leaders and the future of their employer, their EEI scores are four to five times higher than those of employees who lack this confidence. Confidence levels correlate with fast-growing economies—India, Mexico and Australia all have experienced recent economic growth and their employee engagement index scores are among the highest.”

It’s not a news flash that employees who are confident in their organization’s senior leadership and future are a lot more engaged, but the interesting thing to me is how much more engaged they are. If you can find a way to turn that into a greater ROI, you have something tangible. That might help take employee engagement out of the shadows as some hard-to-figure measure, and instead make it a real, honest-to-God business metric that managers can comfortably use and understand.