A recent review of research on employee engagement published in Personnel Psychology confirmed findings that engagement is positively related to performance. Results showed that engagement had a strong positive effect on task performance (carrying out required duties) and contextual performance (behaviour that positively impacts social aspects of an organisation). The effect of engagement on performance was much stronger than for job attitudes, such as job satisfaction or organisational commitment. Therefore if you are carrying out an employee survey it would be well worth measuring employee engagement.
What do once you have your engagement survey results? If employee engagement and performance are lower than desired and you want to carry out an intervention you could increase some of the following, which were all found to lead to higher engagement:
· Employees ability to control their own work.
· Work tasks that are varied, complex and meaningful to employees.
· Giving employees feedback on their performance.
· Social support to employees.
· Transformational leadership behaviours: leaders having clear expectations, recognising good performance, being fair and having positive attitudes.
To monitor increases in employee engagement, best practise would be to measure employee engagement again after an intervention.
You can run employee surveys using our Climate Check tool.
- Findings from:
Christian, Garza and Slaughter (2011). Work Engagement : A Quantitative review and test of its relations with task and contextual performance. Personnel Psychology.