Measuring employee engagement a constant endeavour for companies

MUMBAI: Measuring employee engagement is no longer a once-a-year exercise. Given the frequency of swings in employee mood, organizations are looking beyond archaic annual surveys to adopt new technological tools and short, smart surveys.

The objective behind this shift is to capture real-time employee engagement experience and make improvements. On any given day, an employee may be happy about his/her salary, but may not be as content with the work environment. The engagement level may be high with respect to camaraderie, but the food in the cafeteria may not be up to the mark.

Although an annual survey has its own merit, it comes with a lag indicator. Technology is being increasingly used to get a sense of employee engagement on a daily basis. Celpax is one such organization which helps measure the mood at the workplace through a simple device which is hung at the exit door with a red and a green button. Employees can press either of the buttons to convey the total office mood. Celpax is a Stockholm-based firm which also has customers from various regions in India like Bengaluru and Chennai, and different sectors, but mostly from IT.

Rebecca Lundin , co-owner, Celpax, said, "Companies verify if their improvement initiatives have an impact on their baseline. For instance, '90% pressed 'green' as we tested leaving fresh fruit in the kitchen yesterday', or they see the impact of an important announcement. One Swedish company got 100% 'red' when a popular manager announced departure, another company plummeted to 40% 'green' the day of their staff party (which was mandatory outside of office hours). It's like Google Analytics. It doesn't tell you what the problem is with your website, but if you try fixing something, you see if it has an impact or not on the employee morale."

A Celpax console was deployed by Prowareness, a $20-million Dutch IT services and agile consulting company with presence in Netherlands, Germany, the US and a local facility in Bengaluru. "We kept the Celpax console at the reception, next to our attendance register, and while leaving people would press the green or red button depending upon how their day went. This gave us an unmatched perspective on their 'day-to-day' mood and since it's a close-knit community, we also had a context behind the person's experience," said Abhishek Johri, agile coach, Prowareness.

The company gathers feedback from people every two weeks and acts upon them at best within 10 working days. "We found the ratings going down just a day before sprint demo. We realized it was due to last minute pressure before releasing the product. We immediately went back and brought improvement in our sprint planning and continuous integration, which resulted in an evenly distributed work throughout the sprint. The beauty was that we were able to at upon it even before any employee could bring it up as a concern," said Johri.

HCL Technologies, on the other hand, is studying how the total employee experience can be improved, rather than just measuring engagement. Prithvi Shergill, CHRO at HCL Technologies , said, "The focus is shifting from engagement to talk about experience. Engagement is a point-in-time measure, so measuring them one day in a year is clearly inadequate. You need a more real-time measure."

The company has a patented tool called 'Smart Survey' to collate effective feedback from employees and work towards the ongoing development and growth of individuals and the organization. Since its roll-out in 2013, smart survey has reduced survey fatigue by almost 80%. A mechanism built in Smart Survey helps the system intelligently trigger a survey to an employee when he/she is undergoing an event change at work. This allows feedback to remain relevant.

The company said 60% of HCL-ites provided useful feedback vis-a-vis their role expectations from their stakeholders — whether manager or team or peer, while 50% of HCL-ites got guidance on how they could become better professionals leveraging their passion and strengths.

source: techgig