The best way to spend $1,000 on employee engagement? Nobody knows.

For many years now, research on employee engagement shows horrible results, like Gallup’s State of the American Workplace February 2017, reporting 70% of employees not being engaged at work. So how can the numbers be so dramatic for such a long time? Don’t companies invest in it? On the contrary! In the US alone in 2016 companies spent over 600 million dollars on measuring employee engagement. And that’s only measuring. Think of the total investment, from company parties to any other perk that aims to engage employees. It’s incredible.

So why isn’t it working?

Let’s say you have $1,000 to spend on improving engagement in your team. What are you going to do? Organize a dinner for the team? Spend it on improving the office space? Use it for a bonus? All good answers. The problem is that no matter what you choose, you won’t know if it was the right choice, since no one measures the results. Most companies conduct one employee engagement survey a year, at best. But by the time those results are in, the effects of the team dinner are mixed up with everything else that happened during the year and you will have no way to assess your $1,000 investment.

For comparison, let’s say we’re spending $1,000 on Marketing. In any company that I ever worked for there was someone – if not the whole management team – that wanted to know how much sales it brought in. Yet, everyone seems to be ok not knowing what the millions do that are invested in creating a happy and engaged workforce. It puzzles me every time I think about it.

The sooner we all start measuring the employee engagement on a much more frequent basis, the quicker we’ll all learn how we can best invest those billions of Dollars, Euros, Rupees and Wons. And on top of becoming more productive and successful, we will all create more rewarding jobs and happy people as businesses grow.

 

At 2daysmood we developed a weekly 15-second-survey that helps organization to become a great place to work in a fun, effective and measurable manner. Don’t hesitate and start a free trial for your team today!