Employee Engagement is widely acknowledge as being more than a passing fad, and something that has real impact on the performance of your organisation, and the engagement survey is now a regular fixture in many organisations.

But what is engagement? There is no definitive definition, but according to the CIPD engagement “involves feeling positive about your job, as well as being prepared to go the extra mile to make sure you do your job to the best of your ability.”

The Institute of Employment Studies, meanwhile, describes it as “a positive attitude held by the employee towards the organisation and its values. An engaged employee is aware of business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organisation.”

So there is an emotional or motivational element to it, which goes beyond feeling good about work, but is aligned to the goals of the organisation. It also suggests that there is a related, behavioural component, but I would suggest that these are a product of engagement rather than a component of it.

Whether you agree with this or not, engagement is clearly a multidimensional experience. The problem is engagement surveys tend to be pretty one-dimensional. They are all about the employee and their opinion. These surveys ask things like “does your organisation make you feel…..?” or “Do you intend to be here in x years time”.

The issue that we have with these surveys isn’t a technical one, however: They just don’t tell you that much, and they certainly don’t give you a lot to work with (and not doing anything with your data can be a source of disengagement in itself). We know that because we’ve been asked to come in and dig deeper to make sense of engagement scores.

Let’s see if we can be a bit more precise about engagement.

Feeling good about work is important, but in itself not that useful without knowing what an employee really cares about. They could be satisfied because they have very low expectations! That’s why we ask employees what they feel is important and whether they get enough of these things at work.

But that’s not enough either. We need to know if employees care about the same things as their employer (and vice versa).

What if you and the organisation believe in the same things, but these are some how not being put into practice. Does your employer deliver on its values? Surely that will affect ‘engagement’?

While we are at it, what if employees and management agree have totally different ideas on what the employees actually experience? For example, in one businesses, the most important thing to employees was that they worked with their friends. Managers didn’t see it, and were about to embark on change that would split social groups and take away just about the only source of employee satisfaction!

Does your employee engagement survey tell you these things?

Many survey providers claim to have figure out the smallest number of questions that best predict business performance, but they kind of assume that all businesses are alike and engagement can be reduced to a “best” set of questions.

Others simply have no guiding framework. This means that most employee engagement surveys fail to measure a number of potentially important motivators that can have real impact on your business and provide satisfaction to employees. For example:

* Fun and enjoyment is important to creativity and productivity.
* Consideration for others is the bedrock of customer service.
* The freedom to challenge and suggest new ideas is the source of innovation.

We can be confident that our employee survey, theApter Work Impact System (AWIS) is motivationally comprehensive, because it is based on a theory of motivation that has been developed over 30 years of research and application across many domains of life including business, sport, education, clinical psychology and counselling, and health.

By measuring how employees feel, in relation to what they care about, in the context of the organisation’s goals, across the eight values of Reversal Theory, the AWIS provides a powerful insight into the motivational landscape of your organisation.

That inevitably creates a great deal of output, but the AWIS does not simply spit out a report for you to make sense of. At Apter International we have many years of Organisational Development experience and we use that to highlight what’s really important for your business and, importantly, what you can do about it.

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Rob Robson is Head of Employee Profiling and Research at Apter International.