Employee Engagement, Commitment and Satisfaction

"Companies with high levels of employee engagement earn returns that are more than double those of the overall market" As HR managers consider the various options open to them for conducting their employee surveys, here at Insightlink we've been asked questions relating to the role of "employee engagement" in our surveys. In particular, we've been asked to compare our approach with that of alternatives such as the Hewitt Engagement Model and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. Insightlink's standard 4Cs employee survey contains many of the same measures that organizations use to assess employee engagement, such as "You are willing to work above and beyond the call of duty for your organization," "Your work gives you a feeling of personal accomplishment" and "You feel proud to work at this organization."

However, our experience analyzing numerous employee studies is that employee engagement alone is not a sufficient barometer with which to gauge organizational performance, particularly in terms of influencing more concrete measures such as predicting turnover. In fact, our experience with employee engagement as a survey measure is very similar to the conclusions of the article "Work Engagement in Japan: Validation of the Japanese Version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale" that (a) all engagement items load on a single factor (rather than the multiple factors included in the Work Engagement Scale), which means that the scale is evaluating just one construct, and (b) that work engagement is positively related to job satisfaction. In other words, we place much more emphasis on the measure of employee satisfaction (using the 5 point scale "Extremely satisfied," "Very satisfied," "Somewhat satisfied," "Not very satisfied" and "Not at all satisfied") as the key predictor of organizational well-being. Our approach has been validated by a recent article from Wharton University of Pennsylvania called "Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles? Employee Satisfaction and Equity Prices."

To obtain a copy of the full article, contact us at info@insightlink.com For this study, they examined the stock returns of companies with high employee satisfaction and compared them to various benchmarks, including the broader market, peer firms in the same industry, and companies with similar characteristics. They concluded from this evaluation that companies with high levels of employee satisfaction earn returns that are more than double those of the overall market. Our own model of employee satisfaction uses a range of factors to help explain an organization's level of employee satisfaction, which we summarize as the "4Cs": Culture, Commitment (which includes engagement), Communications and Compensation. These findings are then used to highlight both the main strengths of the organization and its primary opportunities for improvement. In all Insightlink 4Cs surveys, we also create what we call the "Loyalty and Engagement Matrix," which is a four-quadrant calculation that combines the level of employee satisfaction with anticipated tenure (a measures that has been proven to be an accurate predictor of eventual behavior) to create the following segments:


Committed Loyalists: Extremely/very satisfied with their jobs and plan to stay 2 or more years
Satisfied Opportunists: Extremely/very satisfied with their jobs and plan to stay less than 2 years
Dissatisfied Compromisers: Somewhat/not very/not at all satisfied with their jobs and plan to stay 2 or more years
Change Seekers: Somewhat/not very/not at all satisfied with their jobs and plan to stay less than 2 years

In most cases, we've found that the sum of Change Seekers and Satisfied Opportunists is usually pretty close to the organization's actual level of employee turnover. In response to a question about the engagement level of Millenial employees (specifically, "of course I think about leaving all the time -- I'm young and I have a long career ahead of me, but that doesn't mean I'm not engaged"), we would place more emphasis on their likelihood of leaving, since that can easily translate into turnover regardless of their level of engagement.

On a related note, we find the prospects of advancement within an organization can be just as important as current engagement in terms of preventing turnover, although many companies do not pay enough sufficient attention to the importance of career advancement/enhancement in their HR management. Our main focus of analysis, however, is on the Dissatisfied Compromisers. Since they are not satisfied with their jobs but plan to stay, they can have a very detrimental impact not only on individual productivity but also overall morale. We focus our analysis on determining what changes the organization needs to make to shift them into becoming Committed Loyalists. The good news is that we find that, when organizations commit to creating Action Plans based on the survey results, they can see improvements in overall satisfaction, with similar declines in the other segments. On average, we measure an increase in 7 percentage points between studies in top two box overall satisfaction.

To learn more about how Insightlink approaches the issues of employee engagement, commitment and satisfaction or For a guided Webinar walking you through Insightlink's 4Cs survey process, contact us at info@insightlink.com or call 866-802-8095 x705.

Insightlink offers a variety of professional services that can help organizations both improve employee engagement and evaluate their reasons for leaving. Our services include: Insightlink's 4Cs Employee Engagement Survey - a comprehensive diagnostic tool to determine how your employees feel on all 4Cs of employee satisfaction: Communications, Culture, Commitment and Compensation.


Insightlink's Exit Survey System - a powerful online exit survey management tool that provides survey results in real time and the ability to create aggregate summaries as needed.