The concept of  'employee engagement' is an update on the more familiar idea of 'job satisfaction'.  If you attempt to measure the level of employee engagement in an organization then you attempt to measure the extent to which the employees have taken on-board the vision and values that the organization promotes as well as general levels of satisfaction with their role in the organization.

There is an obvious quantifiable benefit to an organization in terms of reduced recruitment and retention costs if they have a lower level of staff turnover than their competitors. There are also harder to quantify benefits of maintaining high levels of employee engagement. For example several studies have shown that customers prefer to deal with an organization where the 'front-line' employees that they deal with are interested and enthusiastic about the organization, its goals, services and products.

Managing employee engagement is a very complex subject and will be different for every organization. It is dependent on the organizational culture and how the organization is perceived by the employees. However the starting point in trying to influence employee engagement is to get a current measure of the levels of employee engagement.

There are many valid ways of measuring employee engagement. A good strategy is to conduct an annual survey of all your employees and then back that up with a number of micro surveys through the year which only look at smaller group of employees. The aim here is to avoid survey fatigue by asking everyone to complete too many forms. Employees will only give honest answers if they are confident that the surveys are confidential.