Authors
Steven WintonSarah N. Palmer
Topics
Psychological Well-being and Life SatisfactionEarly Childhood Education and DevelopmentYouth Development and Social Supportmployee opinion surveys, commonly branded as measuring employee engagement (EE), are a key tool for HR strategic efforts. From an HR perspective, it is essential that EE survey data be useful, actionable and accurate. Unfortunately, self-reports are notoriously flawed. Schwarz (1999) contended that self-reports are often as much about the questions as the answers. For HR practitioners implementing EE surveys, this means that careful attention must be given to questionnaire design issues such as item order, question wording and response options. Given the dynamic, fluctuating nature of EE (Bledow et al., 2011; Reis et al., 2016) , we contend that one element of employee opinion surveys is often overlookeda clear and explicit understanding of time.The intention of HR efforts to measure, track and act on EE is contingent on it being time-bound. There is a clear difference between being an engaged employee and being engaged in the moment, the past week or the past month. This distinction is all the more important considering that many organizations are beginning to supplement their annual or biennial survey with smaller, more frequent pulse surveys as organizations pursue more timely, actionable data (Van Rooy et al., 2011; Welbourne, 2016) . Such surveys cannot, and should not, rely on self-reported measures that purportedly measure a stable characteristic. If the survey data are not accurately capturing the attitudes and behaviors of employees, then recommendations or action plans could be addressing the wrong issues. For HR leadershipespecially as organizations move to more frequent pulse surveysit is critical to understand how steps can be taken to improve the accuracy of measurement in current survey efforts.
About
PublishedApr 13, 2018
TypeArticle
Citations4
References5