Enhance Engagement, Reduce Absence

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As we all know by now, employee absenteeism can slowly eat away at an organization’s effectiveness and team performance. Whether it’s a pattern of frequent short-term absences or infrequent but longer ones, absenteeism is a big challenge for how well a company functions. It’s closely linked to an individual’s overall well-being.

 

Exploring Employee Absence and Its Relationship with Engagement

So, let’s dive into the connection between absenteeism and engagement and see how the HR department, armed with data, can tackle absenteeism trends within their organization. Absenteeism isn’t about pointing fingers or labeling people as lazy. It’s more about the work environment and what’s happening around it. And one of the first steps is to collect the right data to understand and pinpoint areas in the workplace that might cause unwanted absenteeism patterns and then take appropriate actions to overall improvement.

 

All of this is for the benefit of the company, the organization, the team, and, of course, the individual employee. That’s turning insights into real impact.

 

The Two Dimensions of Absence from Work

Absent employees are (super logically, we know) unable to fulfill the scope of their work role – either as an individual or as a team member of the organization. It’s no surprise that one unfortunate outcome of absenteeism is that the workload and departmental pressure often shift to other members of the organization.

Our main focus here isn’t to dwell on the well-covered negative consequences of absenteeism, as these have already been thoroughly discussed in HR research. Instead, our primary goal is to understand how absenteeism works in practical terms, specifically, identifying what drives this phenomenon. Getting a practical grasp of this is the crucial first step toward taking effective action.

Absenteeism related to frequency and duration

When it comes to employee absenteeism in general, there is already a clear distinction between frequency and duration.

 

High Frequency Signals Low Engagement and Motivation

Frequency refers to how often an employee calls in sick, regardless of how long they are absent. High frequency often indicates voluntary absence, which can be attributed to factors such as a lack of motivation or engagement, or as a psychological response to the work environment. In these cases, employees decide not to show up for work.

Voluntary absence is also linked to one of the main hypotheses in research known as the ‘withdrawal hypothesis’. This hypothesis suggests that employees actively seek to distance themselves (temporarily) from unpleasant work situations or conditions. These conditions may include a lack of autonomy, emotionally demanding situations, difficult relationships with immediate supervisors, or tasks that lack intrinsic interest. While there may be no physical barrier preventing employees from going to work, the presence of psychological factors such as low motivation, low engagement, or high burnout compels them to take protective actions, like staying home to ‘take a short break from high external demands. In such cases, absenteeism patterns typically exhibit higher frequency but shorter durations.

 

Duration is linked to health-related factors

Conversely, duration refers to the length of absenteeism and is often linked to health-related factors, such as actual sickness, like the flu or something more serious. This type of absence is typically labeled as involuntary. In cases of involuntary absence, your actual illness has made the decision for you – no matter how much you’d love to come in, how much you love your job and your co-workers, there’s simply no chance that you can make it out of bed!

And it happens to all of us – no one is immune to the flu, a bad meal, or anything in between. This pattern should result in medium-length durations and low frequency in terms of absence. When you’re out with the flu, you’re usually out for about a week, maybe two, once or twice a year.

 

What about when the absence duration becomes high?

But when absence duration shifts to high, we are looking into the second of the two main hypotheses; the stress-reaction hypothesis. The stress-reaction hypothesis relates to situations where employees have been exposed to numerous and frequent stressors over an extended period, leading to a devastating outcome – extended sick leave, much longer than what the withdrawal theory of absenteeism suggests. We might be talking about absences lasting for months…

So, in short, if your organization’s typical absenteeism pattern shows high frequency and low duration, it could be a result of an unfavorable working environment that needs to be addressed to prevent unnecessary sick leaves.

Without any action or initiatives, you may run the risk of absenteeism patterns shifting towards the stress-reaction scenario, resulting in much longer absences from your valued employees. The consequences for both the team and the organization in such a scenario need not be overstated. However, we would like to focus on the positive side of things, and yes, it’s all about work engagement!

So, why is measuring Engagement a good place to start?

We’ve previously discussed the various benefits of highly engaged employees in terms of their ‘output’ – they tend to be more productive, more inclined to collaborate, and more committed to the organization’s overarching goals and strategies.

However, it’s worth noting that engaged employees also exhibit higher overall motivation for work and report better overall health conditions. Studies have consistently found that engaged employees are significantly more present at work, with engagement showing a strong correlation with reduced absenteeism rates.

  • Engaged employees may choose to be absent less frequently because they tend to approach their tasks in a self-determined manner, even in challenging work environments.
  • Engaged employees report fewer psychosomatic complaints, such as headaches or chest pain, as well as fewer cardiovascular issues and less burnout-related fatigue.
  • Engaged individuals rate both their overall health status and their ability to work more positively, and they are perceived as mentally healthier compared to their less engaged counterparts.

 

This may help explain why engaged employees don’t view work as exhausting and stressful, but rather as a positive challenge, making them less susceptible to stress-related health problems.

Conversely, less engaged employees appear to be less resilient in demanding work situations, leading them to withdraw more frequently and take more regular sick leave.

 

Predict and prevent absenteeism using Woba

Woba’s vision is to create a better world to work in by revolutionizing your HR landscape. We help HR departments and leaders worldwide in measuring, predicting, and taking action on the risk of talent loss and absenteeism.

Our passion lies in empowering you within HR to become the central driver of business impact. Using Woba, you can transform employee surveys into proactive action plans, measure the ROI of your initiatives, and align them with your most crucial HR KPIs.

Schedule a meeting with me to explore how Woba can help you prevent and predict absenteeism.

 

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Employee Engagement Surveys
Transform the Employee Engagement Survey into actionable insights

Employee engagement surveys are a critical HR tool, designed to unlock your organization’s potential. They gauge employee well-being, drive talent retention, boost productivity, and support continuous HR improvement.

Much like conducting scientific research, the journey of knowledge and business intelligence within the realm of human resources starts with simple questions. These questions can vary widely. They’re born from curiosity, assumptions, and a desire to understand the intricacies of your organization’s people. The key is to focus on what’s essential, practical, and relevant to your unique organization.

 

In this article, the specific type of question you aim to answer with robust evidence is not the primary focus. Instead, the emphasis lies on the approach and methods you employ to design and collect data for your employee engagement survey in the most effective manner possible.

 

From gut feelings to a data-driven approach in Employee Engagement Surveys

We will show you how to shift from relying on your gut feelings to using a more solid, scientific, and data-driven approach in your employee engagement surveys. This change will help you improve your HR-business intelligence, make decisions and recommendations based on real evidence, and implement effective programs and initiatives where they matter most – for both your people and the organization as a whole.

 

The success of your organization depends on your role as an HR architect, and we’re here to support you. So, get ready to learn more about creating and conducting a quantitative staff engagement survey.

 

What is an Employee Engagement Survey?

An employee engagement survey serves as a valuable tool for gauging the sentiments of your workforce concerning their overall work-life experience. These surveys, usually in the form of questionnaires, are tailored to capture employees’ thoughts, feedback, and perceptions related to their work environment and their overall experiences within the organization.

In HR, you’re tasked with answering essential questions, such as:

  • How engaged are our employees?
  • Are they more engaged than last year?
  • Does the level of engagement vary across employee segments?
  • What’s our turnover rate, and how can we reduce it?
  • To what extent do they feel included in the workplace, and how can we empower this sense of inclusion?
  • How do they perceive their current job resources?
  • Do we know enough about employees’ viewpoints when designing programs and initiatives to enhance their psychological safety?

 

The insights derived from these surveys are a treasure trove for HR professionals. They provide a deeper understanding of the workforce’s engagement levels and well-being, ultimately leading to a more motivated and productive team. These surveys play a vital role in ensuring that the organization can adapt to change and sustain a people-centric approach, where employee satisfaction and commitment are at the forefront of HR strategies.

To fully comprehend the importance of employee engagement in HR, we suggest you read our article Employee Engagement – Definition, Relevance & Strategy.

 

Designing your Employee Engagement Survey questions: Close-ended questions, open-ended questions or a mix of the two?

Creating a good employee engagement survey requires thorough preparation, and it’s always crucial to have a clear problem statement. When the survey is based on interviews or questionnaires, a well-defined problem statement serves as the foundation for subsequently formulating clear questions. But how do you formulate effective questions for a survey?

When conducting employee engagement surveys, one of the many decisions you have to make is the inclusion of different types of questions. In quantitative research designs, we typically have the option to design our research around:

  • Close-ended questions: offer respondents a limited set of predefined answer options, making them a common choice for surveys aiming to gather quantitative data.
  • Multiple choice questions: provide respondents with answer choices, such as age groups or preferences, where they select the most appropriate option.
  • Simple binary (e.g yes, no) questions: Can help ascertain binary responses, such as whether an individual received adequate training.
  • Ordinal scaled (e.g. likert scaled) questions and open-ended questions: gauge satisfaction levels on a scale, usually ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

 

Such structured questions are valuable in obtaining clear, structured data, facilitating analysis and comparison, and are often employed to assess demographics, preferences, attitudes, and behaviors.

 

Open-Ended Questions vs. Closed-Ended Questions in an Employee Engagement Survey

Open-ended questions in an employee engagement survey differ from their closed-ended counterparts as they invite respondents to provide detailed, free-text responses. These questions encourage respondents to share their thoughts, feelings, and suggestions in their own words.

For instance, an open-ended question might ask employees to describe their biggest challenges at work or provide suggestions for improving the workplace. These responses are valuable for uncovering nuanced insights, identifying unexpected issues, and gaining a deeper understanding of the employee experience. They offer context to the quantitative data gathered from closed-ended questions and help interpret the “why” behind the numbers, making them an essential part of a comprehensive employee engagement survey.

 

You need to consider whether it’s most appropriate to use closed-ended questions or open-ended questions in employee engagement surveys for several reasons:

 

Benefits of using close-ended questions:

  • Provide structured and quantifiable data. They are ideal for measuring specific aspects of employee engagement, such as satisfaction with company policies, benefits, or job tasks. This structured format allows for easy comparison and analysis.
  • Ensure consistency in the response format, making it easier to analyze the data and identify trends over time. This is important when conducting surveys at regular intervals to track changes in employee engagement.
    Are quicker for respondents to answer, making the survey process more efficient. This can lead to higher response rates and more complete data.
  • They use Likert scales, which are commonly used in employee engagement surveys. This allows for benchmarking against industry standards and other organizations.
  • Allow for more objective data analysis, as responses are standardized and do not rely on the subjective interpretation of open-ended responses.

 

Benefits of using open-ended questions:

  • Allow employees to provide detailed, nuanced feedback. This can uncover issues or suggestions that might not be captured with closed-ended questions.
  • Employees feel heard and valued when they can express their thoughts in their own words. This can boost their engagement and satisfaction with the survey process.
  • Can reveal unexpected issues or opportunities that you may not have anticipated. They can provide insight into the “why” behind quantitative data.
  • Offer better contextual understanding than closed-ended data. They help interpret the quantitative findings and provide a richer understanding of the employee experience.

 

 

Employee Engagement Blog
Employee Engagement - Definition, Relevance & Strategy

We explore the employee engagement framework, including what employee engagement is and how to measure and improve it effectively in your company.

 

What is Employee Engagement?

An employee engagement definition, in short, refers to the emotional commitment and level of enthusiasm that employees have toward their jobs and their organization. However, this might be an oversimplification. Employee engagement is a multifaceted concept that goes beyond initial impressions.

But, much like the transformation of a simple acorn into a sprawling oak tree, the concept of employee engagement has undergone a remarkable evolution since its early days in the 1990s. It has grown to become not only an academic discipline but a pivotal operational practice in the realm of organizational human resource management.

 

As it gained widespread recognition, the concept of employee engagement, akin to the branches of an oak, has taken on a multitude of diverse forms and shapes. However, there is a significant departure from the analogy of the oak tree. Unlike the tree’s natural evolution, the concept of employee engagement isn’t meant to outgrow its origins.

With the burgeoning popularity of this field, we witness an unintended consequence—an increase in inconsistency and confusion regarding the application of employee engagement as a means to study well-being within modern organizations.

 

The very essence of employee engagement becomes obscured in the midst of this transformation, leaving us to grapple with the challenge of aligning its core principles with its expanding interpretations. However, we don’t need a multitude of complex definitions or branches when it comes to employee engagement. What we truly need is clarity. We need to ensure that an evidence-based approach, rooted in decades of well-established research, is easily accessible. Furthermore, we need to bridge the gap between the scientific realm and the practical applications of employee engagement in HR.

 

This article aims to help you better understand some challenging questions:
What is employee engagement and how can we create a simple way to measure employee engagement effectively?

 

The Employee Engagement Framework

While simple answers to these intricate questions may remain elusive, our objective is to contribute to the ongoing effort to comprehend employee engagement. We aim to do this by retracing the concept to its origins and provide a systematic overview of how it has been operationalized by different scholars and researchers over the past decades. This, in turn, should pave the way for a more concise framework for proactively, strategically, and operationally addressing employee engagement as a means to nurture happier employees, more effective teams, and enhanced organizational outcomes.

 

We will delve into some of the most validated constructs and definitions of employee engagement that the academic research field has to offer. This is in pursuit of setting a benchmark by replicating sound, evidence-based approaches and standards from the world of science.

Once we’ve clarified the definitions and constructs, we’ll shift our focus to the practical dimension. Here, we’ll inspire you to implement measurement scales that effectively capture the various facets of employee work engagement while ensuring validity and reliability.

Finally, we’ll wrap it up with insights on how to cultivate and enhance engagement within your organization, enabling you to harness the myriad benefits of high employee engagement.

 

Why is a clear(er) definition of employee engagement important?

To effectively study and understand any phenomenon, we require clear and unified approaches to grasp that specific subject. In the realm of Human Resources (HR), a precise definition becomes crucial due to variations in understanding among different consultancy branches, HR departments, and top-level executives.

The confusion often arises from whether employee engagement equates to elements like job satisfaction, commitment, or motivation. And when it comes to satisfaction, employee engagement and satisfaction are evidently not the same psychological construct, so merging them in one measure can simply be counterproductive.

But this conceptual ambiguity not only introduces imprecision, but also leads to a view of criticism, with some dismissing employee engagement as a mere rebranding or a superficial trend in HR.

 

However, employee engagement is not merely another superficial HR concept. The view has led some to argue that ‘the concept of employee engagement needs to be more clearly defined … or it needs to be abandoned’. Skeptics have long argued that the term ‘engagement’ is likely to fall out of usage at some point because it lacks substance or distinctiveness. As well as being challenged for a lack of clear definition, it is also seen to be a relabelling of existing constructs, and thus redundant.

Unfortunately, this criticism sometimes overshadows the importance of employee engagement in thriving organizations, where the neglect of it is more evident than proactive efforts to improve it.

 

Challenges with composite engagement measures

We stand with CIPD in the discussion on and well-argumented criticsm about how consultancy and management practices often creates more “old wine in new bottles”, “fads and fashions” or “been there, bottled that” – see their discussion report from January 2021.

Because a number of consultancy firms have developed (their “own one-point-of-questionable-truth”) composite measures of engagement along these lines. Gallup’s Q12 is just one example of a tool widely used by consultants and practitioners, but it doesn’t always meet the standards of academic research. Some scholars have raised concerns about its validity and consider it a composite measure lacking in scientific rigor.

When developing a reliable measure, it’s not enough to group survey items together and give them a name. Validation is key. The measure should be tested against similar and different constructs to show it behaves as expected in theory. To put it simply, merging various measures into a single score doesn’t work like magic. It results in a confusing mix of metrics, making it hard to interpret the data.

 

For instance, when an organization wants to gauge employee engagement, it might involve many aspects such as alignment with company goals, using one’s strengths, satisfaction with pay, and relationships with managers. Combining all of these into one score makes it difficult to understand what’s driving differences or improvements. This could very well be the reason why Bailey et al. (2015), in a systematic study review, chose to exclude studies relying on the Q12 due to concerns that it serves as a broad, all-encompassing measure lacking in validity.

Advocates of composite measures might argue that you can break them down, but this can lead to a loose collection of measures that may not provide clear insights. While it’s understandable that employers are interested in various aspects of employee experiences, it’s crucial for measures to be precise and focused. Often, it’s more effective to consider these aspects individually – especially if you wish to investigate the relationship between engagement and relevant independent variables in a regression analysis (which, essentially, requires the dependent variable to be measured!).

 

The need for clarity

So. Why was a clear definition and understandable conceptualization important again? Because creating a work environment where employee engagement thrives is crucial for organizations, as it leads to positive outcomes like lower turnover, reduced absenteeism, higher job satisfaction, increased efficiency, and productivity.

 

To become more data-driven and implement progressive HR initiatives, research consistently emphasizes the significance of employee engagement. It all starts with defining the core concept and how it has evolved over the years in various evidence-based interpretations explored in applied research.

And hence, we move forward to where we position ourselves, when we assist, consult, advocate and what-not our clients about employee engagement. A definition. A clear one that’s scientifically grounded.

 

Survey Fatique 1300x700
Employee Survey Fatigue - How to ensure better response rates

In recent years, our exposure to quantitative employee surveys have increased – which also applies to the organizational field of research. The rise in digital survey platforms and easier distribution methods has led to more frequent workplace survey invitations, but it’s also caused a drop in the response rate.

 

This leads to Survey Fatigue:

When respondents lose interest in your surveys because of the overwhelming frequency of survey requests or the extensive effort and questions involved in completing them.

 

This, in turn, can create unfortunate barriers to the validity and representativeness of your engagement surveys in general. As employee engagement surveys gain increasing popularity, the quest for high response rates and valuable insights presents growing challenges. Organizations seek to assess their employees’ work life, but these hurdles cannot be ignored.

In this article, we’ll unveil the concept of survey fatigue and provide strategies to combat this silent adversary of quantitative research designs.

 

What are the main risks about Survey Fatigue?

When it comes to employee engagement surveys, there are a couple of key issues related to survey fatigue that you should be aware of.

  • First, you might run into a problem of nonresponse. This means that some employees may not participate, which can affect the accuracy of your insights and your ability to make general conclusions.
  • Second, you could end up with data that’s not entirely reliable because tired participants might hurry through the survey, giving quick answers without really paying attention to the questions.

 

The factors contributing to declining response rates

There are several factors contributing to declining response rates.

Firstly, there’s a proliferation of surveys, as more and more companies and organizations use them to gather opinions. This, along with the growing number of survey service providers and an increasing interest in data-driven decision-making, is causing what we call survey fatigue.

Another important point is that people who don’t respond to surveys are often more likely to contemplate leaving their jobs and generally report lower job satisfaction and less contentment with their supervisors compared to those who do respond.

What this means is that if a company’s HR department doesn’t receive feedback from these dissatisfied individuals, the data they collect may not accurately represent the reality. It could provide a more positive but inaccurate picture of the situation.

 

Lack of communication and followed actions from surveys triggers fatigue!

A research review performed by McKinsey showed that the number one driver of survey fatigue among participants is when they believe the organization won’t take any action based on the survey results.

On the flip side, when organizations not only run employee engagement surveys but also actively share relevant information and take appropriate actions based on the feedback, it encourages more employees to take part in current and future surveys.

Clearly, the crucial takeaway here is that employee surveys should be seen as a tool for making meaningful improvements, not just a metric by itself.

 

Julian Raymond Blok - Data Scientist i Woba
Julian Raymond Blok
Data Scientist in Woba

Biography

Julian is Woba’s very own in-house data scientist. His expertise lies in applying statistical models to HR data, providing us with a profound understanding of the intricacies, patterns, and correlations within employees’ work lives. With a combination of technical skill and a passion for human behavior, Julian utilizes HR analytics to advise HR and leaders on how they can proactively work with transforming employee data insights into ROI impact.

Topics: People analytics, HR-KPI Management, People Management, Employee Engagement, Employee Experience

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