Understanding the level of engagement of your employees has become a strategic metric when it comes to managing people and teams. It is greatly important when considering building a healthy, motivating organization and where everyone can prosper, create and grow, helping to retain and attract the talent.

Employee Engagement is not simple, but being able to measure it and see how it evolves over time helps:

Managers: Offering a real-time picture of the level of commitment of their teams helping them identify strengths and opportunities.

HR and direction: By providing them with a global vision of the commitment in the organization being able to identify at what levels and what groups of employees require your attention.

What are the dimensions of Employee Engagement?

Before continuing to explain what HF Scores are, we must make a brief introduction to the approximations or divisions of the factors that incur the "Engagement" of the employees.

A first approach is structured under the perspective that requires an employee emotionally connected with your organization:

Similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, each of these dimensions indicate different employees needs, which all play a role in determining their level of engagement with the company. 

Psychologically, this pyramid responds to how employees experience their day to day at work answering: “How the organization contributes positively to employee engagement?” in terms of more holistic aspects such as alignment, responsibility, autonomy etc. 

Through Happyforce we have combined all this knowhow and created our Indicators specifically suited to match all the dimensions that affect employees in their day to day at work. We have done this in a simple yet powerful manner to provide managers and HR departments with automatic analysis of cultural indicators to help  managers define priorities, identify opportunities for improvement, and to create a customized action plan based on the data collected.

Our indicators are metrics that are complementary to the Happiness Index. Our indicators are calculated through regular pulse questions which Happyforce quickly, reliably and easily displays and can be filtered by segments. Each Score breaks down into 3 factors and each factor into 3-4 validated items: 18 factors and around 57 items in total, all normalised onto a common 1 to 10 scale. Items are spread over time rather than delivered as one long questionnaire, and every result is reported alongside the sample size behind it.

All indicators have been created by experts in employee engagement, internal communication and people development.
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We have 7 main cultural indicators which are composed of 3 factors within (except eNPS - which is only one). These factors cover and all aspects of the Employee Engagement journey to help build a productive and healthy organization to drive measurable improvements over time. 

At a glance, the Indicators and factors are the following: 

This score measures three elements that affects intrinsic motivation in humans based on Daniel Pink's model: Autonomy (the desire to direct our own lives), Mastery (continually improve and grow within our roles), and Purpose (the mission, vision and company values).
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​What it rests on. This is Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000), one of the most replicated frameworks in motivation science: people are intrinsically motivated when three needs are met — autonomy, competence and purpose. The Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose formulation used here was popularised by Pink (2009).

This indicator is composed of the following factors:

This score measures the health of your organisation that looks at how employees experience stress, diversity and the overall work environment.  These elements are crucial for evaluating organizational, individual and team well being.  
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​What it rests on. The framework is the Job Demands-Resources model (Demerouti et al., 2001; Bakker & Demerouti, 2007): strain results from the balance between demands (stress load) and resources (tools, information, support, fair treatment). Diversity & Equality captures the climate for inclusion (Nishii, 2013), which acts as one more resource, because exclusion is a chronic demand.

This indicator is composed of the following factors:

This score measures how well your teams and employees understand your brand, culture, values and goals, as well as their role in getting there. 
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​What it rests on. The values items operationalise person-organization fit (Kristof, 1996), a consistent predictor of satisfaction, commitment and retention. Roles & Objectives rests on two classics: goal-setting theory (Locke & Latham) and the role clarity literature, which treats role ambiguity as a chronic stressor (Rizzo, House & Lirtzman, 1970).

This indicator is composed of the following factors:

The relationship score measures the relationships that exists between managers, employees and co workers alike, and how they affects overall satisfaction.
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​What it rests on. This is the most robust finding in the engagement literature: Gallup's meta-analyses across thousands of business units (Harter, Schmidt & Hayes, 2002) place manager-dependent items among the strongest correlates of business outcomes. The Trust factor operationalises trust in leadership, whose links to performance and attitudes are meta-analytically established (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002).

This indicator is composed of the following factors:

This score measures employees perception of the rewards and recognition they receive for great work. These come in the form of compensation, recognition and benefits in your organization.
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​What it rests on. Notice that the items do not ask whether you are paid a lot, but whether you are paid fairly and can talk about it. That is organizational justice theory (Adams, 1965; Colquitt, 2001): perceived fairness of outcomes and processes predicts attitudes and behaviour better than absolute salary levels.

This indicator is composed of the following factors:

This score measures how employees perceive the feedback in the organization. They evaluate the quality and frequency of feedback, the use of active listening across teams and managers, and whether the workplace welcomes diverse ideas and opinions.

​What it rests on. Diversity of Opinions is a direct operationalisation of psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999): the shared belief that one can speak up without punishment. Two decades of research, including Google's Project Aristotle, identify it as the strongest team-level predictor of effectiveness. Quality & Frequency and Active Listening draw on the employee voice literature (Morrison, 2011): voice only exists where someone demonstrably listens.
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This indicator is composed of the following factors:
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In addition to the 6 scores, Happyforce measures the eNPS, which measures employee loyalty and their perception of your company. 

You can dig deeper into details of the indicators and their factors straight in the Scores section in your dashboard. 

If you want more technical details continue reading:
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​How are scores measured?

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