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Einstein once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. This is how I feel most companies approach employee engagement. 

The quest of employee engagement for many HR and business leaders seems to be never-ending. Over the last 20 years, employee engagement has seen only minimal improvement. What we–meaning most employers–are doing is not working. See my reference to insanity above. That’s why it’s time to take a new approach with your employee population and leverage tools, methodologies, and technologies that are different, innovative, and customized to your company’s specific needs. 

I recently took a test drive of ITA Group’s employee engagement diagnostic called EngageFx. EngageFx is a customizable survey that educates employers on the best way to engage their specific employees.

What Drives Employee Engagement at Companies? 

Prior to creating the diagnostic, ITA Group completed extensive research to explore how psychological benefits drive employee engagement. EngageFx builds on this research and uses it for benchmarking within each custom survey to provide a tailor-made approach helping you to understand nuances and barriers to employee engagement within your organization. 

Psychological Benefits and ITA Group’s Employee Engagement Methodologies 

Their unique approach focuses on key employee engagement drivers including functional benefits, emotional benefits, and identify benefits. 

Functional Benefits help you determine whether employees believe that the company facilitates professional growth and success while enabling a good work/life balance. 

Emotional Benefits help you evaluate the emotions your people feel and whether their typical work days evoke overall positive (vs. negative) emotions. 

Identity Benefits help you understand, on a deeper level, how you’re impacting employee self-esteem, interpersonal connections and cultural alignment. This category is divided into the subcategories of personal identity, social identity, and cultural identity benefits. 

Key Engagement Drivers

EngageFx evaluates the psychological benefit performance of your employees to provide a data-driven, comprehensive and customized employee experience diagnosis. Through this process, they determine which benefits are the largest drivers to improving engagement levels and can break that down by group, department, division, and team to help organizations understand team dynamics and engagement drivers at the macro or micro levels. 

I believe there is no cookie-cutter approach when it comes to improving engagement levels for your workforce especially in light of the current remote workplace and work environment we are experiencing. With EngageFx every client receives a customized and centralized analytics dashboard complete with detailed reporting and recommendations designed to move the needle when it comes to employee engagement. Each page and report within the dashboard provides ways for employees to dive deeper into each of the psychological benefits and analysis. 

One of my favorite features of their reporting is the point in time survey feature where you can create a pulse survey strategy that integrates with your existing data set giving you quick insights into your employees, which can help you flex and pivot quickly.

Taking a Proactive Approach to Turnover and the Reality Slump 

Another powerful focus within EngageFx dives into employee engagement drivers focused not just on position and team but also tenure within an organization. Their research and work has found that tenure substantially impacts psychological benefit performance and that the 1-2 year employment mark is when engagement levels decrease most. They refer to this as the reality slump. 

With the help of EngageFx , employers can take a proactive approach to employee communication and engagement minimizing and/or eliminating the reality slump. Their focus on treating each company’s unique diagnosis and not the symptoms is what employers need to move the employee engagement needle, improve employee morale, and reduce unwanted turnover to help sustain and grow their organizations during uncertain or strong economic times. 

To make real change in your organization and drive engagement, employers need to customize their strategies to be relevant for their unique people. EngageFx will help you identify where that customization is needed and help you develop a fresh approach to make meaningful strides with your workforce.

FTC Disclosure: We received compensation for mentioning and reviewing the product listed above as part of one of the services we offer our clients. Regardless, we only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers. We are disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.