Given the prime role it plays in organizational success, employee engagement has of late been the focus of many research studies and reports. An engaged worker is one who feels passionate and enthusiastic about their job and their workplace. Studies show that engagement can have a significant impact on organizational outcomes. For example, research conducted across the retail giant Marks & Spencer over a four-year period showed that an improved employee engagement led to an increase of 62 million in sales every year compared to stores with low employee engagement. A similar study at Sainsbury's, one of the biggest grocery stores in the United Kingdom, demonstrated that employee engagement led to a 15 percent increase in a store's year-on-year growth.

However, despite its obvious importance, employee engagement is still a challenge in many companies around the world. A global study by Qualtrics in 2020 showed that employee engagement scores are below the employee engagement average of 53 percent in many countries. For example, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Germany, South Korea, and Japan scored 50 percent, 47 percent, 41 percent, 40 percent, and 35 percent respectively on employee engagement.

Low levels of engagement at work could spell trouble in the long run; employees who are disengaged at work are often demotivated and less productive, all of which can slow down business performance and reduce a company's competitiveness in the market. Many experts say that businesses should consider employee engagement as a top priority and develop strategies to foster it in the workplace. However, this outcome is heavily dependent on understanding and measuring the drivers of employee engagement at work, which leads us to a vital issuedata collection. To this end, businesses need to employ the right data measurement tools for assessing and managing employee engagement levels at work.

Employee and engagement surveys are a prime example of data measurement tools. Focusing on the assessment of employee attitudes about various aspects of the business environment, these surveys can take the form of advanced online surveys, which are administered frequently to employees and promise to offer frequent, real-time data, or they can be the more traditional yearly surveys, which run the risk of slowing down the management's response time in improving engagement at work. A recent article by Eric O'Rourke, Scott Judd, and Adam Grant in the Harvard Business Review lists a number of benefits of employee surveys, foremost among them being that they are excellent predictors of employee behavior with a high degree of accuracy. Based on what surveys say about how their employees may act in the future, companies can use this information to make better decisions at work.

Despite the strategic importance of data collection, studies show that many companies have yet to leverage the power of data in decision making across companies. Employers often fail to act on the data filled by employees in the surveys, and in many cases employees may not be surveyed at all. It has been argued that improving employee engagement requires a fundamental change to a corporate culture that recognizes the value of generating data for making better-informed decisions. It follows that generating data about employee engagement represents one of the best practices for improved performance, and companies who discover the power of employee data too late may find themselves at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

Questions

1. In your opinion, how does measuring employee engagement through a survey provide managers with insights in improving staff performance? What other types of tools can you use to gather data on employee engagement?

2. In which instances would collecting data about employees lead to infringement of employee privacy?

3. The case mentions that many companies do not do any type of assessment of their employees' attitudes at work.In your opinion,what are the dangers of failing to gather such feedback?