Developing and Validating a Global Model of Employee Engagement

Most organizations today conducting employee surveys refer to their programs as “engagement surveys,” or they measure employee engagement as one of their survey topics. We estimate 90 percent of our current global survey clients conduct employee engagement surveys. As others note (Macey & Schneider, 2008; Wefald & Downey, 2009), employee engagement, while a relatively new construct, has grown in popularity and acceptance, in large part because organizations believe they can leverage employee engagement for positive organizational outcomes, such as higher employee retention, greater customer satisfaction and improved financial performance (Harter et al., 2002).

We accomplish several objectives with this chapter. First, we provide a definition of employee engagement and a method for its measurement. Second, we rank the countries representing the world’s 12 largest economies on our measure of employee engagement. Third, we identify the global drivers of employee engagement and compare and contrast these drivers with those derived from an analysis of country-level data. Fourth, we build an overall model of employee engagement and validate the model against organization-level measures of financial performance. Lastly, we suggest actions organizations can take to drive employee engagement levels higher.