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BCWI developed an Employee Engagement Index to measure the level of employee engagement within Christian organizations. Engagement has been defined as “the willingness and ability to contribute to the organization’s success” (O’Neal & Gebauer, 2006). BCWI’s 15 item scale of employee engagement includes items assessing employees’ sense of their own growth in and fit with an organization as well as their beliefs about how much impact employees have on the organization and its leaders.
The BCWI Employee Engagement Index items are scored on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being Strongly Disagree and 5 being Strongly Agree. BCWI defined Unengaged as people who had a combined score on the Employee Engagement Index of less than 3.00, Neutral as those having a score of 3.00-3.99, and Engaged as those whose Engagement Index score was 4.00 or higher. Our belief is that those in the Neutral category are people that an organization should concentrate additional efforts on in order to bring them into the Engaged category. They are sometimes engaged and sometimes not, and have not yet committed to putting in that extra effort to contribute to the organization’s success.
Using results from our 2006 employee survey, 7.5% of employees surveyed were Unengaged, 38.3% were in the Neutral category, and 54% of employees were Engaged.
These results had a .807 correlation with Overall Job Satisfaction as measured by our survey. Another interesting result is the connection between level of engagement and all aspects of job satisfaction. For the remaining 33 questions on our survey, the average responses for employees in each of these engagement categories differed by almost 1.00 per category. For example, one of the items on the survey is “There is clear consensus on my organization’s values.” Employees respond using the same 5-point scale with 1 representing Strongly Disagree and 5 representing Strongly Agree. Unengaged employees had an average score for that question of 2.7, Neutral employees had an average score of 3.7, and Engaged employees’ average score was 4.6. This trend was repeated on every single question in the survey, showing a clear difference on all aspects of job satisfaction among the three categories of employee engagement.
References
O’Neal, S. & Gebauer, J. (2006). Talent management in the 21st Century: Attracting, retaining, and engaging employees of choice. WorldatWork Journal, 15(1), 6-17.
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