If you work for a large organization, there is a good chance that you have completed an employee engagement survey. Employee engagement has become an important focus not only for practitioners who use it to benchmark employee feelings about work, but for academics in industrial-organizational psychology and organizational behavior who study it. There are many different definitions and measures that people use, which leads to the question, what do employee engagement questionnaires measure?
The Many Faces of Engagement at Work
The idea of employee engagement is often traced to Robert Kahn who wrote in 1990 about how people engage and disengage from tasks at work. As is true for many new concepts in organizational research, people branched out in different ways, leaving a lack of clarity about what engagement is, and by extension what do employee engagement questionnaires measure. A review of the academic literature shows that there are seven different types of employee engagement that have been studied. Kahn’s original idea was that engagement had three aspects–Affective (how people feel about work), Behavioral (how on-task people are and how hard they work), and Cognitive (how mentally absorbed they are in work). The ABCs of engagement have been prominent in many fields including customer service. Employee engagement researchers have favored a different type of engagement that includes dimensions of Absorption (being mentally focused on work), Dedication (being committed to the job), and Vigor (having high energy at work). This three-component idea is considered the opposite of employee burnout and is anchored in research on job stress. There is definitely overlap among the different types of engagement, but enough differences to make for confusion.
What Do Employee Engagement Questionnaires Measure?
Each of the engagement types has questionnaire measures to assess it. Among academic researchers the two major approaches are to focus on ABC, or on Absorption, Dedication, and Vigor. When we move into the practitioner world, things can get more complicated. Most engagement surveys that I’ve seen in companies are focused primarily on Affective Engagement–how people feel about their jobs. Items in engagement surveys are similar to items in job satisfaction and organizational commitment measures. Practitioners using such engagement measures looking to ground their work in academic research can look to the ABC engagement literature.
A much broader concept of employee engagement can be found in the Gallup research that has been tracking employee engagement worldwide over time. While their 12-item measure includes affective engagement, most of the items are about working conditions that are important for employee well-being, such as having clear expectations, receiving recognition, and having opportunities for learning and growth. Gallup provides data over time for each individual item that enables comparison of the different items. For example, overall job satisfaction in the U.S. has dropped from 2007 to 2025. On the other hand receiving recognition for good work and having a caring supervisor have increased over the same time period.
Interpreting Engagement Numbers
With so many types of engagement and measures to assess them, interpretation can be a challenge. To answer the question “what do employee engagement questionnaires measure”, you have to look carefully at what is actually being measured. Different measures do not always measure the same thing even though they are all called engagement. When comparing scores from different surveys, you should be sure that you are making and apples to apples comparison. Of course, this advice holds for interpreting all surveys, as there can be different definitions of the seemingly same concept, and there can be a disconnect between what someone says they are measuring and the items they use. There are two important questions to always ask about surveys.
- What is your definition?
- What items are you using to measure what you have defined?
The two answers will enable you to understand the connection between what someone wants to measure and what they are actually measuring. This is needed not only to interpret results, but to be sure that comparison across different surveys is even possible.
Image generated by DALL-E 4. Prompt “wide aspect image of a person conducting a survey with a clip board”
SUBSCRIBE TO PAUL’S BLOG: Enter your e-mail and click SUBSCRIBE