Understanding Employee Engagement: A Mixed-Methods Study

For over 4 decades businesses around the world have been conducting employee satisfaction surveys at regular intervals and this surfaced a strong positive relationship between employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and overall company performance. In recent years however, academics and researchers have reopened the debate on whether employee or job satisfaction metrics are in fact reliable indicators of productivity, suggesting that employee engagement has a far stronger correlation to productivity. This study addresses two interrelated problems that are associated with a practice that is common in working environments all over the world. According to literature, it is generally accepted that (a) quantitative measurement of employee engagement yields reliable results and that (b) reliable conclusions about employee productivity can be drawn from it. The objective of this study is to examine whether this notion is accurate and to assess whether qualitative research adds meaningful insights to an employee engagement study. These research questions are answered by means of a study based on an explanatory sequential mixed-methods research design. Qualitative and quantitative primary research is conducted among employees at a large financial services company based in the United States and the target sample is characterized by homogeneity across age, tenure, rank, ethnicity and gender, with a normally distributed spread across these variables. The results are compared to a generalized secondary data set containing raw survey data from employee engagement studies conducted across countries and industries. The study reveals that conducting interviews in addition to the structured surveys produces significant deep insights, varying from subtle nuances to distinctly different and even conflicting outcomes, which the quantitative research did not capture on its own. The preliminary results indicate that the current quantitative instrument as well as its delivery method are no longer adequate to measure employee engagement in modern day working environments