Towers Watson

Engagement Levels Defined

Engagement is defined as employees’ willingness and ability to contribute to company success. Put another way, engagement is the extent to which employees "go the extra mile" and put discretionary effort into their work — contributing more of their energy, creativity and passion on the job. When we speak of an "engagement gap," it is the difference between the level of discretionary effort employers need from employees to drive results and what they are actually able to elicit.

Engagement levels are determined based on employees’ responses to nine questions that measure their connections to the organization across three dimensions:

• Rational: How well employees understand their roles and responsibilities (the "thinking" part of the equation)
• Emotional: How much passion and energy they bring to their work (the "feeling" part of the equation)
• Motivational: How well they perform in their roles (the "acting" part of the equation).

Based on a statistical analysis of their responses to all nine questions, survey respondents are clustered into four groups:

• Engaged: Those giving full discretionary effort, with high scores on all three dimensions
• Enrolled: The partly engaged, with higher scores on the rational and motivational dimensions, but less connected emotionally
• Disenchanted: The partly disengaged, with lower scores on all three components of engagement, especially the emotional connection
• Disengaged: Those who have disconnected rationally, emotionally and motivationally