How to measure employee engagement

Moving away from fluffy BS.

This morning, I was walking to therapy (2.4 miles, because I like to get those steps in) and I listened to Hubspot’s Growth Show podcast with Jon Wolske of Zappos. If you’re unfamiliar with Zappos from an organizational culture perspective, it’s one of the big names always thrown into those discussions about ‘having a good culture’ — although holacracy, which is a management style most closely associated with them, has some pros and cons for sure. (If you’re unfamiliar with holacracy, it’s essentially the removal of managers so that the actual work take precedence.)

Jon Wolske is an ‘evangelist’ for them, which basically means he goes around talking to people about their culture. Sweet gig in some respects. He talked about a lot of interesting things on Growth Show — one of his best quotes about employee engagement was something along the lines of ‘Your financial metrics can be great, but if a dragon is leading you, eventually the village will burn’ — but eventually they got into an area about tracking employee engagement.

(Cue ominous music.)

This is where the rubber truly meets the road on this issue. There’s a prevailing attitude in business, and it’s been there for many years, that only stuff you can track/measure is valuable. That + capitalist greed = why…