New research from Oracle reminds businesses that measuring employee engagement is the only way to know if your efforts are working.

Employee engagement is one of those perennial issues that is never far from the executive radar. Yet despite this ongoing interest some questions remain. Is it a strategic business issue and, if so, in what way? How can it be accurately measured? Who owns employee engagement, and how can HR best stake its claim to this ownership? What are the key drivers of it, and what obstacles stand in the way of effectively measuring employee engagement?

Our latest global research report The Changing Nature of Employee Engagement offers some new insights into all of these issues and more.

The debate over whether employee engagement is considered important to decision makers within businesses now appears to be over. The results were pretty overwhelming, in fact: 88 per cent of businesses surveyed believe employee engagement scores an eight, nine or 10 out of 10 in terms of its influence on the success of their organisations.

While it is great that companies recognise the importance of employee engagement to their business outcomes, the research also revealed that not enough is being done to go about measuring employee engagement. Indeed, just 41 per cent reported that they are able to link engagement levels to business performance. For employee engagement to be a success, its outcomes must be measured in terms that matter to business leaders (i.e. productivity and top line growth). Without this, employee engagement will never live up to its promise.

One important factor is that businesses should ensure that they have a clear and accountable ‘owner’ of employee engagement in place. Our research shows that HR is responsible for employee engagement in 40 per cent of cases, with the broader business taking responsibility in 35 per cent of organisations. In around 11 per cent of businesses, meanwhile, a line of business owns employee engagement, while 5 per cent of businesses admit that there is no real ownership of employee engagement at all.

For me this represents a huge opportunity for human resources to demonstrate its value to the business by asserting their leadership of this important issue. HR can also help to make the business outcomes of employee engagement more transparent and more relevant to modern business practices.

In addition, human resources should look to lead their organisations away from the traditional ways of measuring engagement, through outdated and discredited approaches such as annual employee surveys. Instead they should seize the opportunity to utilise modern cloud-based technology combined with the power of big data analytics to provide organisations a continuous, real-time view of employee engagement. In these days when social media offers immediate feedback in the form of ‘likes, comments and shares’ the demands from employees are for similar opportunities and experiences for engagement when at work.

Finally, this analysis also needs to include the all-important correlations between employee-engagement strategies and their effect on business outcomes. With this approach, not only will employee engagement be validated as a powerful strategy, but it will enable the human resources function to really demonstrate its value-add credentials to the C-suite.