How Should You Measure Overall Employee Engagement?
Measuring employee engagement sounds straightforward, but the way the overall score is calculated can make a significant difference to what an organisation learns from its survey.
A common approach is to report the percentage of employees who respond Agree or Strongly Agree to employee engagement survey questions. This creates an easily understood percentage-positive score.
However, this approach can conceal important changes in employee sentiment.
At Protostar, we prefer to calculate an average engagement rating using the full response scale. This allows changes between Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree and Strongly Disagree to affect the overall score, making it easier to identify movement over time.
The important question is therefore not simply “What is our employee engagement score?” but “Does the way we calculate that score accurately reflect what employees are telling us?”
What Is an Employee Engagement Score?
An employee engagement score is a numerical measure designed to summarise the overall level of engagement within an organisation.
It is normally calculated from responses to a number of carefully selected engagement questions rather than from every question in an employee survey.
Those questions should measure engagement itself, rather than simply factors that might influence engagement.
For example, questions about communication, leadership, pay or career development may help explain why employees are engaged or disengaged. They are not necessarily measures of engagement in their own right.
A useful overall engagement measure should therefore be based on questions that reflect characteristics of an engaged employee, such as commitment, advocacy, motivation or intention to remain with the organisation.
How Is Employee Engagement Usually Measured?
Employee engagement surveys commonly use a rating scale such as:
- Strongly Agree
- Agree
- Neither Agree nor Disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly Disagree
There are then different ways of turning those responses into an overall score.
Two common approaches are:
- Percentage positive — calculating the percentage of employees who selected Agree or Strongly Agree.
- Average rating — assigning numerical values to all response options and calculating the mean score.
Both produce a number, but they do not necessarily tell you the same thing.
Why Can Percentage-Positive Employee Engagement Scores Be Misleading?
Percentage-positive scores are easy to understand, which is one reason they are widely used.
For example, if 80% of employees select either Agree or Strongly Agree, the organisation might report an 80% positive engagement score.
The problem is that this combines two different responses into a single category.
Consider this simplified example.
Survey 1
- 50% Strongly Agree
- 30% Agree
- 10% Neither Agree nor Disagree
- 5% Disagree
- 5% Strongly Disagree
The percentage-positive score is 80%.
Now imagine the same question is asked the following year.
Survey 2
- 10% Strongly Agree
- 70% Agree
- 10% Neither Agree nor Disagree
- 5% Disagree
- 5% Strongly Disagree
The percentage-positive score is still 80%.
If management only looks at the percentage-positive result, it appears that nothing has changed.
But something important has changed.
A large proportion of employees who previously felt strongly positive have become less positive. They still agree with the statement, but the strength of that agreement has fallen substantially.
A percentage-positive calculation completely conceals that movement.
Why Does Protostar Use Average Ratings?
An average rating uses information from every point on the response scale.
For example, a five-point scale might be scored as:
- Strongly Agree = 5
- Agree = 4
- Neither Agree nor Disagree = 3
- Disagree = 2
- Strongly Disagree = 1
Using the example above, the first survey produces an average rating of:
4.15 out of 5
The second produces:
3.75 out of 5
The percentage-positive approach reports:
80% → 80%
The average-rating approach reports:
4.15 → 3.75
The second calculation therefore identifies a deterioration that the percentage-positive figure misses.
That is why Protostar uses average ratings when measuring and comparing employee survey results.
Are Percentage Scores Wrong?
Not necessarily.
Percentage-positive reporting can be useful because it is intuitive and easy to communicate.
If a senior leader is told that 82% of employees agree that they understand the organisation’s strategy, the result is immediately understandable.
The problem arises when percentage-positive figures become the only way survey results are analysed, particularly when comparing results over time.
Grouping Strongly Agree and Agree together means information about the strength of employee opinion is lost.
For a one-off survey, that may be acceptable.
For organisations using surveys to understand whether engagement is improving or deteriorating from year to year, it can become a significant limitation.
What Is an Employee Engagement Index?
An employee engagement index combines responses from several engagement questions to create an overall measure.
Rather than asking employees directly:
“How engaged are you?”
an index uses several indicators of engagement.
For example, an organisation might measure whether employees:
- feel motivated to do their best work
- would recommend the organisation as a good place to work
- feel proud to work for the organisation
- intend to remain with the organisation
- are willing to make additional effort when required
The exact questions used will depend on the engagement model and methodology.
The important principle is that an engagement index should measure engagement outcomes, while the wider survey measures the factors that may be driving those outcomes.
That distinction helps organisations move from simply knowing their engagement level to understanding why it is at that level.
Should Every Survey Question Be Included in the Overall Engagement Score?
No.
This is an important distinction.
Imagine an employee responds:
“I am highly committed to this organisation.”
but also:
“Communication between departments could be improved.”
The second response identifies something the organisation may need to address, but it does not necessarily mean that employee is disengaged.
Similarly, questions about:
- pay
- communication
- leadership
- career development
- recognition
- workload
- working environment
can all influence engagement without necessarily being direct measures of engagement.
Including every survey question in one overall engagement score can therefore make the measure difficult to interpret.
A better approach is to distinguish between:
engagement measures — indicators of how engaged employees are
and
engagement drivers — factors that may explain why engagement is high or low.
What Is a Good Employee Engagement Score?
There is no universal employee engagement score that can reliably be described as “good” across every organisation.
A score depends on:
- the questions being asked
- the rating scale
- the calculation methodology
- the workforce
- the sector
- the organisational context
This makes comparisons between engagement scores from different providers potentially misleading.
For example, a provider reporting 78% engagement using percentage-positive scoring cannot necessarily be meaningfully compared with a provider reporting an average rating of 4.1 out of 5.
Even two percentage scores may not be comparable if they are calculated from different questions.
For most organisations, the more useful questions are:
How does our current score compare with our previous survey?
Which parts of the organisation are significantly above or below the overall result?
Which engagement measures are changing?
What appears to be driving those changes?
A consistent methodology over time is often more valuable than pursuing an arbitrary external target.
Should You Benchmark Employee Engagement Scores?
Benchmarking can provide useful context, but it needs to be interpreted carefully.
External benchmarks can help organisations understand how their results compare with similar employers or wider datasets.
However, a benchmark should not become the objective of the survey.
Two organisations can achieve the same overall engagement score while having completely different strengths and problems.
For example, one organisation may have excellent leadership scores but concerns about career development. Another may have strong development opportunities but problems with communication and trust.
Their overall engagement ratings might be identical, but the actions required would be very different.
Internal benchmarking can therefore be particularly useful.
Comparing:
- departments
- locations
- countries
- business units
- management levels
- previous survey results
can reveal patterns that an organisation-wide score alone cannot show.
How Should You Compare Employee Engagement Scores Over Time?
Consistency is essential.
If an organisation wants to understand whether engagement is improving, the core engagement questions and scoring methodology should remain sufficiently consistent between surveys.
Changing the questionnaire or calculation method significantly can make year-on-year comparisons unreliable.
However, organisations should not focus only on whether the overall score has increased or decreased.
Look at:
- changes in individual engagement questions
- changes in the average rating
- differences between employee groups
- movement in the factors driving engagement
- written comments
- areas where scores have changed unexpectedly
- whether actions taken after the previous survey appear to have had an effect
A small change in an overall engagement score can sometimes conceal significant improvements or deterioration within particular parts of an organisation.
Is eNPS the Same as Employee Engagement?
No.
Employee Net Promoter Score, usually called eNPS, typically asks employees how likely they are to recommend their organisation as a place to work.
It can provide a useful high-level indicator of employee advocacy and can be tracked over time.
However, employee advocacy is only one aspect of engagement.
An employee may recommend an organisation because it offers good pay, flexible working or excellent benefits without necessarily feeling highly motivated or committed in their own role.
Conversely, someone may be highly committed to their work but reluctant to recommend the organisation for reasons unrelated to their personal engagement.
eNPS can therefore be a useful additional measure, but Protostar would not recommend relying on it as the sole measure of employee engagement.
Is the Overall Engagement Score the Most Important Survey Result?
No.
An overall engagement score is useful because it provides a headline measure that can be tracked.
But the number itself does not tell leaders what to do next.
Imagine an organisation discovers that its engagement rating is 3.7 out of 5.
Is that good or bad?
More importantly:
Why is it 3.7?
The real value of an employee engagement survey comes from identifying the factors influencing that result.
This might include:
- confidence in senior leadership
- quality of line management
- communication
- recognition
- opportunities for development
- autonomy
- workload
- organisational change
- employees feeling listened to
The overall engagement measure tells you what is happening.
The wider survey should help explain why it is happening and what you should do about it.
Frequently Asked Questions About Measuring Employee Engagement
What Is the Best Way to Measure Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is best measured using a consistent set of questions that assess genuine indicators of engagement, supported by questions that identify the factors driving those results. Protostar recommends analysing the full rating scale rather than relying solely on the percentage of employees who Agree or Strongly Agree.
Should Employee Engagement Be Reported as a Percentage?
It can be, but percentage-positive scores have limitations. Combining Agree and Strongly Agree can conceal changes in the strength of employee sentiment. Average ratings retain more of the information contained within the response scale.
Why Use an Average Employee Engagement Rating?
An average rating reflects movement across all response categories. This means a change from Strongly Agree to Agree affects the result, even though both responses would be classified as positive in a percentage-positive calculation.
Can You Compare Employee Engagement Scores Between Organisations?
Only with caution. Scores are only directly comparable when the questions, response scales and calculation methodology are sufficiently similar. Comparing figures generated using different methodologies can create misleading conclusions.
How Often Should Employee Engagement Be Measured?
For many organisations, a comprehensive annual employee engagement survey provides a useful benchmark, with shorter pulse surveys used between full surveys where there is a specific reason to monitor progress or emerging issues.
Final Thoughts
Measuring employee engagement should provide leaders with more than an attractive headline percentage.
The methodology needs to be sensitive enough to identify real changes in employee attitudes, consistent enough to allow meaningful comparison over time and detailed enough to help explain what is driving the result.
Percentage-positive scores can be useful for communication, but they can conceal significant movement when Strongly Agree and Agree responses are combined.
Using average ratings preserves more of the information employees provide and makes changes in the strength of opinion visible.
Most importantly, organisations should not become overly focused on a single engagement number.
The purpose of measuring employee engagement is not simply to produce a score. It is to understand what employees are experiencing, identify what is influencing engagement and use that evidence to make better organisational decisions.
Protostar provides fully managed employee engagement surveys, including questionnaire design, survey administration, analysis, reporting and consultancy support to help organisations turn employee feedback into practical action.
Learn more about our employee survey service here:
👉 Staff Engagement Surveys – Get Expert Advice | Protostar