This article is a short guide to the concept of a ‘employee engagement’ and how it is measured in the Civil Service People Survey through the engagement index.
What is employee engagement?
There is no single definition of ‘employee engagement’, a study by Bailey et al. (2015) summarised various definitions and approaches into three groups: “a psychological state; a composite attitudinal and behavioural construct; and employment relations practice”.
The Cabinet Office (2025) defines ‘employee engagement’ as follows:
Employee engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.
Based on the questions used by the Civil Service People Survey to measure employee engagement it somewhat fits Bailey et al.’s (2015) “composite attitudinal and behavioural construct”. Or more put more simply, the Civil Service’s employee engagement index measures the general/overall attitudes an individual has towards the organisation they work for, covering:
- an individual’s pride in being associated with the organisation they work for
- an individual’s level of advocacy about the organisation they work for
- an individual’s sense of attachment to the organisation they work for
- the extent to which an individual gets inspiration from the organisation they work for
- the extent to which an individual has motivation to support the organisation they work for
How is employee engagement measured?
The Civil Service People Survey measures employee engagement through an index calculated from five questions that each of the five general attitudes/aspects listed above.
| Aspect | Question |
|---|---|
| Pride | I am proud when I tell others I am part of [my organisation] |
| Advocacy | I would recommend [my organisation] as a great place to work |
| Attachment | I feel a strong personal attachment to [my organisation] |
| Inspiration | [My organisation] inspires me to do the best in my job |
| Motivation | [My organisation] motivates me to help it achieve its objectives |
Like most of the other questions in the People Survey, each of the five questions is measured on a five point ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’ scale. The index is constructed as follows:
- The responses to the five questions are given a numerical value: 0% for ‘strongly agree’, 25% for ‘agree’, 50% for ‘neither agree nor disagree’, 75% for ‘agree’ and 100% for ‘strongly agree’.
- Each individual respondent is given an ‘employee engagement score’ that is the simple average of the numerical values across the five questions.
- An organisation’s or group of respondents’s employee engagement index is the simple average of the individual employee engagement scores for all respondents in the given organisation or group.
This approach means that an engagement index of 0 is equivalent to all respondents selecting ‘strongly disagree’ to all five questions, and an engagement index of ‘100’ is equivalent to all respondents selecting ‘strongly agree’ to all five questions.
How to influence levels of employee engagement?
The attitudes measured in the employee engagement index aren’t things that leaders and managers can easily affect directly, they measure more of the general sentiment an individual has towards their organisation. Instead, driver analysis shows how the other nine main themes of the survey, which measure more actionable aspects of an individual’s experience of work, relate to levels of employee engagement. A separate short guide and in-depth technical article have been produced about employee engagement driver analysis of the Civil Service People Survey results.