What is an Engagement Score?
The Engagement Score is a single number that summarises how engaged your team feels about working for your organisation. It sits alongside the People Score and NPS in your reports, giving you three complementary views of how your team is doing.
What does the Engagement Score measure?
The Engagement Score reflects how connected your team feels to their work. It is built from a small set of carefully chosen Agree-Disagree questions that together cover the constructs every major engagement framework recognises:
- Pride in working for your organisation
- Advocacy, or whether your team would recommend the organisation as a place to work
- Intent to stay over the next two years
- Motivation to do their best for the organisation
- Meaningful work, including purpose and impact
Each of these constructs predicts something different about how your team will behave: pride and advocacy are leading indicators of word-of-mouth recruitment, intent to stay correlates with actual retention, motivation predicts discretionary effort, and meaningful work predicts wellbeing and long-term performance.
By averaging across all of them, the Engagement Score gives you a single executive-friendly number that does not over-react to any one driver.
How is the Engagement Score calculated?
The Engagement Score is the average of the Agree-Disagree scores across the engagement questions in your survey.
- Every engagement question uses the same Agree-Disagree scale, so the average is mathematically sound.
- Each respondent's answers are scored on AskYourTeam's standard 0 to 100 scale, then averaged across the engagement questions and across all respondents.
- Questions that respondents skipped do not pull the score down.
Minimum question threshold
The Engagement Score is shown in reports only when your survey has at least five engagement questions. Below that, the score is statistically thin and could mislead. You will still see your individual question results, but the Engagement Score block is hidden from the reports.
Where does the Engagement Score appear?
To view the People Score for a survey:
- Go to Surveys in the left hand menu.
- Select the title of the survey you want to view reports for.
- Select Apply filters button
- Under Themes, choose People Engagement Score
- Select See results.
Engagement Score, People Score, NPS: which one is right for your survey?
These three scores answer different questions, and each one needs a different number of questions in your survey to produce a meaningful number:
| Score | What it measures | What it needs in the survey |
|---|---|---|
| NPS | Topline employee mood | One Net Promoter question (0 to 10 NPS scale) |
| Engagement Score | How engaged your team feels (multi-dimensional) | At least 5 Agree-Disagree engagement questions |
| People Score | Overall organisational health (validated framework) | The full AskYourTeam validated set (15+ Agree-Disagree questions across the People Score themes) |
NPS is simple to include because it is a single question, so it is almost always added alongside whichever diagnostic you choose. The diagnostic itself is a choice: either Engagement Score or People Score, depending on what you want to measure and how long you want the survey to be.
Choose Engagement Score + NPS when:
- You want a focused diagnostic that lands in 7 to 10 questions plus NPS.
- You want a single executive-friendly number that summarises how engaged your team feels.
- You are running quarterly or biannual pulse surveys where survey length matters.
Choose People Score + NPS when:
- You want the full AskYourTeam validated organisational health picture across 15+ questions.
- You are running an annual deep-dive survey where length is not the constraint.
- You want benchmarks against the AskYourTeam validated framework.
You can also include the full People Score question set and the engagement questions in the same survey if you want both scores reported side by side.
Frequently asked questions
Can engagement question results be compared over time?
Yes, as long as the underlying engagement questions are the same across the surveys you are comparing. Compare reports surface the same Engagement Score on each survey and the trend between them. If you change the engagement set on a later survey, the trend line is paused until the sets line up again.
Can I see the Engagement Score for a specific team or demographic?
Yes. The Engagement Score appears in every demographic breakdown view in your report, the same way the People Score does.
Why can I not add a Yes-No or Multi-Choice question to the engagement set?
The Engagement Score is the average across a single scale. Mixing scales would break the math and the result would not be comparable across surveys. Only Agree-Disagree (0 to 6) questions can contribute.
Can I customise the engagement question set?
Yes. Customising the engagement question set is managed by AskYourTeam to keep your score statistically sound. If you would like to adjust the engagement set for your account, please contact your customer success manager at customersuccess@askyourteam.com and we will work with you on the right change.
We strongly recommend you keep the defaults. The seven default questions are validated, cover all five engagement constructs, and align with the industry standard way of measuring engagement.