interesting that you have narrowed down the impact level to absence and accidents at work, now we should ask about what we cover under ungagement that can have organizational to personal level factors.

The following article refers to a Towers Perrin Report on disengaged employees. Their questions are available in their report on the web. This might be useful for your survey.

Article Employee disengagement: is there evidence of a growing problem?

Engaging Staff in the Workplace, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254582894_Engaging_Staff_in_the_Workplace, offers a concise primer on this subject.

Article Engaging Staff in the Workplace

To measure employee engagement, I've been using the Utrech Work Engagement Scale (UWES), developed by Schaufeli e Bakker. You can find it online.

Thanks a lot for the replies! UWES is great from the engagement survey point of view. My main concern is however, how to aproach it in the interview / focus group meeting, and especially from the perspecitive of the potential casual relationship between engagemet and absences / accidents. I wonder if somebody has already done such qualitative study?

I have been reviewing the literature for my dissertation (for MSc in Organisational and Business Psychology) on employee engagement. While many people  seem to intuitively get what employee engagement is and agree that it is a great thing to have for organisations, there are different approaches to defining and measuring it.  Your questions might change depending on the approach you take. I thought the below articles could be of help. The last one (Saks, 2006) has questions (for a quantitative study) to measure employee engagement as well as work conditions. 

1. Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33, 692–724. doi:10.2307/256287 

2. Shuck, B. (2011). Four emerging perspectives of employee engagement: An integrative literature review. Human Resource Development Review, 10(3), 304-328. doi:10.1177/1534484311410840

3. Saks, A. M. (2006). Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21, 600-619 

Good luck with your research. 

The following linked articles may be useful for you.

Best wishes!

Conference Paper Employee engagement: conceptual clarification from existing ...

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Hello, Leszeck,

All of the responses are very good ones and all point to one important fact: look to the literature for guidance. For the qualitative end of the study, perhaps you can have participants give more in-depth/expanded responses to the quantitative questions from the instrument that you use... You will be, in effect, using one instrument; however,you will be gathering quantitative and qualitative data based on that instrument.

Hello,

I've done some research and I can share my opinion with you. Just as Ozlem said, the question might change depending of the approach you take of engagement. I've found to main ones, the one of Kahn (1990) (Psychological Meaningfulness, Availability and Safety) and the one seen as the antithesis of Job Burnout with authors like Schaufeli and Bakker.  

Regarding the engagement measure,  for Kahn's definition I think the most appropriated one is the one by Rich et al 2010. For Job burnout antithesis the UWES, I would probably use the UWES-17 (most used measurement tool) (the number depends on how many questions/items it has).

Furthermore, you will find many other like Gallup, AON Hewitt, etc. None the less, be careful as they are made my practitioners and for your dissertation you might want to stay with the academics.

Hope it helps and let us know if you have further questions,

Alberto

Hello,

One of main aspects of performance is cost management . In this point of view , the effect of employee engagement could be measured by the share of costs in each category , especially in ABC costing.

You may review the main motivations to shirking. 

Jones, G. R. (1984). Task visibility, free riding, and shirking: Explaining the effect of structure and technology on employee behavior. Academy of Management Review, 9(4), 684-695.