Employee engagement is crucial to organizational success. This is not a novel concept, and it should come as no surprise to HR leaders. However, one well-known company is rethinking these metrics and looking at the bigger picture. Instead of measuring employee engagement, Microsoft is now measuring how well their employees are thriving. “At Microsoft, where we work on the People Analytics team, that means learning what the data can tell us about how our employees aspire to live their lives meaningfully,” Dawn Klinghoffer and Elizabeth McCune write. “In particular, we landed on a new way of measuring thriving, at both work and outside of it, that goes beyond engagement only.” Microsoft defines thriving as being energized and empowered to do meaningful work. “This is the new core aspiration we have for our employees, one that challenges us to push ourselves every day so every employee can feel they’re pursuing that sense of purpose,” Klinghoffer and McCune write. “Our focus on thriving isn’t just about recovering from the impact of the pandemic or matching pre-Covid employee sentiment scores. It’s about coming out the other side and doing even better.”