Measuring employee engagement - key metrics and strategies

Employee engagement is a broad concept that encompasses the relationship between a brand and its employees, the level of motivation and enthusiasm in the workplace, and the overall feeling your employees display for the work they do. Hence, employee engagement is one of the most important things you need to measure, improve and nurture in your organization.

Why? Enhancing workplace engagement is key to building a thriving employee collective and driving your company forward.

It is also a high talent retention rate prerequisite and can help you during recruiting. Employee engagement builds a powerful employer brand if nothing else.

OK, you understand the benefits involved here, so how do you measure and improve employee engagement? That's exactly what we'll tackle today. Let's dive in.

What are the key employee engagement metrics?

Before discussing concrete tips and best practices to increase employee engagement, look at key metrics first.

You can use all the data you collect to put it in the proper context and create actionable reports.

To collect relevant employee data and measure specific metrics, you'll need to use the right employee time-tracking software, survey software, rewards and recognition tools, and comprehensive human resources software.

With this in mind, the metrics you should be monitoring are:

Voluntary turnover. How many people are leaving the company voluntarily? Look at your HR software data for this number, put it in a specific time frame, and use data from exit interviews to find out why they're leaving.

Employee retention. How long do people live on average? Why do they choose to stay, and what are the major factors that influence this decision? Find out by conducting pulse surveys and interviews every year.

Employee absenteeism. Are people skipping work, or are they absent too often? Sometimes, they will have solid reasons, but sometimes it may be that they are not attending and are quietly leaving - your HR software will accurately track the absence.

Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS). Use the Employee Net Promoter Score to measure sentiment around your employer brand and whether or not your people would recommend you to other talented job seekers.

Employee satisfaction. Pulse surveys and face-to-face interviews are perfect for measuring employee satisfaction on an individual level. You can then organize the data into common symptoms and trends to tackle the problem directly.

When people are engaged with their workplace, they tend to stick around, have higher ENPS scores, and produce happier customers. All of these benefits should be visible in these metrics, and it goes without saying that if one of them is low, you need to make some changes.

So, let's look at the best ways to measure and improve employee engagement.

Start Using Pulse Survey

Keeping your hand on the "pulse" of your employee collective provides invaluable insight into their culture, their sense of employer brand, and how engaged they are throughout the year. However, that is only the tip of the iceberg.

The truth is that a pulse survey can uncover a vast amount of data that you can use to improve engagement and productivity and help your employees create a better work-life balance. So, what exactly is a pulse survey?

The pulse survey is a short questionnaire you send to your employees regularly throughout the year. Unlike a typical engagement survey, a pulse survey aims to capture data in real-time and stay on top of the general sentiment and level of engagement in the workplace.

Engaging your audience is all about the right tool.

In our modern day and age, it seems there is a tool and a piece of automation software for every need. While you can never fully automate employee engagement management and analytics, implementing the right tools can make the HR department's job much easier.

After all, if marketing, sales, support and operations can all use dedicated software, your HR specialists should be doing the same. The ability to collect and store feedback on a unified platform, track rewards and recognition, develop employee advancement programmes, and integrate the tool with other business tools is required when using employee engagement tools.

Promote and encourage two-way feedback

Honest, transparent, good-natured and timely feedback is the key to achieving many wonderful things in your organization. From improving productivity to better communication and cross-department collaboration, taking and providing feedback is one way to implement change quickly and effectively.

Feedback is also key to effective recruiting, and you can use recruiting CRM software to integrate feedback and turn it into actionable data for your customers or your recruiting process. This point ties into our previous one on how you can use the power of engagement to source the right people for your company.

Visualize data and create actionable reports

Last but not least, remember that measuring and improving employee engagement is an ongoing process. Therefore, your goal should be to analyze the data you collect on your employees throughout the year and visualize your findings in the reports that give you a comprehensive overview of employee engagement at every level and in every area.

You need to organize all the data neatly in visual reports to make it easy for your company's decision-makers to act on these insights with minimal back-and-forth communication. For example, the better the report on employee engagement, the easier it is to implement concrete changes quickly.