How to Measure Employee Engagement with 3 Key Metrics

With prevalent burnout, high voluntary turnover, and work environments in constant flux due to the pandemic, fostering employee engagement is more important than ever.

Not only does employee engagement positively impact job satisfaction, customer or client relationships, and productivity, an engaged workforce means higher profitability.

Workplace leaders are investing in their workforce to create wins for all shareholders involved, especially now, when employee turnover rates and absenteeism is high.

In fact, by January 2021, employee engagement grew to 39% from 36% in 2020, and we'll see more efforts from business leaders as we continue to rethink work culture and retention.

As you dive into nurturing your own work culture and employee experience, check out these key metrics to benchmark your efforts.

Why you should be tracking employee engagement metrics

How your employees perceive the brand, the mission, or their teams all go back to employee engagement.  

According to Gallup, engaged employees are "those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace."

And tracking employee engagement kpis gives you a baseline for where your organization is in regards to work culture, and signals where you can make changes and grow.

Benchmarking against key drivers will give you an idea of your organization's overall health and your employee's resilience, meaning happiness and work satisfaction.

It will also open your perspective to new opportunities and potential goals with your team. Your team never stops evolving, and you might find surface opportunities for additional goals, like in wellness or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

With that in mind, here are three key metrics to benchmark a successful employee experience.

‍

Three Key Metrics that Signify Employee Engagement

Workplace Resilience

When you look at an employee's relationship with work and their ability to adapt amidst extreme change, like this past year in the pandemic, ADP considers this employee or workplace resilience.  It's an important marker that affects employee retention, especially when you look at average time with your organization.

It's a signal of a fulfilling equilibrium of work-life balance, and you should take note. Engaged employees find what they need out of their work, whether that's purpose, personal connection with teammates, a coach in their manager, or development opportunities.

To track employee resilience, human resources can conduct an employee sentiment survey to ask questions along a likert scale. The higher the number the stronger the belief:

• I have the freedom I need to get my work done.
• I have a healthy work-life balance.
• In the past week, I've felt excited to come to work.

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

In the same way that NPS tracks a customer's happiness with a brand, an employee net promoter score (eNPS) gives your workers an outlet to express employee satisfaction with the company. More satisfied employees are more likely to be advocates or fans of their company as a whole, and proudly share work opportunities to friends or on social media.

Using the same 1-10 likert scale, you can utilize a survey to ask:

• How likely are you to recommend this company’s products and services to others?
• How likely are you to recommend your company as a place to work?

Amidst the scale, you'll see variance in respondents divided between: promoters (positive, motivated employees), passives (neutral, content), and detractors (disengaged). Keep in mind also that eNPS is helpful but doesn't capture the full complexity of an employee's experience.

Employee Recognition

Employee recognition and benefits or rewards is part of the employee lifecycle. Not only is recognition a power tool that empowers employees to do their best work and that their contribution has purpose and meaning.

In fact, almost half of employees report that they’d leave a company that didn’t praise or thank them enough for good work. Bottomline: recognition is important, from managers and peers.

You can measure employee recognition by taking a sentiment survey with the likert scale and asking questions such as:

• My manager lets me know that my work is important.
• I feel like my work contributes to our team's mission.

Additional Metrics

Other signifiers such as absenteeism, turnover, and retention are hallmarks of employee engagement too. According to Inc. engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their companies than their less engaged counterparts.

High employee turnover rates or high absenteeism can signal needs for your employee engagement strategy.

How to measure and improve employee engagement

When considering your population's job satisfaction, a great way to measure is through the use of survey tools or HR employee experience platforms like Cooleaf.

Internally aka do-it-yourself

• Research employee sentiment surveys and draft your questions
• Consider whether you want to do a routine pulse survey to track progress or an annual sentiment survey
• Are you going to do a standard eNPS or create your own?
• Research and utilize platforms to email out your survey to your population
• Make sure to find a service that makes capturing the data easy for excel or Google Sheets
• Send out or schedule your survey and give a time limit for employees to complete your survey
• Send reminders as needed to get a good sample
• Close survey and look through results and opportunities in your data
• Track trends in gaps or where your team's excelling
• Create deck to present to your team
• Execute changes in programming or resources, give feedback to managers, research additional tools to help managers engage or recognize team members as needed.

Externally with Cooleaf

• Work with an engagement expert to discuss your organization's goals, execute the survey, incentivize employees to give thoughtful feedback, and to present data and find opportunities for future programming. Best of all, it's on one app.
• Cooleaf also tracks metrics like employee recognition, engagement, and performance metrics all on our platform. And engagement experts meet with you quarterly to discuss overall engagement and opportunities.

If you're looking for other ways to listen and measure engagement on your team, let us know! We'd love to chat with you.

‍