Engaged employees have a strong mental and emotional connection to their organisation, so it’s no surprise that they're on average 17% more productive and are less likely to change jobs than those who aren't.
If you want to improve employee experience and increase business revenue, measuring employee engagement provides the insight you need to implement meaningful changes.
The process of measuring engagement also has another set of benefits. Your employees will feel a greater connection to your business when you take the time to get to know them and take on board their feedback.
In order to measure employee engagement effectively, you must first choose what metrics are most meaningful to your organisation. These could include:
Now, measuring employee engagement can be a confusing process, so in this article, we outline reliable engagement metrics and discuss the tools you need to accurately measure them.
If employee engagement had a clear definition, measuring it would be much easier. When companies think of engagement, some define it as happiness, while others may view it as an indicator of how committed someone is to their goals.
Unfortunately, both of these interpretations in isolation won’t provide any meaningful insight into how engaged your employees are.
For example, someone can be happy at work — but because they don’t receive enough support from their line manager they won’t progress in their role.
On the other hand, another person could be achieving all of their goals, but have zero work-life balance. So they may actually be deeply unhappy.
That's why, to gain insight into employee engagement, you need to measure a range of metrics. It's all about getting a balanced view.
Our top metrics for measuring employee engagement include:
Everybody loves receiving recognition for their work, especially when they’ve invested a lot of time and effort into a project.
Ideally, your employees should receive some form of acknowledgement at least once a week — and it doesn’t need to come from senior management. In fact, peer-to-peer recognition is just as rewarding.
Asking your employees how often they’re receiving recognition, or if they think they’re likely to receive recognition is a great way of understanding how they feel about their position within your company.
If you want to grow a culture of recognition and reward, an employee engagement platform is an easy way of encouraging this.
Additionally the more people recognise each other, the more reflexive it becomes. Over time, this builds a solid foundation for inclusivity where everyone feels appreciated and valued.
It's become ever more obvious over the years that you must be mindful of the delicate balance between your teams’ professional and personal lives.
When people work from home, they may feel compelled to work longer hours, or lose track of time.
However, if many of your employees constantly burn the midnight oil, their wellbeing is at risk. So, it’s important to monitor how hard your employees are working and whether this routine is negatively impacting their personal lives.
It’s often easier to spot how employee engagement levels change within an office environment than when people are working at home. That's why checking in with your remote employees is especially important.
When a business has an excellent learning and development programme, they will attract the best talent and have better employee experiences.
Investing in your employees' professional development transforms them into ambassadors for your business and contributes to a strong internal brand.
Focusing your attention on the number of growth and development opportunities available to employees ensures they have a chance to showcase their talents and progress within your organisation.
Every organisation should have an inclusive work environment to retain their employees.
An inclusive culture is, at the bare minimum, a safe environment where everyone respects and supports each other. Moreover, you also want to create a sense of belonging among teams. This will lead to more transparent communication and allow you to solve issues proactively.
Employee feedback is key here. Asking questions about how safe and included your employees feel at work effectively measures the health of your company’s culture — and one way of doing this is with anonymous engagement surveys.
Introducing a perks and benefits package is a great way to motivate your teams and show them you care.
Before introducing a package or updating your existing offering, it’s important to ask your teams what they value in their current package. Are there any elements they'd like to update?
Their answers will give you valuable insight into what benefits they find most meaningful and help guide your decisions on the overall benefits strategy. When employees are pleased with their benefits package, they’re also more engaged and willing to go the extra mile.
So, now you understand what engagement metrics are important to your business, but how do you measure them? There are plenty of methods to measure engagement, but because there are so many, it's often difficult to know where to begin.
Fortunately, we’ve created a simple four-step guide to take you through the data collection and management process.
Before you create your engagement survey it's important to think about the types of questions you want to use.
We recommended a mix of survey questions including engagement outcomes and drivers. Feeling a bit confused? Here's a super quick breakdown.
Additionally, you should also consider the type of survey you want to run. An annual employee engagement survey, for example, is much longer and more in-depth.
On the other hand, pulse surveys offer a real-time view of how your employees feel — you could distribute a pulse survey every week, month or quarter.
To get a comprehensive view of employee engagement, you should aim to use a combination of surveys throughout the year.
Running an analysis between engagement outcomes and drivers will uncover interesting trends. These have the potential to influence your employee engagement strategy significantly.
Let’s suppose the most engaged employees also reported they were highly satisfied with their benefits package. This suggests that employee perks are a significant driver of engagement and that you should maintain or grow your offerings.
Alternatively, you may discover that most disengaged employees reported a lack of recognition. In this case, recognition also seems to be an important driver of engagement but is a poorly performing metric that requires improvement.
Additional data you can compare survey responses against include:
So, you've done the initial measuring engagement part. You've discovered a few trends that highlight areas that need your attention. What next? We recommend creating a long-term employee engagement strategy that contributes to your engagement goals.
First of all, you should check if the employee survey data aligns with your goals. For example, if your most disengaged employees reported a lack of recognition and support from their managers, you likely have issues within your culture. Therefore, your goal should be to develop and improve this throughout your organisation.
After taking meaningful action to address these pain points, you should follow up with regular pulse surveys to see if your changes are working.
Being transparent about your engagement survey results reassures people that you're serious about improving their employee experience.
Many employees will probably think about their answers long after submitting the questionnaire and take an interest in the outcome. So it’s important to be upfront about any engagement pain points, as well as the next steps.
Several types of questions reveal your employees’ level of engagement. Some relate to general engagement outcomes and drivers, whereas others are more specific and focus on how likely a person is to recommend your company to others.
Answer formats could follow the Likert scale, where responses range from strongly disagree to strongly agree, or a numerical scale from 1—5. The phrasing of the question may vary slightly depending on which method you choose.
These survey questions capture a snapshot of an employee’s state of engagement and how they feel about where they work.
They tend to reveal a person’s intent to stay, their pride in the business, and other attitudes and beliefs. Examples include:
These questions help employers understand what metrics are performing well and highlight areas needing improvement. Examples include:
eNPS score
An eNPS score indicates how likely a person is to recommend your organisation to their friends and family. In a way, it's a measure of loyalty, which indicates a person’s engagement level.
An example of an eNPS question is:
Employees respond on a scale from 1–10, with 10 meaning they’re highly likely to recommend their organisation to friends and family.
Plenty of tools measure engagement, but the tricky decision is understanding which one is best for your organisation.
While every organisation should survey their employees a few times a year to monitor engagement levels, they could also use:
If you have the budget you could also use software to analyse your employee engagement data. Usually, these programs include reporting functionality that cross-references survey results against your KPIs.
Additionally, these programs automate many administrative processes and allow for more data manipulation.
Giving your employees access to a range of perks and benefits not only boosts engagement but also attracts new talent to your business.
With our platform, your teams can access over 9,000 perks and discounts from some of the biggest brands in the world, including retailers, hospitality specialists, and entertainment venues.
Plus, with freebies they can treat themselves to a range of extras — such as coffees, meal deals, and streaming subscriptions — at no personal cost, all they have to do is redeem points against a free perk.
Because our solution is a global benefits and rewards platform, your teams can recognise each other on the go, wherever they are. Plus they can vote on topics such as employee of the month using the polls feature.
Employee engagement surveys are an excellent method of measuring engagement. However, we recommend combining them with other employee data points, such as absenteeism and turnover rate.
Any engagement analysis should include as many metrics as necessary to present an unbiased and accurate view. It's also important not to rely on one type of survey, so consider using an annual engagement survey in addition to smaller pulse surveys that run throughout the year.
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