How do you measure employee engagement?
Knowing people are committed to your business should be more than just guesswork. Here’s how to measure and improve employee engagement in your organization.
Many things are easily quantifiable — like how many cups of coffee you drink in a day, or how long you spend commuting over the course of a year.
But employee engagement? Not so much. Because it’s more about attitudes and emotions and a range of factors can influence it. Even so, it’s still something worth measuring.
After all, highly engaged employees are generally more productive, proactive and creative. Here are some tips for measuring employee engagement.
Sharing frequent short questionnaires is a great way to gauge the general mood of your organization in real-time. The right communication tools can help.
Workplace by Facebook, for example, enables integrations with bots like a Mood Bot.
It sends a series of customizable questions to people via Workplace Chat and is a simple way to automate your mood questionnaire process so it becomes a regular part of your HR team’s activities
You can also use a Workplace Groups and keep it informal. Just one or two questions on a group poll could provide you with quick opinions on recent changes or help you collect ideas for improvement.
Staff turnover can be a good indicator of how employee satisfaction. If it’s high, you know you have a problem that you need to address.
It’s also worth breaking it down into different areas, such as age groups and gender.
For instance, is there a higher percentage of women leaving your organization than men? Why is that? Do you need to do more to promote gender equality? Building an engaged workforce will make it easier to retain valuable employees.
Your organization probably has a lot of big data at its disposal. Analyzing it is a direct way to track staff engagement levels.
Many companies now use people analytics to measure how many members of staff are doing extra work in their own time.
They can also tell you the number of network connections made beyond the immediate team as well as the percentage of time spent in meetings. All of this can give you interesting insights into staff engagement levels.
Data can give great insight into staff engagement levels
These are a more informal way to measure engagement. But they’re still useful in gathering feedback on which areas staff are most satisfied with and those areas where your organization can improve.
You can carry these out in addition to yearly performance reviews. Younger workers, in particular, say they would value more interaction with their superiors. Nearly 85% of Gen Y say they would feel more confident if they could have more frequent conversations with their managers.
Typically used to measure customer satisfaction, organizations are now using net promoter scores to measure employee satisfaction.
You ask people questions like: “On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend this organization as a good place to work?”
Organizations are now using net promoter scores to measure employee satisfaction.
Anyone answering 0–6 is a detractor, 7 and 8 passive, and 9–10 a promoter. To calculate your NPS, simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the promoters. If your organization scores anything over +10 you’re doing well but a score of +75 to 100 is world class.
It’s all very well measuring employee engagement, but what do you do with the results? Consider these three questions:
- Who will be responsible for following up the staff engagement results?
- What action will you take in light of the findings?
- How will you put this action into practice?
You can then use your answers to turn your engagement findings into positive improvements.
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Originally published at www.workplace.com.
