Key KPIs to Employee Engagement Measurement
Subscribe to the NewsletterWhen employees of an organization or a company get engaged with their workplace, they feel more driven and motivated to do a good job. They try to put more and more effort into their job, which in turn results in massive growth and success for the company. But getting employees engaged with the workplace isn’t something easy to do. Employee engagement requires providing the right resources to support the employees in their respective roles, providing recognition for their hard work, and a great show of leadership from the higher-ups.
These days employee engagement has become highly crucial for keeping the employees inspired and connected. It matters for achieving company success, as well as, developing the skills of the employees to attain future goals. That’s why it is important for a company or an organization to understand how engaged their employees are in the workplace. Traditionally, specific surveys were used to measure employee engagement, but they are outdated now as they fail to reflect how modern employees operate. Those methods fail to show what they need and desire.
Employee engagement measurement in real-time can help companies achieve good results. It is just as important as measuring sales and finances. Understanding the perception and emotions of employees is paramount for maintaining an engaged and successful workforce and workplace culture. Getting your employees content and engaged will bring long-term success for the company.
What Are the Key KPIs to Measure Employee Engagement?
Evaluating employee engagement can be done in various ways. The most common way is to use surveys, but it’s important that you go through other effective measures too. Here are some things that you can adopt for measuring the engagement of your employees in the workplace-
1. Pulse Surveys
Frequent and short surveys are a substantial way of maintaining a consistent pulse on the environment of your office. You don’t need to make the process a complex one. You’ll just need to find a way of asking your employees 5 to 10 questions anywhere anytime about how they are feeling about their work and the workplace. If they want anything changed in the workplace or not.
Pulse surveys have been known to be a very popular method of surveying employee engagement among prominent business leaders. These people know the value of pulse surveys and how they can really be an effective method to boost employee participation. It will interest you to know that while the average employee survey is able to get about 30-40 percent response rates, pulse surveys get about 85% engagement.
2. One-on-One Sessions
A great way to measure employee engagement is to conduct one-on-one meetings with the employees. You can have hour-long meetings with your employees on a regular basis where each of them can have an informal chat with you. It’s a great way for you to understand and get a proper sense of what’s going on with your employees.
The advantage of this method is that you can collect proper and more personal feedback from your employees, as the meetings will be in person, and in a more safe space. You can get much more details about any issue that you or they will bring up. The key to this is to remove fear from your employees so that they can open up easily.
A survey conducted by the Harvard Business Review showed that executives of bigger companies complained that they were losing about 144,00 USD every single day because of poor soft skills. Gallup also states that about 70 percent of variance that exists in employee engagement is down to managers. Here are some crazy stats that really show the value of one-on-one meetings:
- If managers do not provide 1:1 meetings with their employees, then those employees will be about 4 times more likely to not be disengaged.
- 1:1 Meetings can be the main contributor to better employee retention and productivity.
- Employees who are able to get 1:1 meetings with their managers are about 3 times more likely to be properly engaged.
- 1:1 meetings can really be the difference between poor employee turnover and a great one.
3. eNPS
eNPS or Employee Net Promoter Score is one of the most simple and effective ways to measure employee engagement. It is a simple question that highly gauges loyalty. You might be happy at work, but the real question is if your employees will be willing to recommend your company as a good place to work at. By asking this question to your employees, you will be able to truly understand how engaged your employees are with the workplace.
The data gathered through this survey will only be useful if it is applied properly in the correct context. One thing that you ought to be aware of is that the simplicity of eNPS can throw people off a bit. However, it is important to understand that this survey method can be applied very effectively if you know how to do them properly. Here are some things that you ought to consider when employing this survey technique.
- Ask yourself why you are doing this
- Make sure that your eNPS scores are properly combined with the other metrics you have
- The results should be properly tied up with action
- Carefully evaluate benchmarks and take the context into consideration
- Ask why to combine eNPS with other metrics
- Tie the results to the action benchmark and consider the context
4. Exit Interviews
One of the great ways to collect feedback from your employees and understand what makes them feel engaged or what is holding them back from getting engaged is using structured interviews.
Even though exit interviews are quite common in most companies, one great thing that you can implement in your company is stay interviews. Here you will ask your employees what is making them feel happy and engaged with the workplace, and what is making them stay here. It will make you understand what you are already doing well in the workplace.
On the other hand, with exit interviews, you will be able to understand what you could have done better to improve your employee engagement system. Implementing both these things in the workplace will help you a lot in measuring employee engagement in your workplace.
It is absolutely essential that you conduct exit interviews in the proper manner if you want to get the most out of them. It is one of the most useful and best ways to make proper employee retention strategies.
The very first thing that must be mentioned here is that exit interviews should be done by a third party. This will completely eliminate the biases. The second most important thing to remember is that you should conduct exit interviews at the proper time. These interviews need to be conducted after the employee has taken his leave from the company. It is important to note that about 63% of the answers of these employees change when they give the interview to an outside third party.
The third point that we want to emphasize here is to make sure that you obtain detailed data about why the employee is leaving. It is important to ask why they are leaving in a manner that is open-ended and can be quantitatively measured.
The data that will be collected will reflect why employees are leaving. This data has to be properly tracked and the progress has to be measured. It will also come in very handy when we look into whether the employees were properly engaged or not.
It is very common for employees to leave if they do not feel engaged enough with their work. Therefore, when an employee is leaving, it is the perfect opportunity to ask them about how they found the office environment and whether or not it was engaging. This data can be used to improve upon existing workplace practices that may not be working properly in terms of employee engagement.
Why Do You Need to Measure Employee Engagement?
Being engaged with the workplace means your workforce is feeling inspired and empowered to keep doing good work. It also means how an employee will speak to others about their workplace will be very positive. You need to know that business teams that have highly engaged employees, experience a 59% lower turnover rate than the ones with less engaged employees. These businesses also have a 6% higher profit margin.
Also, teams that are highly engaged with the workplace are 17% more productive. So, you can easily see that employee engagement benefits the business and employees at the same time. When the higher-ups of a company know how to properly measure employee engagement, they can come up with better strategies that can amplify the gains of the company.
Here are some key reasons for measuring employee engagement-
Identifying Strengths and Problem Areas
Measuring employee engagement regularly can help you tackle specific obstacles that can become problems in the future. You will also be able to use engagement data to understand what’s going well and what’s not. Then you can make connections between your stronger and weaker teams to bring out the best from all.
Building Trust
If you ask for feedback from your employees while measuring employee engagement, it will show them that you care about how they feel at work and their opinions about the workplace and the job. You can prove to your employees that you are always there to listen to them, and you are eager to create the best possible experience for them in the workplace.
Helping Everyone Understand The Current Workplace Situation
You can share the data of your employee engagement measurement with your employees. It will help them understand what’s going on in the office, and what needs to be done to achieve a better result. It will provide everyone with the opportunities to contribute to a better workplace culture
Understanding Trends
You can understand what’s happening in the company by location, over time, team, or compared to the benchmarks of the industry. It will help you keep a pulse on where and how the company is progressing.
Opportunity for Improvement
Employee engagement measurements provide results that will help you develop your future plans months ahead. You’ll also be able to measure interconnectivity and social activities at work to increase the ability of the employees to find meaning at their work. Make sure to encourage your employees to keep track of their feelings and thoughts every week and speak up. It will help you understand where you need to improve in the workplace and will help you work on that.
Keeping the Positive Flow Going
You need to maintain positive energy flowing through the workplace. You can do so by keeping your employees engaged and feeling valued and appreciated for their hard work. Make sure to monitor your initiatives for employee engagement on a regular basis, and do everything that’s needed to maintain the positive flow in the workplace.
Final Verdict
There is nothing more important than getting your employees engaged with the workplace for the sake of achieving your desired growth and success for the company. Without measuring employee engagement on a regular basis, you won’t be able to find out what’s going on in your workplace. You need to know if your employees are properly engaged or not, if they are happy and content with their job, or not. You need to know all these as without a motivated workforce, you won’t be able to experience good results.
So, make sure to conduct employee engagement measurements regularly to understand what you need to do to create a better workplace, and get your employees engaged.