Employee Engagement Metrics

The current situation has placed workers in a scenario where employees have to deal with the temporary suspension of direct supervision with the rise of remote work and free virtual business addresses. This is even a time to take employee engagement more seriously. Why? An engaged employee is said to be someone that can be trusted in terms of competence and consistency when it comes to project execution. Employees who can completely go above and beyond to execute his/her duties to ensure the optimum delivery of results are said to qualify as engaged employees.

As reported by Gallup, businesses with highly engaged employees tend to outsmart their counterparts by 147%. Similarly, this report also concludes that an estimated 87% of employees worldwide are not engaged. So, how do you determine whether your company is threading on the right part of employee engagement and operational metrics? This is where measuring your employees' engagement comes into play. This is the only way to keep your A-players while reducing employee turnover.

What is Employee Engagement?

Whenever an employee is engaged, he/she is said to exhibit certain traits or characters to help the organization succeed. An engaged employee is driven by commitment and determination. These categories of workers always fond of putting the best effort toward achieving the organization's goals. This type of individual believes in the organization, and they still work tirelessly to ensure that the organization succeeds in all ramifications.

Employee engagement is, however, different from employee satisfaction. A satisfied employee will not go the extra mile to achieve the organization's success. Still, they are the ones that perform their assigned tasks competently without expending their time and effort. When it comes to job satisfaction, it is said to be transactional. You can consider improving employee service awards and motivating your employees to raise engagement.

Employee engagement, on the other hand, is not transactional. This means that an employee that gets the highest salary might not necessarily be termed as an engaged employee.

Why is Employee Engagement Essential?

The engagement of your employee plays a significant role in an organization and its success as a part of KPI. Why? As reported by Gallup, an organization with engaged employees tends to outperform its competitors.

Here are the few reasons why employee engagement is essential:

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Engaged employees are determined to go above and beyond to offer excellent services to their customers. They are the ones that are motivated to perform their roles and duties to the best of their abilities.

For instance, an engaged employee is a computer programmer who expended both time and effort to get rid of bugs from their client's program. Another typical example of an engaged employee is a salesperson who goes above and beyond to walk a new customer through their inventory of product, or a retail clerk to help customers solve their purchase issues, no matter how long it takes.

When customers are offered exceptional services, chances are that they tend to return. Also, they tend to recommend your services to their friends and families. This, in turn, increases the loyalty of those customers to your company.

Better Productivity and Efficiency

As mentioned earlier, engaged employees are always searching for the best ways to deliver their services towards achieving the organization's goals and employee time trackers can be used for this. This is precisely what motivates them to provide excellent services while not sacrificing timely delivery for accuracy.

An unengaged employee is the ones that simply come for their paycheck, knowing fully well that they have only offered the least amount of input to the organization. On the other hand, engaged employees are always determined to oversee that their efforts are already yielding positive results even if they are working remotely.

Reduction of Staff Turnover

This is exactly a factor that distinguishes between employee engagement and satisfaction. Whenever an employee is satisfied, he/she will be open to taking more projects provided that they'll be offered a raise in their salary.

Statistics revealed that employee retention often amounts to a challenge in an organization. 81% of business organizations recognize staff turnover as one of the costly problems.

Whenever an employee leaves an organization, it could lead to disruption in several ways. This usually amounts to a huge cost on the part of the organization, while many of their clients might be left unsatisfied. This is because replacing a lost employee could cost up to 40% of a salary.

Engaged employees will never want to leave their roles in an organization as they are always determined to help the organization attain success. They are not always driven by the temptation to search for other tasks. Why? This is because they are emotionally and mentally connected with the functions they are already handling in their current organization.

Employee engagement often results in increased staff retention, specifically when it comes to the top performers in that organization. This is one reason why employee engagement has continued to gain much-needed relevance, considering the modern-day hyper-mobile workforce.

Reduction in Employee Absenteeism

Measuring employee engagement is a surefire way to eliminate truancy at work. An engaged employee will never want to miss coming to work. This is their habit as they believe in their input to your organization. When you measure employee engagement using attendance tracking software, you'll be able to fish out the truants and the lazy ones in your organization.

Increased Business Outcomes

According to Gallup, companies with engaged employees reported a 21% increase in profitability and were scored 17% higher in terms of productivity. An engaged employee will always want to work harder towards delivering a better job. This helps to increase customer satisfaction as well as loyalty. Ultimately, this brings a great deal of value to your organization.

Through their hard work, dedication, and commitment, engaged employees increase your profitability leading to innovation within their team, department, and organization in general.

Employee Engagement: How to Measure Properly

Pulse Surveys

One of the effective ways to measure your employee's engagement is through feedback and listening tools. And a typical example of that is the pulse survey. Measuring your employees' engagement through a pulse survey allows you to send a brief, which usually contains one or two questions.

These surveys are sent to employees frequently to gauge how employees are feeling. They can be sent or distributed on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. For the employees who do their best, you can give glass awards, as a great way to motivate them and the rest of the team.

The questions usually border on gauging the happiness of your current employees. Besides, it also provides you with an immediate snapshot of the mood of your entire workforce. In some cases, these surveys are also aimed at exploring employees' happiness at a greater depth. These surveys should focus on the following metrics:

• Alignment: This measures the level of motivation your employees have developed in terms of achieving your mission and goals as an organization. It also helps to determine whether your employees are only coming to work just to request for a paycheck at the end of the month.
• Satisfaction: This refers to the level of acceptance of your employee when it comes to handling assigned tasks. How pleased are they to handle those tasks? How comfortable are they with the working atmosphere, benefits, remuneration, supervisor, and many more?
• Future Orientation: Does the employee foresee a greater future for your company? Or probably he/she sees herself leaving your organization for somewhere else in a few years? When measuring your employees' engagement through pulse surveys, you must ask open-ended questions. Examples include: What's your perception about work today?. You can also incorporate single-click questions to present a series of faces from dissatisfied to neutral to happy. After answering these questions, you can implement some ways to reward employees and level up their motivation.

Employment Turn Over Rate and Absenteeism

Turnover rate is an employee engagement metric that measures how employees are leaving your organization for somewhere else over a defined duration. Engaged employers always show up at work while also putting the best of their efforts.

When you closely examine trends in the rate of increase or decrease of your absence rates and turnover rates, it is an excellent indication to gauge your employee engagement. Unfortunately, this metric indicates a lag in your level of employee engagement.

As reported by market survey, companies and organizations should aim for an annual employee turnover rate of less than 10%. Of course, employee turnover can benefit an organization in some cases. This might be in terms of the overall development of your organization or fast-track a radical change in your organization. Above all, an abnormal increase in employee turnover rate could negatively affect the return on investment (ROI) of your organization.

In some cases, increased absenteeism and employee turnover rates in certain departments or among specific teams could indicate the need for an improvement in employee experience in those departments. More so, if some of your employees are often absent from work without genuine reasons, the activities of the remaining members of the team could be hugely affected.

How do you improve your employee absenteeism and turnover rates? Understand the source of motivation in your employees. Devise some strategies to know what motivates them to perform their task diligently and ensure that these motivations are continually being met. Programs like employee of the month can elongate their time in the organization. The coworking industry has seen increased popularity in recent years, and the pandemic has just made this growth even faster. Many of them are coming up with creative marketing ideas to capture additional members. The thinking is that additional members can make for a highly collaborative environment, which benefits everyone.

Employee Net Promoter Score

This is considered one of the simplest and most useful metrics to measure employee engagement. Employee net promoter score simply involves seeking your employees' opinions to determine whether they'll love to recommend working at your organization to friends, families, or colleagues. Statistics suggest that only 49% of workers would recommend their employer to a friend.

The employee net promoter score is usually on a scale of 0-10. While net promoter score of 6 or less is categorized as a "detractor," getting a 7 to 8 is considered as "positive," and 9 and 10 are considered as "promoter."

You can place your employee on a survey and ask them this question. Would you recommend our organization for your friend, family, or colleague? Deduct the detractors from the promoters. And Voila! You'd get your organization's net promoter score. While a negative score means that your current employees do not recommend your organization as a place to work, a positive score is a perfect reflection of good employee engagement.

Stay Interviews

This is usually an alternative to exit interviews. Instead of waiting for an employee to leave your organization before asking them why they left, you should consider powering a conversion before they decide to leave. This is known as stay interviews.

Heads of organizations usually conduct Stay interviews by scheduling one-on-one meetings with highly valued employees. In these conversions, they discover what the employees like about their organization.

Apart from that, they also discuss the issues regarding the career objectives of that employee and their plans to bring about a radical change in their current professional situation.

Final Note

Measuring your employee's engagement is undoubtedly a challenging task. It all begins with devising the strategy, coming up with the questions, designing the questionnaires, and ensuring the response of your employees. All these are the inevitable parts of measuring your employee engagement.

As a human resource professional, asking the right question is as impactful as possible to your organization. Instead of resorting to a one-size-fits-all approach, you can simply launch a focused initiative that is driven by data while focusing on the most critical areas that need improvements in your organization.