Do you think you know how to get the best from your team? Or do you know?
What impact do your investments in employee development have on overall workforce productivity? Who stands out as your leading performer? How can you inspire and enable the rest of your team to reach similar heights of achievement?
Employee engagement is the holy grail of HR. High levels of employee engagement lead to high levels of productivity, employee satisfaction, and talent retention. And unfortunately, if your engagement levels are low, you’re going to have lower productivity, more frustration in the workplace, and high rates of turnover.
As critical as it is to your organization, the impact of employee engagement is difficult to measure. Unless you’re a very small business with only 2-5 employees, measuring employee engagement is a challenge as well. It’s clear that small, mid-sized, and large businesses alike need to have reliable methods to gather data about their employees’ experience.
A number of tools have been developed to measure employee engagement. Let’s take a look at these tools as well as a few impressive case studies that highlight what you can achieve when you invest in your organization’s most important asset–its employees.
Benefits of Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is about more than just happiness and satisfaction. It’s also about productivity and commitment.
Kevin Kruse, Forbes contributor and CEO of LEADx, says “Employee engagement is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals.”
When an employee is engaged in their work, they are committed to more than just earning a paycheck. Engaged employees are often happy and satisfied, but they also feel like there is value and purpose to their work.
That’s why an engaged employee will pick up overtime without feeling overworked, put in extra effort to help clients or customers, and contribute to the positive work environment that you are trying to build.
Workplaces with high levels of engagement experience significant benefits. Outcomes are better in almost every area of the company!
For example, high employee engagement results in decreased rates of the following problems that plague many workplaces:
- Absenteeism
- Turnover
- Burnout
And it leads to an increase in the following vital areas:
- Productivity
- Growth
- Customer satisfaction
- Employee happiness
- Brand reputation and loyalty
- Retention
- Creativity and problem-solving
How Do HR Analytics Tools Measure Employee Engagement?
Analytics tools can help you gather valuable data and insights about your employees and their levels of engagement at work.
Let’s take a look at the guidance that some of the world’s leading employee engagement platforms have to offer about how to make this work.
Dos and don’ts of measuring employee engagement
Quantum Workplace offers survey software to gather an impressive number of insights. Their survey system includes three kinds of surveys:
Engagement surveys (which give you a big picture overview of your employees’ engagement)
Lifecycle surveys (which you can use to explore key moments in employees’ experiences)
Pulse surveys (which provide you with immediate feedback on important topics).
Aaron Brown, the Senior Insights Analyst at Quantum Workplace, wrote an article about how to gather employee engagement data that can be used to make improvements and strengthen your work culture.
You can read more here, but these are some of the key takeaways.
What you SHOULD do when evaluating employee engagement:
- Ask questions that actually help you determine your outcomes.
- Figure out what is important to your employees, and make sure your survey covers a wide range of issues that your team members care about. Examples include: teamwork, trust in leadership, career development opportunities, communication, change management, confidence in what comes next, wages and benefits, and value and recognition.
- Perform a driver analysis to find out where your strengths and weaknesses are as a company.
- Develop a “continuous listening strategy,” in which you use a combination of survey strategies to gather information consistently–and with the intention of acting on what you learn!
What NOT to do, according to Brown:
- Don’t limit your feedback to instantaneous pulse surveys. An annual engagement survey will give you more effective markers for measuring engagement over time.
- Don’t just sample a portion of your employees for your surveys. This skews the results.
- Don’t overlook the qualitative results. Quantitative isn’t everything. Comments are just as important as numbers.
- Don’t send out a “satisfaction survey” and neglect to include meaningful engagement metrics.
- Don’t limit yourself to surveys as your ONLY way to increase engagement levels.
Employee engagement measurement strategies
Contact Monkey’s mission statement reads: “We’re on a mission to build a highly-engaged, connected, and productive workforce. We’re committed to empowering our employees and serving our customers.”
They do that by creating internal communications software that integrates seamlessly with Google Suite and Microsoft Outlook. This includes:
- A drag & drop template builder
- Solutions for real-time, two-way conversations between employees and managers
- Data-based internal communications strategies
Mariya Postelnyak from Contact Monkey published an article called “How to Measure Employee Engagement: 10 Key Strategies.” Although you’re welcome to read the whole article for additional context, her main strategies are as follows:
- Make sure you know what your goals are
- Use internal email engagement to gather insights
- Use pulse surveys to gather real-time data
- Calculate your eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score), which gives you insight into how likely your employees are to promote your company
- Schedule virtual 1-on-1 meetings with your employees
- Use focus groups
- Look at your employee retention rates for insights
- Track productivity over time
- Find out what your employment absenteeism rate is
- Use an exit survey for departing employees
What to measure when looking at employee engagement
Sparkbay says their mission is “to help companies thrive by making work better for their people.” They do this by focusing on employee engagement.
Neya Abdi from Sparkbay repeats a lot of the same advice as our other two featured software companies, but she also adds some important information about what kinds of engagement to measure.
Specifically, Abdi says to measure employee engagement by learning how employees feel about the following issues:
- How they align with the organization’s strategy
- Whether or not they feel recognized for doing a good job
- If there are enough opportunities for professional and personal development
- Relationships between managers and employees
- The strength of their relationships at work
- How much autonomy they have
- If they feel a sense of accomplishment for their work
- Their level of compensation
Additional HR Analytics Tools to Check Out
Quantum Workplace, Contact Monkey, and Sparkbay are certainly not the only HR analytics tools that you can use to measure employee engagement levels. Here is a list of options that you may find useful as well:
- Lattice
- Bonusly
- Vantage Circle
- Leapsome
- Motivosity
- Workvivo
- Fond
- Cooleaf
- Qualtrics Employee Experience
How to Choose the Right Analytics Tool for Employee Engagement
With all these options to measure employee engagement, it can be challenging to know where to start.
Our advice is to integrate HR benefits with mid-sized company software and to choose tools that are relevant to your specific needs, aligned with your budget, flexible as you grow, and easy to integrate into your existing software infrastructure.
Real World Examples of the Impact of Employee Engagement
A Harvard Business Review article titled, “Competing on Talent Analytics” explores a comprehensive study across several major US companies, focusing on the crucial link between employee engagement and a company’s financial performance.
The idea of engagement as a key to HR success isn’t new, but its tangible impact has often been elusive. The research highlights how certain organizations have managed to quantify the financial impact of a minor 0.1% boost in employee engagement at specific outlets.
For example, Best Buy saw a remarkable increase of over $100,000 in its annual operating income for each store with just this slight improvement in engagement.
This significant finding prompted Best Buy to update its engagement survey frequency from yearly to quarterly, emphasizing the substantial influence that a deeper understanding of employee engagement can have on a company’s bottom line.
Further insights into this relationship are detailed in the complete article.
Europe HR Solutions–Providing Our Clients with HR Support & Guidance
At Europe HR Solutions, one of our main priorities is supporting our clients as they navigate the complexities of HR and employee management.
We can help you choose and integrate an HR analytics tool for measuring employee engagement. Or we can do your engagement surveys and other strategies for you, using the excellent engagement analytics tools at our disposal.
Outsourcing your HR services is a great way to make sure that your processes are current and up to date with all the best practices in HR, employee engagement, and more!
