Employee engagement
What are some of the best ways to measure employee engagement?
Start building your digital home with Happeo
Request a demoEmployee engagement
Product
Features
Solutions
Happeo for
Use cases
Resources
Explore
Support
Happeo For
Use cases
Comparisons
Explore
Support
Recent
Employee engagement has become a cornerstone for success in today’s workplace. Most companies have realized the importance of employee engagement and started making efforts to ensure employees are involved in their work and workplace. However, a Gallup survey showed that only 23% of employees worldwide are ‘engaged’.
This clearly indicates that either implementing employee engagement measures is lacking, or companies are not using the right methods to measure it. In any case, the way to improve is to first measure it correctly.
In this post, we are going to discuss the top way to measure employee engagement.
Employee engagement is the connection your employees feel towards their work and workplace. Engaged employees perform and behave better because they are satisfied with their work and happy with their workplace.
Read more: 18 proven employee engagement strategies for a thriving workplace
The challenge with measuring employee engagement is it is an intangible aspect. There are no direct tangible measures to tell you whether or not your employees are engaged. It can be measured tangibly using indirect metrics such as absenteeism rate, employee net promoter score, and turnover rate, or using qualitative surveys. Thus, the intangible nature and lack of direct KPIs and metrics make it difficult to measure employee engagement.
To measure employee engagement accurately, it is advised to measure it quantitatively and qualitatively. Have a look at the top three ways to measure employee engagement in an organization.
The most reliable and tangible way to measure employee engagement is to track employee performance metrics like employee absenteeism rate, employee turnover rate, and employee net promoter score. This helps you predict employee engagement by signifying key employee characteristics.
Here is a brief explanation of how these performance metrics work:
Employee absenteeism rate defines how frequently an employee takes unplanned leave over a specific period. A high absenteeism rate in a department of the company often signals employees disagreement and disengagement from work.
These employees will eventually leave the company if concerns are not addressed. Thus, you need to work on finding and resolving underlying issues.
Employee absenteeism rate is calculated as follows:
Absenteeism Rate = (Total Days Missed / Total Work Days Scheduled) × 100
Totally days missed: Total number of workdays that employees were absent due to unplanned reasons
Total work days scheduled: Total number of workdays available for all employees during the chosen time period (e.g., month, quarter, or year)
A good employee absenteeism rate typically falls around 1.5% to 1.8%!
Employee net promoter score is defined on a scale of 0-10, “How likely an employee is to recommend others working for the company?”
Scale: Employee
In an engaged environment, an average score of 9+ generally signals a highly engaged workforce. If you have low eNPS, it means there is a need for improvement in the company culture. You can conduct surveys and feedback sessions to find the underlying issues.
Employee turnover rate talks about the percentage of employees who leave an organization over a specific period typically expressed as a monthly or annual figure.
A higher employee turnover rate suggests employees have issues with the company culture or policies. They are so highly disengaged that they consider leaving the company.
To calculate the employee turnover rate, you can use the following formula:
Turnover Rate = ( Number of Employees Who Left/ Average Number of Employees ) × 100
A good employee turnover rate is generally considered to be around 10% or lower.
Read more: 7 formulas to calculate employee engagement ROI
The second most reliable way to measure employee engagement is to carry out employee engagement surveys: pulse surveys and annual engagement surveys. These are a great tool to get the ‘pulse’ of how employees are feeling.
Pulse surveys are short, frequent, and topic-specific surveys that can be carried out as soon as a project ends or some events happen. It is a great way to get quick, consistent, and actionable insights. It can include a set of open-ended and scale questions on current issues or company environment and leadership.
Annual engagement surveys are long, detailed, and holistic view surveys carried out annually to create a baseline for company policies and engagement initiatives. It includes asking 50-60 questions where you try to get an idea of whether or not the basic needs of employees are met, leadership and management support in engagement, and peer contribution in growth.
Gallup has identified the 12 elements of employee engagement and make up the Q12 survey. You can include these 12 questions in your annual employee engagement survey to create a comprehensive set of questions.
Create a quick pulse survey or a detailed annual engagement survey with Happeo AI-based engagement survey builder!
To get a comprehensive view and the right measure of employee engagement, it is necessary to have face-to-face discussions with employees. These discussions provide you with the opportunity to get deep insights into the status of employee engagement.
In addition to that, the non-verbal cues and the environment of the discussion groups provide you with a fair idea of the company culture. If employees are participating and raising their concerns, it shows you have created a good environment where employees want to engage.
You can conduct face-to-face interactions primarily in two ways:
One-on-ones include a meeting with an individual employee on what they feel about the company and what are their concerns. This helps build a strong and lasting relationship between employees and management but it is not always feasible to conduct one-on-ones. That’s why this type of meeting is conducted annually.
This is a more realistic approach than one-on-ones. You can choose representatives from various departments to gauge the company initiatives, culture, and engagement activities. This provides you with a diverse point of view on the areas of improvement and strengths.
Check out: 15 excellent employee engagement tools to invest in right now Measure employee engagement for success
Employee engagement is a direct measure of organizational health. Well-engaged employees perform better, loyal, and motivated. To boost employee engagement, it is important to first know where you stand as an organization. Using the right metrics and engagement measures, you can measure employee engagement accurately which provides you with the right picture of the organization, whether it is bad or good!