While effectively measuring employee engagement at your organization can be a challenge, it’s undeniably important. Low engagement costs the global economy $7.8 trillion every year.
Yet, with so many businesses turning their backs on DEI initiatives—which are proven to boost engagement—is employee engagement really still a priority?
Prior to the pandemic, employee engagement and well-being had been rising globally for almost a decade. Now, they’ve stagnated.
Just a fifth of employees are engaged at work, and only a third are thriving in their overall well-being.
Work now feels pointless to many and they don’t feel hopeful for their futures. I mean, can you blame them? Given the current state of the world from every direction?
Businesses need to be mindful of the impact engagement can have on their bottom lines, and how both company culture and external factors can impact employee engagement and productivity.
Failing to consider these factors means risking a decrease in employee engagement, innovation, productivity, and profit.
Which is risky, when you consider that engaged employees lead to a:
- 10% jump in customer satisfaction rates
- 17% productivity bump
- 20% sales increase
- 21% profitability boost
- 31% reduction in absenteeism
To be able to improve your employee engagement rates you need to measure them, though. How do you do that?
Here are our tips for measuring employee engagement:
Automate feedback
Automation is a key part of making your, and your employees’, lives easier.
When it comes to measuring employee engagement, if you automate it, there’s no forgetting to send that feedback survey or not having enough time to do so. The right tool can do it all for you. So you can collect more data in less time.
Want to automate your employee feedback surveys? Check out Workrowd. We can help you send automated, bite-sized surveys so that it’s easier for you and your employees to discuss what’s happening in your business in real time. And did we mention we can automatically analyze the results, too?
Make feedback opportunities bite-sized
The more effort you make something for someone—especially a busy employee—the less likely they are to do it.
Think about those feedback surveys you get from a coffee shop or doctor’s office that say they’ll just take ten minutes for you to complete. How often do you actually want to fill them in? And how often do they offer some sort of reward/prize to incentivize you to do it?
Yeah, that’s so that you focus on the reward not on the effort you’ve got to put in to fill it out.
Sure, one-time, in-depth answers can be useful. But if you collect data regularly, you’ll get more actionable information because you can spot trends more quickly.
Meaning you can pivot faster if something’s going wrong or capitalize on what’s working quicker.
Little and often can be much more effective than one and done. Especially when it comes to measuring employee engagement.
Combine data points from a variety of sources
Imagine you’re collecting employee feedback on your company culture and want to improve response rates. Consider:
- Reaching out to people from multiple teams—and following up if a particular team has a disproportionately low participation rate
- Requesting feedback more often—to obtain more real-time data
- Getting feedback from people throughout the organization, not just at a particular level or in a particular role
To get even more useful data throughout the year:
- Ask for feedback on multiple initiatives rather than just one or two
- Include employees in decision-making processes (or at least ask what they think of certain decisions so that they feel heard and valued)
The more data you have, the more in-depth your results will be and the more useful they’ll be for measuring employee engagement.
Make data collection ongoing
Many companies still send one large feedback survey per year. This allows them to track changes over several years.
But in the modern world, where things change so quickly, is yearly enough?
When you make data collection an ongoing initiative, you get an evolving, holistic picture of employee sentiment, rather than a point-in-time snapshot. Meaning the data you get is more accurate, precise, and actionable.
So you won’t just be measuring employee engagement for appearance’s sake. The data you collect can actually lead to positive changes across your organization.
Leverage tools
The right tools are a key part of any digital employee experience. They’re also key to measuring employee engagement. If you want to collect actionable data that can help you drive change within your business, having the right tool is even more important.
Using Workrowd, surveys will automatically go out after employee initiatives to see how team members feel in real time. You can set them to go out after certain milestones, too, and the software will analyze the results for you. That way, you don’t have to rifle through all the responses to find the data that matters.
Instead, you get more time to spend improving employees’ working lives and supporting your organization.
Conclusion
Employee engagement is a key metric that can foreshadow challenging business times, or help you adapt to upcoming challenges. High employee engagement can mean that it’s easier to weather storms, while low engagement is a sign of stormy seas ahead.
Measuring employee engagement is therefore vital if you want to be able to successfully navigate the modern business world. It shows your employees that you support them and listen to them, as well as helping you see how your decisions impact your employees in real time.
If you want to collect more feedback with less work, check out Workrowd. You can automatically send surveys and view the results once they’re already analyzed, meaning you have more time to drive change and support your employees. Get in touch today to book your free demo.
