How to Measure Workplace Engagement?

This article is all about employee engagement and how to measure it in HR. Engaged employees play a crucial role in the success of any organization. Employees who are actively invested in a company’s goals don’t just perform consistently. They also contribute new ideas, support morale, and look for ways to help the business grow. This is precisely why human resources teams must look for ways to measure employee engagement within their organizations.

Since it’s impossible to make the necessary changes without measuring the extent of the problem, I have prepared a top-three list of key performance indicators. They will help you assess engagement and learn where your organization stands, and where to make changes if necessary.

Top-three list of key performance indicators

1. Turnover rate.

   You can measure employee engagement by regularly monitoring the company’s turnover rate. Ideally, an organization should have an annual turnover rate of 10% or less, as higher annual turnover rates typically limit the return on investment.

   It’s useful to try to link the turnover rate to particular actions the company has taken to boost workplace engagement. For example, if an organization implements a new strategy to boost employee satisfaction, monitor the turnover rate to see if it has a positive effect.

   It’s important to realize that if your company has a low employee engagement, measuring the turnover rate will obviously not allow you to boost engagement among the employees who have already left.

   All it does is prove there’s a problem you must address. Thus, it’s necessary to find ways to improve employee engagement before others jump ship. The next KPI will help in this respect.

2. Suggestion boxes.

   Employees tend to be more engaged with their work when they feel that their voices are being heard. According to a survey by Career Builder, 48% of workers are less likely to leave an organization if they have a continuous opportunity to provide feedback, and if they can see that company leaders are acting on their feedback.

   Something as simple as a suggestion box or a digital feedback tool could not only help you get a better sense of how engaged your employees are but also create an environment in which engagement among workers is much more common.

   A company’s HR department should, therefore, coordinate with all office management and relevant team supervisors to develop a simple, easy-to-implement procedure for accepting employee suggestions and feedback.

   Keep in mind that if you’re going to implement this strategy, it’s very important that you actually use the feedback provided by your employees to make real changes. Employees may become even less engaged if they feel as though their suggestions have been ignored.

   While you can’t act on every idea, be sure to act on those that have genuine value.

3. Engagement surveys.

   Last but not least, KPI number three, . Never underestimate the value of employee surveys. They can yield useful insights when implemented properly.

   That said, your approach to distributing surveys shouldn’t be old-fashioned. Sending out an employee questionnaire is an outdated practice that doesn’t give your workers sufficient opportunities to offer instant feedback.

   Instead, opt for pulse surveys. A pulse survey tends to be short, and usually consists of no more than 10 questions. This allows your HR team to distribute them as often as once a week if you decide that would be helpful.

   Also, unlike most traditional employee surveys, a pulse survey usually focuses on one specific area you want to receive feedback on. For example, you could focus on whether or not your employees feel engaged.

   In this case, you might want to include questions such as do our employees feel they get recognition for their accomplishments? Or do our employees have the support they need from management to advance in the company? Next, create a scoring key for the survey to determine which survey results represent the feelings of an engaged, a neutral, and a disengaged employee.

   After each round of surveys, find out how many respondents fell into each individual category. This provides a clear set of data telling you whether your efforts to boost engagement are working. Again, research shows that whereas low employee engagement hurts your bottom line, high engagement can boost it.

   So taking steps to address this problem will yield major rewards in the long run.

That’s it for today’s article in which you’ve learned about the importance of employee engagement and which top-three KPIs you can use to best measure and then improve it.