How to Measure Employee Engagement

Measuring employee engagement is no easy task due to the fact that employee engagement itself is difficult to define and nail down. Personal growth, happiness, satisfaction, recognition, wellness, and relationships are only a few of the most important metrics that you should consider in this context.

Every company will have a different way of measuring the engagement of its employees. Still, the probably most efficient and effective way is to go with pulse surveys and a simple 1 to 10 scoring system such as (e)NPS.

After that, one-on-one interviews are the best way to get the details about the results you obtained in the surveys and design an action plan for improving your score.

How and how often should you measure employee engagement?

What’s important here is to focus on improving your scores month in and month out. These surveys are easily implemented and collected, so setting smaller goals and measuring the impact of the changes you implement won’t take too much time, and it’s pretty straightforward to get done as well. However, they can have a significant impact on revenue. 

In addition to pulse surveys — which give you a concrete number to work with — there are other ways of measuring employee engagement that gives you an idea about what to work on and how. These include the one-on-one interviews we mentioned earlier, stay and exit interviews and the employee Net Promoter Score.

Employee pulse surveys

Most companies still focus on yearly or quarterly surveys, which are not very reliable for measuring employee engagement. They offer a glimpse into an employee’s current feelings, which is then applied to a considerable period (a quarter or a year). Basing a year-long strategy on this is not recommended since it does not offer a truthful and transparent overview of the employee's actual engagement. 

That’s why we suggest doing employee pulse surveys: short surveys that employees can complete in a couple of minutes, which means that you can seriously up their frequency without risking employees getting annoyed for spending half an hour filling in a questionnaire. The result will be a numerical value that gives you a quantifiable result and a tangible and practical number to act on.

However, to truly understand the engagement of your employees, it’s crucial that you actually talk to your employees. The best moment to do that is during one-on-one meetings: here, your managers can hone in on particularities and see what needs to change and which issues need to be addressed for the engagement to go up.

Pro Tip? You can easily design and send out simple pulse surveys through the Ambassify platform. This way, you don’t have to invest in creating your proprietary survey software, nor do you have the additional expense of using another third-party provider.

One-on-one meetings

Aside from performance reviews and other structured interviews, managers in your company should take the time to talk to employees about various aspects of engagement. These meetings should be less formal, and the employees need to be told that they can be as honest and as forthcoming as they want to be. 

Make clear from the start that the goal is not assigning blame but finding out which improvements can be done to facilitate, encourage, and drive employee engagement. Since these meetings are confidential, managers really get a chance to sit down with an employee and get personal. These meetings are a great way to show that you are invested and that you care. And this, of course, should go a long way toward proving to people that you’re interested in their personal growth, what they have to say, and in increasing their overall satisfaction with their workplace — all three very important sub-categories of the employee engagement metric.

Exit and stay interviews

One of the essential tools for measuring employee engagement is exit interviews: formal or informal chats with employees who are leaving the company to find out why they are doing it.

A similar and also effective tactic is scheduling interviews with the employees and finding out why they are still sticking around. Exit interviews are great, but, at that point, whatever you do might be a little too late.

These so-called 'stay interviews' give you a chance to have a frank conversation with an employee about what makes them want to contribute to the company. This is an easy and effective way to find out the company’s strong points and the things that need to be improved on as you move forward — and it shows you care about their opinions and about doing better and better.

Employee net promoter score

If there’s one thing that we at Ambassify obsess over, it’s the Net Promoter Score: a metric that helps you gauge how loyal your employees are and to what lengths they would go to promote your company.

It’s the ONE employee engagement metric you should focus on getting up, even if you’re not working on anything else.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company as an excellent workplace?

This is the question you should be asking, and getting anything below a 9 here is nothing to write home about — a score of 8 means that the employee is neutral, and anything below 7 means that they are an actual detractor.

If your employee NPS is low, don’t just ignore it and hope that it gets better. Actively seek out the reason/s why your employees wouldn’t recommend you. Ask them if they were to give a hypothetical 7 or less to answer this question; what would the reason be? 

Now it's time to act!

If you make your employees jump through hoops by filling out surveys and coming into interviews, and then decide not to act on what you’ve learned, you’re going to hurt employee engagement, which is the very thing you set out to improve. 

This is why after measuring employee engagement and having an idea of the points and issues your company should improve on, the next thing to do is act on it!

• Thank everyone for participating, and share the results. This gives the employees an insight into where you stand as a company and brings it a little closer to home when it zooms in on their department.
  
  
• Pick one or two sub-metrics to improve.You definitely won’t be tackling everything in one push since that’s a recipe for getting nothing done. Instead, focus on one or two metrics and work on improving them. 
  
  
• Make time for one-on-one meetings. Have managers randomly select employees to ask for advice on what to do to improve the outcomes of future surveys. Remember to keep everyone in the loop even after a course of action has been set.
  
  
• Repeat the process. Measuring employee engagement is not a one-off process. As we said, you need to keep at it and constantly compare your results to the previous months. That’s the only way to grow, implement changes, and cultivate truly engaged employees.

Now that you know how to measure employee engagement, are you excited about implementing the steps and allowing your employees to shine?