Employee engagement strongly influences company performance, retention, and productivity. To improve engagement, HR and company leaders must track employee engagement metrics. These metrics provide a well-rounded picture of your employees’ level of motivation, commitment, and satisfaction.
By tracking employee engagement metrics, you’ll know whether people are showing up to work with enthusiasm, participating actively, and giving projects their best effort. Tracking engagement is especially vital for remote teams, where managers aren’t directly observing people as they work. Without tracking engagement closely, they’ll miss out on opportunities to increase organizational success.
Employee engagement metrics serve as tools for enhancing the effectiveness of your workforce. We’ll explain how to track them as a routine part of your people management practices. Along the way, we’ll explore the top 10 engagement metrics to monitor, as well as how to respond to the data you collect.
Table of Contents
- The Importance of Tracking Employee Engagement Metrics
- Top 10 Employee Engagement Metrics You Should Measure
- How to Improve Employee Engagement Based on Collected Data
- How Primalogik Can Help You Track Engagement More Efficiently
The Importance of Tracking Employee Engagement Metrics
Let’s review some key statistics on employee engagement. Then, we’ll delve into why monitoring employee engagement metrics proves crucial to company success.
The Critical Need to Monitor Engagement
Today, just 34% of U.S. employees and 31% of those in Canada are actively engaged. What’s more, 16% are actively disengaged. “Globally, 31% of managers are engaged, compared with 20% of individual contributors,” Gallup adds.
At the same time, we’re faced with unprecedented opportunities to measure engagement continuously—and improve it in real time.
“At no other time have organizations had so much opportunity to measure and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of their workforce,” write Jennifer R. Burnett and Timothy C. Lisk in The Future of Employee Engagement: Real-Time Monitoring and Digital Tools for Engaging a Workforce. “Yet, when it comes to measuring and tracking employee engagement, most companies still evaluate engagement on an annual, or longer, basis.” Employing a range of methods for studying different aspects of engagement continuously—and responding promptly to this data—is essential.
Effects of Engagement on Company Success
Tracking employee engagement metrics plays a key role in assessing workforce health. By tracking engagement, you can take steps to enhance it. Because engagement links closely to satisfaction, improving engagement leads to higher retention and a more positive workplace culture. Performance will increase as people become more focused, energized, and collaborative, too. Your company’s overall productivity and profitability will then increase in turn. Effectively tracking and improving engagement can reduce turnover by 81%, decrease safety incidents by 64%, and raise quality by 41%, says Gallup.
“Employee engagement serves as a predictor of a company’s ability to cope effectively with difficult situations,” write Malgorzata Baran and Barbara Sypniewska in the journal Sustainability. “ In their everyday functioning, more engaged employees are more efficient, creative, more likely to provide constructive criticism and question the status quo.” Engaged employees are also more adaptable, open to change, and committed to producing their best work, the authors add.
Top 10 Employee Engagement Metrics You Should Measure
Tracking the right metrics, in the right way, is critical to enhancing engagement. Here are some of the top ones to monitor.
1. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
Your employee net promoter score measures employees’ likelihood of urging a friend or family member to apply to work at your company. It’s typically rated on a 1–10 scale. You can take the average of all employees’ ratings to find your overall net promoter score. You’ll learn whether the majority of your employees are “promoters” (scoring 9–10), “passives” (scoring 7–8), or “detractors” (scoring 6 or below).
2. Turnover & Retention Rates
Observe turnover and retention rates as well. To calculate turnover, determine the number of employees who left during a given period of time. Then divide it by the average number of employees and multiply the result by 100 to find the percentage of turnover.
3. Absenteeism Rates
Absenteeism is a strong indicator of engagement. When employees enjoy showing up for work, it tends to decrease, and when they feel disengaged, it rises. (Bear in mind that outside factors such as a loved one’s illness could cause an individual’s absenteeism to temporarily increase, too.)
4. Employee Satisfaction
Employee surveys can measure aspects of satisfaction like these:
- How often they receive recognition and appreciation for their work.
- Their level of work-life balance (or burnout).
- Whether they’re satisfied with the support and coaching they receive from their manager.
- How they feel about their team and workplace culture.
- Whether they find their work meaningful and feel a strong sense of purpose.
- Whether they have a best friend at work.
The answers to these questions are subjective, but that’s the whole point—it’s about how employees feel. These questions explore the heart of the employee experience, so you can enhance it. You can also ask such questions within stay interviews to take a deeper dive into this topic.
5. Employee Productivity Levels
By setting and tracking clear goals, you can monitor employee productivity. After inputting goals and KPIs into a performance management system, you can measure progress toward them. This data will establish employees’ individual productivity levels.
6. Creativity and Innovation
Think outside of the box by using nontraditional KPIs to measure employee performance, suggests Gloria St. Martin-Lowry in Harvard Business Review. These include collaboration, participation in discussions, sharing of differing opinions, creativity, and innovation. For instance, look at how often an employee has shared outside-of-the-box ideas that the team then leveraged in projects. Such KPIs are signs of high engagement and stronger contributions to team efforts. Further, they highlight your star performers so you can nurture their growth, as St. Martin-Lowry points out.
7. Alignment with Organizational Goals
Strong alignment between individual, team, and organizational goals will foster greater engagement. People will feel more purpose-driven when they understand how their work supports the big picture. And engaged employees will typically have a better understanding of high-level goals, which helps them set appropriate personal objectives.
How to track goal alignment? Set cascading goals throughout your organization, and then monitor progress via goal-tracking software. If anyone gets off course, you’ll be able to quickly spot and address the issue.
8. Training and Professional Development
To what extent does each individual participate in training and development? Track how fully they take advantage of the opportunities presented to them. Also observe the quality of their efforts within such initiatives, through ratings they gain in training modules or follow-up conversations with a mentor.
9. Interpersonal Relationships and Communication
Use peer and manager feedback to track this KPI, through 360 feedback surveys. In these surveys, you can ask questions about how the employee interacts with others:
- How effectively does the employee collaborate with team members?
- Does the employee communicate project updates promptly?
- How fully does the employee participate in team meetings?
- Does the employee work to make changes based on feedback?
- Does the employee effectively meet deadlines?
The answers to these questions provide valuable insights on engagement. Peers tend to perceive engaged employees as more reliable, collaborative, and communicative than disengaged employees. Track them over time, from one quarter to the next, to measure progress in this area. The results will show whether employees are effectively engaging in personal development.
10. Internal Mobility and Career Growth
Track how often you promote employees internally (rather than recruiting managers and leaders from outside your company). These internal promotions signal to employees that they have a bright future with your organization. Monitor the ratio of internal promotions to external hires for these roles.
These 10 employee engagement metrics will provide a rich understanding of employees’ motivation and satisfaction. Establish a baseline for each metric—the current state, or status quo. Then, you can observe the degree to which any changes you make strengthen each dimension of engagement.
How to Improve Employee Engagement Based on Collected Data
Once you have collected this data, how can you leverage it to improve employee engagement? The exact steps you take will depend on your results, but here are several important areas to address.
Strengthen Manager Engagement
Engagement of employees depends on the engagement of their managers. So, to enhance their engagement, ensure that managers feel motivated to do their best work. Managers’ superiors should have regular conversations with them about how their work supports the company’s mission. Further, they should discuss managers’ career prospects and provide abundant opportunities to build their leadership skills.
Improve Workplace Culture
When managers foster a psychologically supportive culture, engagement tends to rise, assert Baran and Sypniewska. When employees feel a sense of ownership over their work, have the chance to actively participate on a team with a positive culture, and feel respected and nurtured, engagement will increase, they found.
Managers who adopt a transformational leadership style to enhance teamwork and individual development will successfully achieve these goals. By regularly emphasizing each individual’s role in achieving big-picture goals, thanking them for their efforts, and connecting them with mentorship and learning opportunities, they’ll make sure everyone feels valued and highly motivated.
Improve Employee Wellness
Reducing burnout and improving wellness also contribute substantially to engagement, as Emma Bridger says in Employee Engagement: A Practical Introduction. Taming the sense of overwhelm by reevaluating workloads, providing appropriate support, and modeling how to maintain work-life boundaries will support employee wellness.
How Primalogik Can Help You Track Engagement More Efficiently
Using a suite of performance management tools will help you to accurately track employee engagement metrics. Such software automatically monitors, analyzes, and reports on trends in engagement, such as degree of goal achievement. By monitoring 360 survey data, it will also reveal personal development efforts. Further, by launching regular employee pulse surveys, you can monitor satisfaction, the employee experience, and how they relate to engagement.
By tracking the 10 key dimensions of employee engagement, you’ll strengthen your teams’ performance, productivity, and quality of work. As you track engagement from one performance cycle to the next, you’ll observe how organizational initiatives affect it. In turn, you can continue modifying your management practices to motivate employees and enhance their experience.
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