It goes without saying that practically every employer wants workers who are fully committed to their role and strive to do the best that possibly can.
After all, having good employee engagement is essential for any business to succeed. Good employee engagement means having staff members show up to work every day and work to their full potential. Engaged employees are happy in their job, and their positive attitude will be displayed in their work ethic.
There are many benefits of having a high employee engagement at your company. An engaged workforce means a more productive work environment, a lower turnover rate, less money spent on training new hires and, consequently, higher profits.
While the idea of having high employee engagement is great, in order to figure out whether your company has a good rate, you’ll need tools to measure engagement. Fortunately, we have come put together six simple steps that you can implement into an employee engagement strategy and/or use to help measure employee engagement in your workplace.
1) Set Clear Benchmarks to Measure Employee Engagement
The first step to successfully measuring employee engagement is setting clear benchmarks. To do so, you’ll need to find out exactly what is needed from your team in order for their productivity to reach their full potential. A good way to start is by devising your company's employee net promoter score which is an equation that involves ‘promoter’ employees and ‘detractor’ employees.
Put simply, this is the process of seeing which employees enjoy working for the company (promoters) and which aren't 100% happy with their role and/or the company (detractors).
Promoters are the employees that are positive at the workplace, are not likely to take time off work and are working towards achieving a better position in the company.
Next, find out which staff members are detractor employees. Detractor employees are those that have negative attitudes, do the bare minimum and generally don’t seem very interested in their role. These are the staff members that call out of work regularly, tend to complain about daily tasks and show up to work unprepared.
Lastly, figure out which employees would be considered neutral or passive. These are employees that would not fit in either category and fall somewhere in-between the two other categories.
After categorizing your employees, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters (leave the passive employees out of the equation).
An example of this would be if 15 per cent of your employees are detractors, 30 per cent of your employees are promoters and the remaining 55 per cent of your employees are passive. You would take the 30 (promoters) and minus 15 (detractors) and the score would be 15.
Any score that is above zero is considered good because there are more employees who are engaged (promoters) than there are detractors. If your score is over 20 it is considered a very favourable score, and a result like this normally coincides with a successful company. A score over 50 is considered to be in the excellent range and above 80 would be considered exceptionally good and is extremely rare.
2) Conduct a Survey Focused Specifically on Engagement
Conducting an employee engagement survey for your team is a direct way to find out exactly what your staff's overall attitude towards the work environment is. These should be conducted at least once a year and will set a benchmark for your team’s engagement. Businesses can then use pulse surveys throughout the year to recalibrate their benchmarking.
The surveys should be very clear and include direct questions that focus on your employees well being. A good way to make these surveys would include a set of questions that are answered with a 1-4 scale from poor to excellent.
Employee engagement surveys should have questions should be focused on your company culture and allow for employees to feel as though they have an open line of communication. This will help your HR department see if there are any trends within the company, like if a number of employees all feel that they are undervalued, or that they all really enjoy specific aspects of their job.
By attaining this information, it becomes easy to recognize what needs to be worked on within the company or team, and what is working well. For more information on conducting these surveys that are specifically focused on employee engagement please click the link below.
3) Schedule One-on-One Meetings
One of the most common reasons that an employee becomes a defector is when they feel unheard and undervalued. A great way to counter this is to conduct one on one interviews with staff members which allow every employee to have their voice heard and to feel appreciated.
The frequency of these interviews depends on your company. However, we recommend holding them monthly, or quarterly in order to effetely keep your staff's concerns voiced. If members of your team are working remotely, it is encouraged to conduct these interviews more regularly, due to the lack of in-person interactions that occur in an office environment.
During these interviews, it is imperative for the interviewer to ask direct questions concerning the employee's point of view on aspects of the company.
If possible, it’s recommended that the one on one meetings are held in a casual setting because this will help to make the employees feel more relaxed, which allows for them to open up more easily.
Usually, a manager or HR team will conduct these members. It’s important for the meeting leaders to ensure that they pause after asking each question so that the employee is given enough time to answer the question thoroughly. It’s also a good idea to include mostly open-ended questions. By doing this, employees will have to explain their answers, giving them the opportunity to voice their concerns or compliments on the company.
4) Use Retention Interviews and Exit Processes
Conducting stay interviews (or retention interviews) and exit interviews is another great way to find out how to keep your team fully engaged.
A retention interview is conducted with an employee who is currently working for the company. The main purpose of a stay interview is to find out what an employee likes about the company and their current role and what they think can be changed for the better.
Like the one on one meetings, these meetings should have open-ended questions and be held in a casual setting so that employees can be encouraged to voice their concerns truthfully and openly.
Exit interviews are very common, and are used to determine why the employee left the company, and whether the reason is something that can be changed in order to retain more current employees.
These interviews are usually done towards the end of the employer’s tenure, rather than on the day they turn in their notice. It is recommended that the interviews are not conducted by a departing employee’s daily manager, in order to avoid bias and give the worker the opportunity to speak honestly and openly about their team.
The questions asked in these interviews should cover why the employee is leaving the company, what they would change in the role (and within the company) and what they enjoyed. The answers from these exit interviews can be used to ensure that the company can fix any possible problems, leading to an increased employee retention rate and increased employee engagement.
5) Collaborate with an HR consultant or moderator
When running a company there is almost always countless tasks on hand and it can often seem impossible to tackle every one of these. In order to lower your workload and get the most engagement out of your employees, we recommend collaborating with an HR consultant or moderator. These are trained professionals that specialize in making sure your staff is fully engaged within the company.
When working with an HR professional, they can provide you with an unbiased opinion on each of your staff members. This allows for bias to be removed and is invaluable information to understand which staff members really benefit the business. Once this is determined a HR professional can help devise a plan to increase employee engagement for specific individuals.
6) Listen and readjust benchmarks based on feedback
While the above five methods are very effective ways of measuring employee engagement, it's extremely important to continuously implement them, and analyse the results. These results can help you set benchmarks - or goals - about where you'd like the employee engagement level to be within your company, and determine what work needs to be done.
Link where possible to related employee engagement pages.
Measuring employee engagement with software and data
When measuring engagement and employee engagement levels it is important to utilize every possible tool on the market to help your company thrive. Conducting interviews and consulting an HR professional is a great way to find out what is going on with employees within your company.
However, just determining what the problems are is not enough. You need to use this engagement data to devise a strategy to boost employee engagement, this can be done by utilizing the correct computer programs.
There is now software on the market that will take your interview questions and identify trends within the company. These programs also do a great job of tracking employees of identifying their overall engagement through data that are determined from multiple tests and surveys.
It is important for your team to feel appreciated and accepted in the workplace in order for them to do their best work. Highly engaged employees will have higher productivity rates. An engaged team will also have a great financial benefit with lower employee turnover and make the workplace an overall more enjoyable place for employees.
Our team can help train your workers on an engagement strategy to improve employee engagement, give specific tips where needed, and/or make suggestions for software programs that can help your leaders.
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