Measure Employee Engagement to Improve Hiring Retention

Surveys deployed once a year are the most common way companies measure employee engagement.

Companies that want to gain the benefits of employee engagement–like increased productivity and retention–need ways of measuring engagement so they know that their methods are working and in what areas they may need to make adjustments and improvements. 

Data useful, but only if it is meaningful to overall objectives and shows accurately the ways in which engagement is both working and needs more work to be effective.

Currently, only about half of employers in one survey said they measured employee engagement at all, and 73% of those did so only with an annual survey of their employees. Others said they used exit interviews to measure engagement, but those results are unlikely to accurately reflect engagement levels of those still employed.

As with most important business objectives, having a number of ways to measure key metrics will be more effective than just one method, no matter how effective. Here are a few of the best ideas for measuring employee engagement effectively. Bear in mind that these can be adapted for use in a work-from-home setting if your team is now working remotely due to COVID-19.

–Survey employees more than once a year. Instead of just an annual survey, try surveying semi-annually or quarterly to get more frequent feedback and keep your finger on the pulse of changes in attitudes or perspectives that may occur. Employee engagement can sometimes change significantly in a short time, and you need to know if this happens.

–Consider social media engagement. The level of engagement your employees have on social media can be reflective of their engagement in their jobs. Sentiment analysis tools can look at social media and messaging tools like Slack to measure engagement from a different perspective from something like a survey, which may not get completely honest answers from some. 

Employees that have interpersonal relationships with co-workers are more likely to be engaged at work.

–Peer-to-peer interactions. One study found that employees with interpersonal relationships with co-workers were seven times more likely to be retained by the company. StarMeUp OS is one tool that can measure peer-to-peer relationships to see if they are at the level that will impact retention or whether more should be done to encourage these interactions and foster engagement.

–Talk to employees. Managers should be trained to have conversations with employees specifically about their engagement that will elicit honest responses. This will not happen overnight, but it can be done if employees feel that management cares about them as people and really wants to foster a better workplace environment. Talking to employees one-on-one is probably the best way to measure engagement in an authentic environment. 

Measuring employee engagement is not only important to see how you’re doing, but can also in itself increase engagement because it demonstrates that you care about it. The right kind of measurement will be another signal to employees that you sincerely care about whether they are engaged and how they are doing along the way. 

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