Employee engagement goes beyond feel-good programs or workplace happy hours. It’s a key business strategy that can impact employee retention and performance, but it can be hard to measure and pinpoint growth.
We know employee engagement is a must, but for the first time in 11 years, U.S. employee engagement rates dipped at the start of 2024. To get leadership buy-in and demonstrate employee engagement’s strong ROI, teams need a metrics-driven approach.
Teams wanting to address their employee engagement levels should look at metrics like workplace resilience, eNPS, and employee recognition. These give an authentic picture of your initiatives because you gather data with recurring employee feedback and surveys.
Many teams will issue an annual or quarterly employee survey on their own to measure sentiment. Alternatively, platforms like ITA Group's employee engagement technology measure key metrics within your employee engagement program in real time. Admins issue pulse surveys, track core value recognitions, and see participation rates in training or online activities.
Tracking growth helps you create a roadmap for a successful employee engagement program. More importantly, it keeps you in steady communication with your employee’s feedback.
Monitor employee engagement metrics through surveys
That feeling your employees have on Sunday evening, knowing they're coming into work tomorrow? That reflects your employee engagement. How your employees perceive your brand, its mission or their teams also reflects your employee engagement.
But how do you track employee engagement metrics? Through employee surveys. Employee feedback on specifically worded questions will gauge workplace sentiment, so you can measure the success of your employee engagement programming.
Workplace resilience, eNPS, and employee recognition measurements are key metrics to track employee engagement over time. These specific metrics are best measured by using questions on the Likert Scale, which measures attitudes or perception. I recommend using a scale of 0-10 with 10 being the highest or “most likely” end.
Many teams prefer gathering employee feedback on a quarterly or annual basis to avoid survey fatigue. This helps you keep in touch with the organization, but these surveys often have multiple questions for employees to sift through.
Pulse surveys are a great way to gather data throughout the year. These are short surveys with a handful of questions to gauge employee sentiment. They're designed to be succinct, so you can send them out more often, without exhausting your people for constant feedback. Be sure to use the same questions every time you issue your pulse survey, so you can set a baseline and monitor growth over time.
I love pulse surveys because they're to the point, frequent, and keep an open feedback loop with employees. Sending out a pulse survey around organizational changes, launches, busy seasons, or after in-person gatherings helps you keep an eye on your people.
Companies with high engagement take findings from their pulse surveys to benchmark responses surrounding key questions. Tracking responses and benchmarking results will help you discover new opportunities to engage your people.
Also, combining pulse survey findings with additional metrics like turnover rates or absenteeism gives a bigger story on your organization's health and employee engagement.
What metrics to track for employee engagement
According to Inc., engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their companies than their less engaged counterparts. It makes sense for significant metrics such as absenteeism, turnover, and retention to help companies understand their employee engagement. You can track many of these metrics with the help of your HR or acquisition team and measure it in a certain timeframe.
In addition to those data points, metrics like workplace resilience, eNPS, and employee recognition give a more detailed picture of what teams can do to build a strong company culture. Workplace resilience shows employee trust, eNPS gives you an idea of morale, and recognition tells you whether an employee feels valued at work or not.
Gather employee feedback around these metrics through pulse surveys or annual sentiment surveys to help your people feel empowered. Your employees can voice their opinions and be part of the process, so your HR or people ops team can offer new solutions to better serve your organization.
1. Workplace Resilience
Workplace resilience is a key metric that impacts employee retention, especially when you look at average tenure within your organization. What is this KPI exactly?
ADP says employee or workplace resilience is an employee's relationship with work and their ability to adapt during extreme change. It's a signal of equilibrium of work-life balance.
Highly engaged employees reflect the support they receive from their workplace. That might be feeling a sense of purpose, having a personal connection with their peers, finding a coach in their manager, or growing with development opportunities. When employees feel their needs are met, they're more likely to feel that sense of workplace trust.
Trust helps employees adapt to big organizations. Employees are more likely to trust communication, participate in new initiatives, and work with their organization through whatever’s coming their way.
To track workplace resilience, utilize a pulse survey with key questions along a Likert Scale. The higher the number, the stronger the belief. You should time your pulse surveys around organizational shifts, like new leadership or a return-to-office guidelines. You should be sure to track before, right after, and 30-60-90 days down the line to keep an eye on morale.
Use the Likert Scale with these questions to measure workplace resilience:
- I have the freedom I need to get my work done.
- I have a healthy work-life balance.
- In the past week, I've felt excited to come to work.
2. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
In the same way that NPS tracks a customer's happiness with a brand, an employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) gives team members an outlet to express their satisfaction.
Satisfied employees are more likely to be employer brand advocates or fans of their company as a whole. They're also more likely to share work opportunities with friends, post about their company on social media or wear team swag. Along with increased employee referrals or employee posts on social, the eNPS rating will show if your team members are getting what they need at work.
To track eNPS, conduct regular surveys, using the same questions in the survey over time. Employees should give responses to questions along a Likert Scale of 0-10.
Your eNPS pulse survey results will be divided between promoters (positive, motivated employees), passives (neutral, content), and detractors (disengaged). Promoters score 9 or 10 on the eNPS survey, passives around 7-8, while detractors score between 0 to 6. Your final eNPS is calculated by the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. A healthy eNPS ranges from 10 to 30.
It’s important to track eNPS over time because while helpful, it doesn’t capture the full complexity of an employee's experience. For instance, when we partnered with the organization SOLTECH, they had an initial eNPS score of 18. This showed more promoters than detractors, but they knew they had more work to do.
After investing in employee experience initiatives like a recognition program and online engagement activities, SOLTECH saw their eNPS increase every quarter. SOLTECH grew their eNPS score from 18 to 82, increasing their employee engagement and their business.
Likert Scale questions to add to your pulse survey to measure eNPS:
- How likely are you to recommend this company’s products and services to others?
- How likely are you to recommend your company as a place to work?
3. Employee Recognition
Since recognition boosts employee retention and morale, we can look at these metrics to gauge employee recognition. We can also track metrics like participation.
If you’re using recognition technology like ITA Group’s engagement platform, you can track the number of recognitions issued divided by the number of employees to measure recognition per employee. This will give you an idea of how many people engage in the program.
Your recognition platform should allow you to break down recognition data based on core values, which can show if employees understand or feel aligned to a certain value over others. You will also want to break up data to measure the number of recognitions from managers, peers, and teams over time to see which groups are participating the most.
You can even track recognition’s impact by asking specific questions within an employee survey. You can incorporate questions into an employee sentiment survey with the Likert Scale from 0-10 to see how effective recognitions are in the team. Employees who receive more meaningful recognition from peers or managers are more likely to feel valued and have a deeper sense of purpose at work. How you ask about recognition matters.
Gather feedback in a quarterly or annual employee survey and monitor over time to understand growth and discover opportunities. For example, if you’re seeing employees consistently score low in these questions, it might mean you need to review participation in recognition or quality of recognitions going out.
Likert Scale questions for your employee survey to gauge employee recognition satisfaction:
- My manager lets me know that my work is important.
- I feel like my work contributes to our team's mission.
Related: A turnkey platform for employee experience
Get ready to increase employee engagement metrics
Employee engagement can be an unstoppable strategy for your business and workplace morale. The best way to increase employee engagement rates is through a connected culture approach. Incorporate your core values and employee programming into every stage of your employee experience.
Bringing a people-first mindset will help you find ways to support your people and help them feel empowered.
Get more ideas on how to build up employee engagement with our latest ebook.