How do you know if your team is truly engaged? We hope it’s not based on gut feeling.
Meaningful employee engagement begins with clear, accurate measurement that empowers you to take actionable steps. You need a clear picture of what’s working for your team so you can keep it, and what’s not, so that you can address it quickly.
This article covers how to measure employee engagement, including core engagement metrics, assessment methods, and tracking tools.
Let’s get started.
TL;DR - How to Measure Employee Engagement
HR and top-level managers should track employee engagement to quickly detect morale and job satisfaction changes and address their team’s concerns before they affect company performance.
Can’t read the whole article right away? Below are the best methods for measuring employee engagement:
- Participation in engagement programs
- Targeted interviews
- Comprehensive annual or bi-annual surveys
- Exit interviews
- Pulse surveys
- Focus groups
- 360-degree feedback reviews
- Digital analytics
Also, we have shortlisted the best employee engagement measurement tools for your team:
- Workleap
- Culture Amp
- Tinypulse
- Awardco
- Motivosity
Continue reading for detailed discussions on how these methods and tools can help you track employee engagement and identify improvement areas before members disengage.
What Is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement simply means members’ commitment and enthusiasm as they work for your company. Engaged employees feel a sense of belonging to your organization, which prompts them to ‘go above and beyond’ to help the company achieve its goals.
William Kahn, credited for the Employee Engagement Theory, noted that engaged members and teams bring all of their selves to work physically, cognitively, and emotionally, which translates to improved company performance. As such, organizations must cater to all three engagement dimensions to get the most out of their teams.
Why Measuring Employee Engagement Matters
Given that employee engagement directly impacts organizational performance, it is in all companies’ best interests to track how much their teams are committed.
Below are the key advantages of monitoring your employees’ engagement levels:
- Identify Dissatisfaction Early: Tracking employee engagement helps you spot issues like declining morale, burnout, or poor management practices before they escalate into disengagement and increased turnover rates.
- Informed, Data-Driven Decisions: Reliable engagement metrics replace guesswork, enabling proactive strategies.
- Track the Effectiveness of Engagement Programs: The most reliable way to calculate the ROI of your engagement initiatives is to measure changes in members’ sentiments, absenteeism, and self-reported satisfaction scores.
- Link Employee Engagement to Business Performance: Tracking employee engagement provides quantifiable data like job satisfaction, retention rates, and project completion rates, which HR can use to correlate members’ productivity with company performance.
Core Metrics to Measure Employee Engagement
Employee engagement metrics help you quickly identify what works (to be retained), what doesn’t (to be removed), and what should be changed (to be refined) to achieve the desired engagement outcomes.
Here are the key engagement metrics to track:
- Employee Net Promoter Score: This metric determines how likely employees are to advise friends and acquaintances to join your organization. As such, it provides a quick and straightforward way to measure employee loyalty and average satisfaction scores.
- Retention/Turnover Rates: Employee retention rate measures the percentage of your workforce that stays at your company over a specified period, usually over a year. On the other hand, the turnover rate calculates the percentage of your team that left the company over the same period.
- Absenteeism Rates: Monitor unexpected absences closely, as frequent occurrences may indicate deeper engagement or wellness issues.
- Internal Mobility: This refers to the number of promotions or lateral moves, especially by minority employees, to determine your organization’s diversity, inclusion, and equity score.
- Survey Participation Rates: This metric measures employees' interest in providing feedback to HR and top-level management. Usually, high response rates show that members are engaged enough to want to suggest ways the company can improve its operations.
- Customer Satisfaction Scores: Surprising as it might sound, client satisfaction is often an accurate measure of employee engagement. Happy and motivated employees will likely take the initiative to meet client expectations, resulting in high customer service ratings.
8 Methods to Measure Employee Engagement
The best methods to track employee engagement focus on specific metrics, such as job satisfaction, morale, and commitment. They provide data that HR and senior managers can analyze for insights on workforce engagement dynamics and how to boost company performance.
Below, we have compiled 8 effective methods for evaluating employee engagement.
1. Participation in Engagement Programs
Track how many employees enroll in your health and wellness programs, including participation and completion rates. Engaged members often register the highest utilization of wellness initiatives and rank high on wellness challenges.
In contrast, employees not participating in engagement programs are likely disengaged from your company or are quitting quietly.
With SoHookd, easily track individual and team participation, leveraging personalized wellness gifts to employees to overcome engagement barriers like procrastination. You can then track employees’ utilization of their wellness incentives for further insights on your team’s engagement levels.
Want to learn more about how wellness incentives tie into employee engagement?
Download our free ebook and discover how wellness programs impact employee engagement metrics, including productivity, absenteeism, morale, and retention rates.
2. Targeted Interviews
These are one-on-one meetings between individual employees and their managers to understand each member’s challenges, career aspirations, and personal well-being.
The conversations should be confidential to allow employees to respond honestly, providing opportunities for managers to establish lasting relationships with their members.
Also, you could use targeted interviews to review individual KPIs and provide personalized feedback about each employee’s performance.
3. Annual Surveys
Annual surveys provide comprehensive insights into employee sentiment, job satisfaction, leadership perceptions, and alignment with company goals. They focus on:
- Job satisfaction
- Members’ perception of leadership
- Alignment between individual and organizational goals.
The data collected from annual or bi-annual surveys becomes the baseline or benchmark for the upcoming year. This also means that the questions must remain fairly the same or standardized to facilitate year-over-year comparisons over time.
4. Exit Interviews
Some organizations perceive exit interviews as unnecessary, considering there’s no opportunity for addressing the member’s workplace experience.
However, exit data could help you identify systemic engagement challenges and provide insight into why your company is experiencing high turnover rates.
Aggregate the data annually to identify patterns that cause employees to disengage, such as dissatisfaction with leadership style or lack of career development opportunities.
5. Pulse Surveys
Regular pulse surveys provide timely insights, helping identify and address specific issues such as collaboration, career growth, or morale quickly.
A well-structured pulse survey consists of 5-10 questions, with most requiring yes/no answers or respondents to select a score between 1-5.
6. Focus Groups
Organize meetings where employees can openly discuss their workplace experiences, including engagement challenges, the disconnect between individual and organizational goals, and barriers to work-life balance.
Ensure the focus groups comprise members from all departments so the feedback represents general employee sentiments.
Also, consider using an experienced facilitator who can remain unbiased and is willing to ask probing questions for deeper insights into employee engagement issues.
7. 360-Degree Feedback Reviews
Collect each employee’s performance and behavioral feedback from the people they interact with, including colleagues, supervisors, subordinates, and even customers.
This holistic approach lets you assess your team’s engagement indicators, including communication, collaboration, and accountability.
It also helps establish areas where individual employees may unknowingly create friction, influencing team dynamics.
8. Digital Analytics
Use digital analytics ethically to assess general enthusiasm and engagement without compromising employee privacy or trust.
Employee Engagement Measurement Tools
Below, we have compiled a list of the best employee engagement measurement tools:
- Workleap: Workleap is a robust tool offering personalized AI-driven recommendations and performance management from onboarding onward.
- Culture Amp: Culture Amp provides pre-built templates to help you design pulse surveys quickly to track employee sentiments. Additionally, you can customize the analytics dashboard to track specific performance metrics based on your employee engagement goals.
- TINYpulse: TINYpulse by WebMD Health Services lets HR conduct weekly or bi-weekly anonymous surveys to help them quickly identify changes in employee engagement. Also, the tool provides insights into improving your employee engagement plan to boost members’ morale and job satisfaction.
- Awardco: Awardco provides a single dashboard for tracking employee engagement, which includes generating dynamic charts to help you visualize sentiment changes and trends.
- Motivosity: Motivosity lets you send regular pulse surveys to specific members, departments, or the entire organization to track changes in employee sentiments. Also, you can auto-generate real-time employee engagement reports to share with relevant stakeholders like HR or top-level management.
Are you a small business or company looking to introduce an employee engagement plan but are unwilling to commit to a monthly engagement tool subscription fee to keep your costs low?
Worry not! Use our free wellness program audit checklist to spot red flags in engagement and identify gaps in employee engagement initiatives.
Common Challenges and How to Avoid Them
Below are likely obstacles and pitfalls you might encounter when measuring employee engagement and how to address them:
- Survey Fatigue: Avoid overwhelming employees by limiting frequency and clearly communicating survey purposes and outcomes.
- Poor Assessment Designs: Biased questions often cause employees to respond incorrectly, skewing the results. Also, members may not put much thought into their responses if the survey is unnecessarily long. Design concise, clear surveys with straightforward questions to encourage honest responses and maximize participation rates.
- Point-in-Time Bias: Sometimes, employees may answer survey questions based on temporary feelings. For example, a highly engaged member may give a low wellness score if they’ve experienced burnout within a few days of the survey. Track employee engagement regularly to establish trends.
- Data Privacy Concerns: Employees may be reluctant to give honest feedback if confidentiality is not guaranteed. Prioritize anonymous surveys to build trust and ensure employees provide candid, truthful feedback.
- Subjectivity During Interpretation: Factors like confirmation bias might affect how HR interprets the employee engagement data. Use standardized survey methods, including combining qualitative and quantitative data to contextualize the engagement scores.
- Measuring Engagement Among Remote Teams: Scheduling one-on-one interviews and focus groups with remote employees may be challenging due to timezone differences. Leverage user-friendly, digital tools designed for remote teams, allowing flexible survey participation across various time zones.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Got pending questions?
Let’s address commonly asked questions about measuring employee engagement.
How Often Should You Measure Employee Engagement?
There’s no specific timeline for how often you should measure employee engagement. We recommend regularly measuring engagement through monthly or quarterly pulse surveys and comprehensive annual reviews to accurately capture employee sentiment trends.
What Are the Signs That Engagement Levels Are Dropping?
Common signs that engagement levels are dropping include high turnover rates, low productivity, increased absenteeism, and withdrawal from team activities and social gatherings.
What’s the ROI of Measuring Employee Engagement?
The true ROI of measuring engagement lies in using collected data to reduce turnover, boost productivity, and enhance overall business performance.
Conclusion
Regular, strategic measurement of employee engagement allows organizations to proactively maintain high morale, productivity, and satisfaction, creating lasting cultural impact. This lets you identify red flags quickly and address employees’ engagement concerns, so they remain happy, motivated, and loyal to your company.
But if you do not know the best-fit methods to measure your team’s employee engagement, we recommend working with a wellness company.
At SoHookd, we have nearly 10 years of experience helping organizations struggling with low employee engagement boost their teams’ motivation and job satisfaction to achieve business goals. Our processes start with analyzing baseline employee engagement to determine engagement opportunities and develop wellness programs that cater to individual members’ needs.
Schedule a personalized demo and discover how we can help you monitor and reinforce your team’s workplace engagement.
