So you're a month into 2021 and hopefully you've been working hard on engaging your team from the plan you created in our last blog (see: Step 4 - Action Your Plan).
But how do you measure your success?
Employee engagement can be a success outcome on its own (a "lag" measure). A happy and engaged team should be considered a great success for a business. But it can also be a "lead" measure too - it can be used as an indicator for other success measures in your business.
This week, we're going to explore this in more detail.
Survey Your Staff
Regardless of whether you are using engagement as a lag or a lead measure, a great tracking tool is a survey. There are loads of ways to do this from emails, to building a form or using a survey platform. There aren't many survey tools designed especially for the Employee Engagement space.
A platform will position engagement with your team, track your success and identify areas of focus. If you want our expert advice on this, drop victoria@tenspace.co.uk an email.
Most engagement survey platforms will give you a score of engagement after a survey - this can be used as your lag measure. Your engagement score can be tracked over time and you can see the impact that your activities are having on your overall engagement score.
Bake this measure into your success measures as a business. Sit it right alongside profit and sales and give it the importance that it deserves. This helps build a mindset of "engagement everywhere".
You can also use engagement as a lead measure too, to establish a link between engagement and business performance. Does an increase in engagement lead to an increase in sales in the following months, what do the trends tell you?
Establishing a cause and effect for your business can really keep the focus on engagement high in your business.
Here's some ideas on outputs of great employee engagement you might want to track so you can enjoy your success:
- Absenteeism
- Sales
- Revenue
- Profitability
- Employee retention
- Customer retention
- Customer NPS scores
- Productivity / efficiency / output
- Time to hire
- Internal talent moves
- Diversity
- Retention of top talent
Don't get too stuck on the numbers
Whilst measuring success is helpful, don't get too caught up in the numbers and start to miss the point. Employee engagement is a mindset, it's a way of working and operating. If you find that you've got caught up in your engagement scores and you've stopped thinking about how it feels to work in your business then take a big step back from your reports!
Engagement every day
To drive success, employee engagement needs to be part of the fabric of your business. Here's some ways to do this:
- Ask for engagement updates in your business updates. The quickest way to demonstrate that engagement matters is by asking about it. If you're calling your Sales Director, don't just ask about their sales figures, ask about employee engagement and what they've done to improve things
- Making a change, big or small? Ask yourself / your team what the impact will be on engagement, if it's negative, how can you lessen it or counteract it?
- Add engagement questions into your every-day conversations with your team, ask "how are you?" and really mean it.
- Make a focus on employee engagement a non-negotiable with your people leaders, poor engagement = poor performance
- Recruit people into your team who are going to make a positive contribution to engagement in your business - treat them as a culture contributor who will have an impact, so make sure it's going to be a positive one
- Publicly talk about employee engagement and how much it means to you, be THAT person on social media who talks about how proud they are of their team.
Ten Space can really help you make a difference in employee engagement levels. Whether your looking for some personal coaching to make you an engagement hero, you're starting from scratch or you're looking for an extra 10% of engagement, we'd love to be part of your success: victoria@tenspace.co.uk
