Do you know how engaged your employees are? Are you sure?
When employees are engaged, they feel empowered to look for innovative, business-driving solutions. In fact, research from Gallup shows that highly engaged teams tend to be 14% more productive than the teams with the lowest engagement.
Finding ways to engage an employee workforce is one of the most impactful measures for long-term success. That’s why organizations can’t afford to place their employee engagement strategy on the back burner.
Employee engagement analytics mean not having to guess whether employees are bought into your organization and larger strategy. By tracking and analyzing top employee engagement metrics, you can find out exactly how your employees are feeling, understand what drives their engagement, and determine ways to improve (or maintain!) your current levels of engagement.
In this article, you’ll learn employee engagement analytics 101, including:
- Benefits of employee engagement analytics
- Top employee engagement metrics
- Key strategies for tracking employee engagement analytics
- How to analyze and strategize with employee engagement metrics
Get to know your team beyond clicks and opens
Decode employee patterns with real-time analytics.
What Are Employee Engagement Analytics?
Employee engagement analytics are a series of metrics that attempt to quantify employees’ feelings about their work and employers.
These metrics usually come from multiple different sources and the numbers both describe and, in some cases, contribute to engagement levels. For example, high turnover can both be an indicator of low engagement, and itself leads to lower engagement among remaining employees. It’s a double-edged sword.
Why Are Employee Engagement Analytics Important?
Employee engagement analytics provide data that leaders and communicators can use to make their employees happier, meet their needs, and ensure they feel motivated and energized in their work! Instead of relying on intuition or guesswork, leaders can base decisions on concrete data, thus using employee engagement analytics to drive business performance.
Additionally, analytics offer a top-down, holistic view of the contributing factors and the effects of employee engagement within an organization. This helps you understand the cause-and-effect relationship between the goings-on in your workplace and employee responses.
Top Employee Engagement Metrics to Know and Track
Employee engagement data analytics don’t just cover a single source of information. For a comprehensive understanding of engagement at an organization, you’ll want to track a variety of employee engagement metrics.
These metrics include:
- Employee communication engagement: To understand how engaged employees, track how they interact with your internal communications. Email tracking metrics like open and click rates provide a sense of how tuned in employees are to their organization.
- Employee feedback response rates: This metric shows how many employees participate in pulse surveys or long-form surveys. High response rates indicate a willingness to engage and share thoughts, while low rates might signal disengagement.
- Employee net promoter score (eNPS): eNPS measures whether employees recommend their workplace to others in their network. eNPS is calculated by taking the percentage of employees that recommend their place of work (promoters) and subtracting the percentage of employees who would not (detractors).
- Employee referral rates: In the same vein as eNPS, satisfied employees are much more likely to recommend jobs that open up in their organization to their friends and professional contacts.
- Employee retention: Satisfied and engaged employees are much less likely to seek other opportunities. This is why high retention rates for employees are often a great indicator of employee engagement.
- Employee turnover: On the flip side of employee retention, high levels of turnover suggest unsatisfied, unmotivated, and disengaged employees.
- Absenteeism: Disengaged employees are much more likely to take absences from work, often with no explanation or notice. A high rate of absenteeism can be a strong indicator of disengaged employees.
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How to Implement Employee Engagement Analytics
To make the most of employee engagement analytics, you need the right tools to gather and analyze the data.
Remember: you need data from multiple sources to get a comprehensive overview and a better understanding of how engagement affects different aspects of your organization. To that end, you’ll need a combination of tools for data tracking and active feedback gathering, including survey tools, HR software, and internal communication platforms with robust analytics features.
For passive tracking, HR analytics tools can monitor metrics like turnover, retention, and absenteeism, while internal communications platforms can track how employees interact with the newsletters, emails, and other forms of communication you send out. Internal communication platforms also often offer survey features to measure your employee engagement levels more directly.
Employee Engagement Analytics: Key Strategies and Examples
Here are some strategies to follow when implementing employee engagement reporting and analytics at your organization:
Bring in data from multiple sources
Don’t rely on a single metric or a single data source. Combine metrics from employee surveys, internal communications, HR analytics, and even performance metrics to get a more complete picture of employee engagement.
One useful internal communication tool for your employee engagement arsenal is ContactMonkey. This internal communications solution helps you create and distribute surveys while also tracking how employees engage with your internal communications, including emails, newsletters, and SMS messages.
ContactMonkey’s drag-and-drop email builder allows you to design engaging internal newsletters and track key metrics such as clicks and opens. You can also incorporate in-depth employee engagement metrics like read time, heat maps, and individual opens and clicks. This helps to determine your most engaged employees and shapes your employee engagement KPIs.
Additionally, ContactMonkey’s survey features enable you to embed pulse surveys directly into your emails. This makes it easy to conduct quick pulse checks, gather responses to important questions, and collect data like eNPS scores.
All of this information is displayed on ContactMonkey’s analytics dashboard, providing a clear and detailed picture of employee engagement.
By combining multiple sources of employee engagement data, such as employee engagement HR analytics, internal comms data, and survey responses, you get a better overall picture of what engagement strategies you might need to implement.
For example, if survey responses indicate low morale in a particular department and there is also high employee turnover, a clear pattern emerges that should be addressed.
Pulse surveys that actually engage employees
Turn emails into conversations.
Track how employees are engaging with internal communication
When employees are checked out and don’t feel particularly motivated or interested in their work, they often become less responsive. They may be less likely to open internal communications like emails or skim them rather than read them thoroughly.
That’s why internal email analytics serve as a useful barometer for employee attitudes within your organization.
ContactMonkey’s analytics dashboard gives you a detailed view of how employees are engaging with your internal emails and newsletters, including an engagement timeline with the time and location of opens, survey results, anonymous comments, and more. It even shows you how long employees are spending reading your emails.
Don’t make assumptions about what data means
Collecting and analyzing employee engagement data analytics gives you a useful snapshot of employee attitudes, but it doesn’t always reveal the reasons behind engagement levels. That doesn’t mean you can’t make educated guesses. In fact, you should make educated guesses!
But when using employee engagement data analytics to strategize, you need to be ready to pivot if continued tracking shows little to no improvement. Or even worse, lower engagement than before.
You should also remember that most employee engagement metrics aren’t caused by a single factor. In fact, many of them form a sort of feedback loop.
What do we mean by this?
Let’s say your employee retention rate is extremely high. That likely means that employees at your organization are highly engaged and not looking for other employment. Having a lot of long-term, engaged employees then helps other employees feel more engaged, which improves retention numbers.
Now, if several of your employees are offered high-level positions elsewhere and leave, the sudden bump in turnover rates doesn’t mean that the remaining employees are suddenly disengaged. However, it might put employees at a higher risk of disengagement if concerns about the changes are not properly communicated. For example, transparency with the remaining team members about the hiring process for a new leader can alleviate concerns and disengagement.
7 ways to get genuine employee feedback in surveys
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Make use of both long-form and pulse surveys
Passive data collection can help you get a more complete picture, but your employees are still your best resource for uncovering what drives engagement and disengagement at your organization.
In other words: if you want to know how engaged your employees are, just ask them!
Start by conducting comprehensive employee engagement surveys once or twice a year. These long-form surveys cover a wide range of topics, such as job satisfaction, alignment with company values, relationships with managers and colleagues, and the overall work environment.
To keep a finger on the pulse of employee sentiment between comprehensive surveys, pulse surveys are a quick way to gather employee feedback on specific issues or initiatives and can help you detect changes in engagement levels in real-time.
With tools like ContactMonkey, you can embed pulse surveys directly into newsletter and other communications you send out. Employees can answer survey questions directly in their emails, and even have the opportunity to leave anonymous comments alongside their votes. That means that you can get immediate feedback from employees when things change within the organization
For instance, after introducing a new remote work policy, you could send out a pulse survey with questions like, “How do you feel about the new remote work policy?” or “What challenges have you faced with the current remote work setup?” If the immediate feedback is overwhelmingly negative, you have the opportunity to address the issue promptly and potentially make adjustments.
Set employee engagement goals and create an action plan
Once you’ve started collecting employee engagement analytics, you need a strategic action plan.
Assess your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and choose areas where you can drive the most impact on the root causes of disengagement. Set goals to achieve in those areas, and make sure they’re SMART! That is—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Warning: avoid the temptation of tackling too many issues at once. A focused and cohesive strategy is always more effective than spreading resources too thin.
What does an effective, data-driven action plan look like? Consider a company that noticed a drop in employee productivity and an increase in turnover rates. By conducting an annual engagement survey, they discovered that a significant number of employees felt undervalued and lacked career advancement opportunities.
In response to the survey results, the company introduced a new recognition program and created a clear path for career progression. To monitor the impact of these changes, they implemented monthly pulse surveys focusing on job satisfaction and recognition, with clear goals for increases in both. Over time, survey data showed improved employee sentiment and HR metrics reflected a decrease in turnover and an increase in productivity.
By making use of employee engagement data analytics, organizations can address issues proactively and create a more positive, productive work environment.
Collect employee engagement culture analytics continuously
Collecting analytics isn’t a one-and-done project. To gain meaningful insights, you need to track engagement metrics over time.
Measurement allows you to observe trends, identify patterns, and understand how changes within your organization impact engagement. For instance, tracking engagement before and after implementing a new policy can reveal its effectiveness.
Plus, continuous measurement is important for sorting the outliers and blips in your data from the actual meaningful trends. If you send out a survey immediately after instituting a new policy and see a big boost in reported employee happiness, you might think you’ve solved your employee engagement issues. But do employees still feel the same way after a month? What about after six?
Combining passive data tracking and collection with regular surveys will provide you with a more complete and robust understanding of the state of employee engagement in your workplace.
Emails employees want to open
Become an Employee Engagement Analytics Pro to Keep Employees Motivated!
Mastering the art of employee engagement reporting and analytics puts you one step closer to making sure your workplace is appealing to employees.
Remember, the key to successful employee engagement analytics lies in a consistent, multifaceted approach. You should regularly collect data from multiple sources for a complete picture of how your employees feel and what drives their engagement.
To streamline the employee engagement data collection process, consider ContactMonkey. This powerful tool not only helps you create engaging surveys but also tracks how employees interact with them.
Take the first step towards becoming an employee engagement analytics pro with a free ContactMonkey demo.
