Employee engagement is crucial for your business’s success—yet quantifying employee engagement can be a big challenge. We’ll take the guesswork out of measuring your employees’ engagement with our practical employee engagement metrics.
Unlike other business processes, employee engagement can’t be narrowed down to a single indicator. Instead, it takes a variety of metrics to measure employee performance to determine your organization’s employee engagement.
Learn about our 10 most effective employee engagement metrics so you can:
- Get the inside scoop on how your employees really feel
- Identify the factors that are negatively impacting your employees
- Optimize your employee engagement strategy for a happy, productive workforce
What Are Employee Engagement Metrics and KPIs?
Employee engagement metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are methods of measuring different aspects of how your employees feel about your organization and how these feelings impact performance. While some metrics for employee engagement may be more relevant for your organization than others, it’s important to remember:
There is no single measure of employee engagement that gives you the whole story.
We made this list of our 10 key employee engagement KPIs and metrics to demonstrate how you can measure employee engagement at your organization. We encourage you to pick the ones that you feel best address the main challenges facing your employees and integrate these KPIs into your employee engagement strategy.
Why is measuring employee engagement important?
Your employees are human beings subject to human feelings and emotions. How they feel about their jobs has a direct impact on how they perform their jobs.
Employee engagement is a concept that attempts to quantify how your employees feel about your organization. While not perfect, this concept can be used to identify aspects of your business that either positively or negatively impact your employees’ job performance. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive explanation of the value of employee engagement, we recommend you read about Why Employee Engagement is Important.
10 Key Employee Engagement Metrics to Track and Improve Performance
While there are numerous metrics to measure employee engagement, not all will provide actionable insight to improve engagement at your organization.
We’ve selected these 10 employee engagement key metrics because they have broad applicability. We encourage you to use these key employee engagement metrics to build out your own business-specific KPIs to measure employee engagement.
1. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
In an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) survey, your employees rate their willingness to recommend your products or services to their friends and family on a scale of 0-10. Their responses are then categorized into one of three categories: Promoters (scale: 9–10), Neutrals (scale 7–8), or Detractors (scale: 0–6).
Using this feedback, your eNPS survey results are combined and represented via your eNPS, which is calculated using the following formula:
An eNPS score of +100 is perfect, whereas a score of -100 is rock bottom low.. Because eNPS has such a high threshold for Promoters, it’s likely that your eNPS won’t look amazing at first. However, if you can increase your overall eNPS, then you know that you’re making real progress at increasing employee engagement.
eNPS surveys can be easily embedded into your regular internal communications, similar to pulse surveys. Using an internal comms tool like ContactMonkey, you can easily conduct eNPS surveys and view their results on your analytics dashboard:
We recommend scheduling your eNPS surveys on a yearly or quarterly basis and using the results as one of your main KPIs to measure employee engagement.
2. Survey participation
Speaking of surveys: did you know that survey response rate is itself an important employee engagement metric? Survey participation is a crucial KPI for employee engagement for two big reasons:
- Your employees’ willingness to share their opinions with you is indicative of their engagement.
- Your survey participation metrics will contextualize other employee engagement KPIs (if only 20% of your employees responded to your eNPS survey, your eNPS may not be accurate).
Whether you’re performing a small survey about office hours or a large eNPS survey, you should always record your survey participation rate. Look at the total number of employees who received your survey versus the number of employees who provided input.
Just like with eNPS surveys, ContactMonkey makes conducting surveys and recording results easy. Embed surveys into your internal emails in seconds using our email template builder, and view your employees’ responses within your analytics dashboard:
To view whether or not your survey participation metrics are improving, you can benchmark your survey results using our Compare Campaign feature:
Benchmarking your survey participation rates is important—not only for measuring a key metric for employee engagement but also for proving the ROI of your employee engagement strategy.
3. Internal communication engagement
Survey engagement is just one small part of measuring overall engagement with your internal communications. Engaged employees are more likely to stay up to date on your company’s latest news, which makes internal communication metrics a useful tool for assessing overall engagement.
The two most common metrics of employee engagement for your internal communications are open rate and click-through rate, which measure the percentage of your recipients who opened and clicked on a link within your internal communications, respectively.
If you use a comprehensive internal communication tool like ContactMonkey, you can get a more granular view of how your employees are engaging with your internal communications. You can also incorporate in-depth employee engagement metrics like read time, heat maps, individual opens and clicks, most engaged employees, and more into your employee engagement KPIs:
These detailed metrics not only help you measure employee engagement, but also give you insight into your best-performing content so you can better target your employees with information relevant to them.
You can also compare these metrics industry averages to help you develop competitive employee engagement benchmarks. With ContactMonkey’s free Internal Email Benchmark Report, you’ll get an exclusive look at how your internal comms stack up against industry averages.
4. Employee recognition
Employee recognition is a huge factor in your employees’ overall engagement. If your employees are not recognized for the good work they produce, they’ll be less inclined to give similar efforts in the future. Recognition matters.
While recognition isn’t a descriptive employee engagement metric like the others we have discussed, it can still serve as a prescriptive employee engagement KPI. Rather than acting as a measure of employee engagement, employee recognition can serve as a pass/fail goal for your employee engagement strategy.
Set a goal for your internal communications and employee engagement strategies for a certain number of employee recognition efforts. These can include:
- Company events to highlight your employees’ hard work
- Employee recognition emails or a feature section in your employee newsletter
- Monetary and non-monetary awards 1-on-1 employee recognition efforts by managers
At the end of the testing period, determine if you met your f employee recognition goal. You can also correlate these efforts with other employee engagement metrics—especially if your employee recognition efforts involve internal communications.
5. Employee satisfaction
Employee recognition is a subset of your employees’ overall levels of satisfaction. Employee satisfaction measures how happy an employee is at their job. This is separate from employee engagement in its exclusion of employee feelings about their employer’s goals and expectations.
Numerous factors contribute to employee satisfaction:
- Work culture
- Employee friendships and camaraderie
- Office accommodations
- Health benefits
- Workplace safety
- And many more factors unique to your organization
These disparate factors cannot be meaningfully measured under a single “employee satisfaction” metric—the only way to effectively measure employee satisfaction is to ask your employees directly.
Employee surveys are the best way to measure employee satisfaction at your organization. We recommend conducting a yearly or quarterly recognition survey to assess how your employees feel about your engagement efforts. Aggregate and benchmark your survey responses, and pull employee engagement ideas from the results to shore up your employee recognition efforts.
6. Turnover rate
Employee turnover measures how often employees leave your organization. Turnover is an essential measure of employee engagement. An employee leaving may signal that they’re seeking something that’s not currently being provided by your organization. Employee turnover percentage is calculated like this:
Turnover is incredibly costly for businesses. The time and money it takes to train a new employee, especially for higher-up positions, is enormous—and that’s not even counting the leaving employees’ work stagnating as you search for a replacement.
The aim of your employee engagement efforts—apart from facilitating productivity—should be to reduce turnover at all costs.
7. Employee retention
The inverse of employee turnover is employee retention, which measures your organization’s ability to hang onto highly-valued employees. Think of employee retention as the number one goal of your employee engagement efforts: aim to keep retention as high as possible.
Employee retention percentage is calculated like this:
Similar to employee turnover, employee retention is a near-direct reflection of your employee engagement efforts—employees who are happy and engaged at their jobs tend to stay at their jobs. Make employee retention one of your organization’s overall key metrics for employee engagement.
8. Employee performance metrics
Employee performance metrics can reflect how your employee engagement metrics impact productivity. Similar to retention and turnover, employee performance is based on myriad factors
We recommend you use company-specific performance metrics to augment your more concrete employee engagement KPIs. For example, if you make a constant effort to improve employee recognition, you’ll discover employee performance metrics that correlate with employee recognition.
9. Trust in leadership
From project managers to C-suite executives, leadership has a huge influence on your employees’ engagement with their job and organization. Even the most dedicated and hard-working employees will quickly lose interest in their responsibilities if they feel neglected or lack trust in leadership. .
Similar to employee satisfaction, trust in leadership is not something that you can objectively measure—it requires input from your employees. Determine the most important touch points between leadership and employees, and ask your employees how they feel about them. Record their responses, analyze them for trends and actionable insights, and benchmark the overall sentiment to improve upon.
10. Employee independence
Whatever roles they may perform, employees need to feel that they have a degree of autonomy and independence in their work. Even if they are not high-ranking at your organization, your employees need to feel that they have control over their work.
While employee independence is an integral part of employee engagement, it can really only be influenced by leadership and HR. While you can measure employee independence similar to recognition and trust in leadership—via employee surveys—there are few employee engagement strategies that actually increase your employees’ feelings of independence.
If your surveys show that your employees feel a low level of independence at your organization, you should share these findings with leadership and HR to identify the issues and build an action plan.
How To Measure Employee Engagement
All of the employee engagement metrics that we have discussed contribute your overall employee engagement strategy. Your employee engagement strategy should include:
- High-level employee engagement goals and objectives
- List of stakeholders responsible for executing your employee engagement initiatives
- Chart or table of your current employee engagement initiatives, and how and when they are to be administered
- Chart or table of your key employee engagement metrics and KPIs so they can be tracked over time
- Section for notes or actionable insights you have learned from employee feedback
To populate your strategy, choose the best employee engagement metrics (from our list or those unique to your business) that reflect your overall engagement goals. Keep your strategy document up to date with the latest results of your tests and measurements so you can quickly communicate your employee engagement successes and challenges.
You can quickly gather whatever kind of employee engagement metrics you need using ContactMonkey. Virtually every KPI we’ve discussed in our list can be measured from our internal communications dashboard or created and sent using ContactMonkey:
- eNPS surveys
- Employee surveys
- Employee feedback collection
- Internal communication metrics and analytics
ContactMonkey makes planning, measuring, and achieving your employee engagement goals easy through our centralized dashboard. If you’re serious about prioritizing employee engagement at your organization, then look no further than ContactMonkey.
Exceed Your Employee Engagement Goals with ContactMonkey
Like it or not, employee engagement is a fundamental part of your overall business success. Give employee engagement the attention it deserves by making it a fundamental part of your overall business strategy.
With ContactMonkey, you can quickly and easily elevate your employee engagement efforts. Create employee surveys, collect feedback, track metrics for employee engagement, implement employee engagement initiatives, and more—all from the same platform.
Ready to smash all your employee engagement goals? Book a free demo of ContactMonkey today to get started.
