Employee Engagement Tools

There are multiple KPI’s and measurement tools to consider when it comes to evaluating your employee engagement goals and success. We’ll walk you through which KPIs to consider, different surveys with question examples and how to analyze your results. 

KPI’s of employee engagement 

There are many KPI’s that reflect employee engagement, but the ones you choose to measure depend heavily on your company’s size, business objectives, engagement activities and more. Here is a list of potential KPIs to consider: 

• Turnover rate: How well are you able to retain top talent? Engaged employees are much more likely to continue working at the same company, thus lower turnover rates suggest your engagement strategies are working. 
• Internal promotion rate: If your engagement strategies revolve around increasing employees’ Sense of Responsibility, then higher internal promotion rates indicate positive professional growth. Additionally, it shows that your efforts towards professional development are paying off as you retain top talent. 
• Employee NPS: In the same way many industries look at Net Promoter Scores to gauge customer satisfaction, employers have started adopting that same strategy to measure employee satisfaction. 
• Absenteeism: Engaged employees are more likely to show up for work and get their job done. If absenteeism is an issue for your company, start putting engagement strategies in place and pay attention to how it affects your absenteeism rate. 
• Employee survey results: One of the most popular employee engagement KPIs is employee survey results. They establish an engagement baseline and clearly depict whether your strategies are working in the eyes of your employees. 

Employee engagement surveys 

There are many kinds of employee experience surveys including: 

• Engagement surveys: Engagement surveys measure the strength of connection an employee feels towards the overall organization including their work, teammates and leadership. 
• Lifecycle surveys: Lifecycle surveys are conducted at key points within employee tenure such as when they are hired, promoted or when they terminate to understand what their experience was like and how it can be improved. 
• Pulse surveys: Pulse surveys, or satisfaction surveys, garner quick employee feedback and opinions throughout the year. These should be shorter and more specific than engagement surveys. 
• Culture surveys: A culture survey measures how an employee perceives the culture both on their team and within the larger organization to see if it aligns with HR goals. 

All of these can help you determine how engaged your employees are in different ways. For example, a lifecycle survey helps gauge how employees feel about different tenure experiences such as onboarding, culture surveys are great for measuring employees’ sense of leadership and pulse surveys are used for regular engagement check-ins. 

Example employee engagement survey questions 

Within an employee engagement survey, there are a lot of different things to ask about to ensure you’re getting the full picture. It’s important to include a blend of questions, such as: 

• Satisfaction questions: Gauging how satisfied and content your employees are with different areas of the organization. 
• Alignment questions: Gauging if your employees agree with your organization’s direction, leadership values, company culture and personal job expectations. 
• Future-oriented questions: Gauging employees’ future plans and likelihood of retention to shed light on areas that need additional HR or managerial support. 
• Open-ended questions: Providing an opportunity for employees to elaborate on what’s working, what isn’t working and share any other feedback they may have. 

Asking a few questions from each category will give you a holistic view of your employees’ engagement levels. 

Analyzing your results 

Determining your KPIs, choosing survey types and questions, and deploying your survey(s) are the first few steps to understanding engagement levels. Now you must make sense of your data and determine what areas you want to focus and improve on. 

Great Places To Work recommends you start with high-impact areas even if they don’t align with your lowest scoring areas. Although compensation and fair promotions are among the most common low-scoring fields, the less tangible, more impactful areas such as appreciation and inclusion are more important to improving engagement. 

Also consider looking for gaps between managerial levels. For example, if there is an area where individual contributors score poorly but managers score highly, it’s important to investigate why there’s an inconsistency.