Top 8 Employee Engagement Metrics To Track and Improve

Understanding and tracking the right employee engagement metrics can transform your workplace. Read along as we explore crucial metrics and show you how they can help create a more engaged and efficient team.

Employee engagement is critical to the success of any organization. Engaged employees are more committed, productive, and likely to stay with the company long-term.

On the other hand, disengaged employees show higher turnover rates, decreased productivity, and a negative impact on company culture. By tracking employee engagement metrics, you gain valuable insights into the health of your workplace culture and can take proactive steps to improve engagement levels.

In this guide, we’ll dive into the key employee engagement metrics every HR professional should track. From turnover rates to employee satisfaction scores, we’ll explore how staff engagement metrics help you identify areas for improvement and create a more positive work environment.

By the end of this post, you’ll understand how to measure and boost employee engagement in your organization. Sound like a plan? Let’s get into it!

What Are Employee Engagement Metrics?

Employee engagement metrics are quantifiable ways to evaluate engagement, satisfaction, and motivation within an organization. These metrics provide valuable insights into the overall health of the workforce and help HR managers identify areas for improvement. By tracking employee engagement metrics, companies can make data-driven decisions to enhance their workplace culture, boost productivity, and retain top talent.

One of the most common methods for gaining employee engagement metrics and other qualitative insights is through employee engagement surveys. These surveys typically include questions that assess employees’ experiences, such as job satisfaction, relationships with colleagues and managers, alignment with company values, and opportunities for growth and development.

By analyzing the responses to these surveys, HR managers can understand the factors contributing to employee engagement and start to build employee engagement benchmarks and engagement key performance indicators (KPIs) for their organization.

Why is measuring employee engagement important?

Understanding employee engagement and why it matters can be the difference between a successful and failing organization.

After all, engaged employees are more committed, productive, and likely to go above and beyond in their roles. On the other hand, disengaged employees can negatively impact team morale, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance.

Leveraging employee engagement data analytics ensures companies have the tools to maintain a highly motivated and productive workforce.

Tracking employee engagement metrics offers numerous benefits for organizations looking to create a thriving workplace culture and drive business success. By monitoring these key metrics, you can:

• Identify areas for improvement: Measuring engagement metrics helps pinpoint where your company may be falling short regarding employee satisfaction, motivation, and productivity.
• Boost employee retention: Engaged employees are more likely to stay with your organization long-term. By tracking metrics such as turnover rate and eNPS, you can proactively identify potential retention risks and take steps to improve job satisfaction and loyalty.
• Enhance productivity and performance: Monitoring metrics like absenteeism and employee productivity helps identify factors impacting worker performance and take action to optimize workflows, remove obstacles, and provide greater support.
• Foster a positive workplace culture: Regularly assessing employee engagement through key metrics helps you gauge the overall health of your workplace culture and alerts you when you need to do more to celebrate successes, address concerns, and improve the employee experience.
• Make data-driven decisions: Tracking employee engagement metrics provides you with objective, quantifiable data to inform your communication strategies and initiatives. By relying on hard numbers rather than gut instincts or anecdotal evidence, you can make data-driven decisions that garner wider buy-in from leadership and employees.
  

Learn more about how employee engagement technology can drive more active participation and collaboration.

Hot tip: 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.

8 Key Types of Employee Engagement Metrics You Should Be Tracking

Wondering where to start measuring your employee engagement? While the best employee engagement metrics for your organization are going to be specific to your needs, we recommend beginning with some of the metrics below.

These eight metrics are applicable across a wide range of organizations and are a great way to start collecting actionable insights about employee engagement at your company.

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:

Using this formula, an eNPS score of +100 would be considered perfect, whereas a score of -100 would mean you need to make changes fast.

eNPS is a simple yet effective way to gauge employee loyalty and satisfaction. Plus, integrating eNPS into your employee engagement program is a great way to track progress over time and identify areas for improvement. Conduct eNPS surveys regularly (e.g., quarterly) and segment the results by department, location, or other relevant factors to pinpoint specific issues and take targeted action to boost engagement.

2. Employee engagement survey participation

While eNPS scores (and other survey results) are excellent indicators of engagement, the survey response rate is actually an important employee engagement metric all by itself.

Survey participation is a key employee engagement metric 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 metrics(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.

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.But there are many other ways you can quantify the effort employees put into engaging with your internal comms, such as read time, which measures how long employees spent on-page reading your emails or newsletters.

4. Turnover rate

Turnover rate is one of the key metrics to measure employee engagement. It describes the percentage of employees who leave your organization over a given time period (typically one year).

To calculate your turnover rate, use the following formula:

A high turnover rate can be a strong indicator of low employee engagement, suggesting that employees are dissatisfied, lack motivation, or feel disconnected from the company’s mission and values.

And of course, high turnover comes at a steep price, between the costs of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding a new employee and the difficulty and disruption of losing an experienced worker.

By proactively monitoring your turnover rate and taking steps to address the root causes of disengagement, you can improve employee retention and create a more stable, committed workforce that drives long-term business success.

5. Employee retention rate

The inverse of employee turnover is employee retention, which measures your organization’s ability to hang onto highly-valued employees.

Employee retention percentage is calculated as follows:

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. As such, your employee engagement efforts should aim to keep this key metric in mind and a priority!

6. Absenteeism rate

Absenteeism refers to the frequency and duration of employee absences from work. High levels of absenteeism can indicate disengagement and dissatisfaction among your workforce. By tracking absenteeism rates, you can identify patterns and trends that may be impacting your organization’s productivity and bottom line.

Monitoring absenteeism is particularly crucial for frontline employee engagement, as these workers often have the most direct impact on customer satisfaction and business outcomes. When frontline employees are frequently absent, it can lead to understaffing, increased workload for other team members, and ultimately, a diminished customer experience.

To effectively track absenteeism, calculate the following:

By proactively addressing absenteeism and its underlying causes, you can foster a more engaged and productive workforce.

7. Productivity metrics

Productivity directly impacts your company’s bottom line, and it’s also a good measurement of how engaged employees are at your business. When employees are engaged, they tend to be more productive, efficient, and motivated to contribute to organizational success.

While productivity metrics are extremely important, they’re a bit more complicated to collect than turnover or absenteeism metrics. There are multiple metrics that you can use depending on your specific business or team. For example, a sales team might measure productivity in deals closed or revenue won, while a content team might measure productivity in projects completed.

Using employee engagement software that provides insights into how employees spend their time, complete tasks, and collaborate with others is another good way to measure productivity. These tools can help you identify productivity bottlenecks, streamline processes, and optimize workloads.

Keep in mind that productivity is not just about the quantity of work completed, but also the quality and timeliness of deliverables. Engaged employees are more likely to produce high-quality work, meet deadlines, and go above and beyond to achieve goals.

Don’t forget, when evaluating productivity, be sure to set clear expectations and communicate them to your team. Providing regular feedback and recognition for a job well done can boost engagement and motivation for your entire team.

8. Employee satisfaction

Employee satisfaction and employee engagement are often used interchangeably, but there are key differences between the two. While engagement refers to how an employee interacts with their work and how motivated they are in their tasks, satisfaction has more to do with their overall feelings about the job.

That being said, employee satisfaction is a driving force of employee engagement. When employees are satisfied with their jobs, they are more likely to be motivated, productive, and committed to their work. On the other hand, dissatisfied employees tend to be disengaged, leading to lower productivity, higher absenteeism, and increased turnover rates.

To effectively measure employee satisfaction, conduct regular surveys asking employees to rate aspects of their jobs such as:

• Overall job satisfaction
• Relationships with managers and coworkers
• Opportunities for growth and development
• Work-life balance
• Compensation and benefits
  

By analyzing the results of these surveys, you can identify areas where employees are most and least satisfied, allowing you to take targeted actions to improve engagement. For example, if many employees express dissatisfaction with their opportunities for growth, you may need to invest in more training and development programs or create clearer career paths within your organization.

It’s important to note that measuring employee satisfaction should not be a one-time event. Employee engagement statistics show that regularly assessing and acting upon employee feedback is essential for maintaining high levels of engagement over time. Consider implementing quarterly or biannual surveys to keep an eye on employee satisfaction and make continuous improvements to your engagement strategies.

Best Practices for Measuring Employee Engagement

Measuring employee engagement helps you understand the state of your workforce. However, to gain meaningful insights, you should follow best practices when conducting surveys and analyzing data.

Here are some tips for how to measure employee engagement metrics:

• Choose the right survey questions: Craft questions that are clear, concise, and relevant to your organization’s goals. Include a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended questions to gather both quantitative and qualitative data.
• Ensure anonymity: Employees are more likely to provide honest feedback when they feel their responses will remain anonymous. Use employee feedback tools that ensure confidentiality and communicate this clearly to your team to encourage participation and candid responses.
• Conduct regular surveys: Measuring employee engagement is not a one-time event. To track progress and identify trends, conduct surveys regularly, such as quarterly or bi-annually.
• Analyze and segment data: Once you’ve collected survey responses, analyze the data to identify patterns and trends. Segment data by department, location, tenure, or other relevant factors for a more nuanced understanding of engagement levels across your organization.
• Share results and take action: Transparently share survey results with your team and communicate any actions you plan to take based on the feedback. Involve employees in the action-planning process to foster a sense of ownership and engagement.
  

Follow these best practices to effectively measure employee engagement and use the insights you gain to create a more positive, productive, and engaging workplace culture.

Which Employee Engagement Measurement Tools Should You Use?

Collecting important employee engagement metrics does not need to be an arduous task. Bringing in the employee engagement platform can simplify the process of tracking and analyzing employee engagement metrics and help you reach your goal of improving employee engagement over time.

With an employee engagement tool like ContactMonkey, you can easily conduct employee surveys. Using the drag-and-drop email builder, you can add a pulse survey to any email you send. With recurring pulse surveys, you can even build a survey in advance and drop it ready-made into multiple emails, then track the results over time!

Want to track key employee engagement metrics like eNPS? Create eNPS surveys and view the results on 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:

You can also incorporate in-depth email metrics like read time, most engaged employees, and individual opens and clicks into your understanding of how employees engage with your content. You can even view a heat map to get a visual sense of what employees are and aren’t clicking.

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.

Plus, you can compare these engagement metrics to industry averages to help you develop competitive employee engagement benchmarks.

Pro tip: Check out ContactMonkey’s free 2024 Internal Email Benchmark Report for an exclusive look at how your internal comms stack up against industry averages.

Exceed Your Employee Engagement Goals with ContactMonkey

Tracking employee engagement metrics is a key first step in creating a thriving workplace culture and driving business success.

By monitoring key indicators such as eNPS, absenteeism, survey participation, internal comms engagement, turnover, retention, absenteeism, productivity, and employee satisfaction, you can start to understand how connected your employees feel to their work and the organization.

Remember, the power of employee engagement metrics is not just in data, but in the actions you take. By consistently measuring, analyzing, and acting upon these metrics, you can create targeted strategies to boost engagement, foster a positive work environment, and drive better business outcomes.

To prioritize these critical metrics and make data-driven decisions for your team, you should consider bringing in an employee engagement tool like ContactMonkey to help your understanding of essential employee engagement metrics at your organization. ContactMonkey makes it easy to survey your employees, monitor the results, collect key employee engagement metrics, and so much more.

Interested in adding ContactMonkey to your digital tools for employee engagement? Book a demo to learn how ContactMonkey fits into your employee engagement tech stack.