Achieving success is a universal goal for every company – but what does it take to get there? At the core, streamlined workflow, effective communication, and strong productivity across frontline and deskless workers are key drivers of job satisfaction and employee engagement. With these factors in place, success naturally follows.
Satisfaction over Salary: Over 80% of Gen Zers, our society’s newest workforce generation, believe employers should actively support both the physical and mental health of their team.
Simply put, when your frontline and deskless teams are the heartbeat of your business, keeping a pulse on their engagement and satisfaction through surveys and metrics keeps your ship smooth sailing.
Achieving consistent insight into employee engagement and satisfaction can be a challenge when so many of your deskless workforce roam various pastures in their day-to-day. If you want to keep your team members not just clocked in, but truly dialed in, a measurable employee engagement strategy should be a key pillar in your mobile workforce management platform.
Tracking these aspects effectively means understanding the depth of what employee engagement metrics are, how to measure employee engagement, and other key considerations.
What is Employee Engagement and Why Measuring it Matters
Employee engagement isn’t just about whether your team members show up and do the job. It’s about how invested they are – emotionally, cognitively, behaviorally, and socially, in both their work and their workplace. Highly engaged employees don’t just get the job done; they drive customer satisfaction, spark innovation, and stick around longer for the long game: morale and productivity.
Why do employee engagement metrics matter? You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Engagement metrics (think about an employee engagement rate, a staff engagement score, or an ever-comprehensive survey result) shine a light on what’s working, what’s not, and where you’re losing people. When you’re armed with real data, you can work to improve low employee engagement: tweak your engagement strategy, double down on employee recognition programs, or overhaul communication for frontline and deskless workers.
Using data-driven metrics to inform and improve employee engagement strategies helps retain satisfied and motivated workers, thus resulting in continued business success.
Know the 4 Dimensions of Employee Engagement to Drive Your Team to Success
Consider first: what is driving engagement in your organization? The four key dimensions that should be at the heart of any workplace culture and the evaluation of it are:
- Emotional Engagement: How employees feel about their work and company.
- Cognitive Engagement: How focused and absorbed they are in their tasks.
- Behavioral Engagement: The effort and initiative they put in, day in and day out.
- Social Engagement: The quality of their relationships with colleagues and leaders.
Identifying these four drivers of employee engagement before and after you measure engagement will result in a more empowered workplace culture – one where customer satisfaction and retention are the natural byproducts.
How Is Work Engagement Measured?
There are various methods to measure employee engagement. Common methods include the traditional employee engagement surveys (pulse, annual, etc.), interviews, and tracking your employee engagement rate.
Engagement surveys for the workplace allow you to capture both the numbers (quantitative data) and the stories (qualitative data) behind your employees’ experience. You can then pair those with stay interviews, exit interviews, and real-time workflow analytics to get the complete picture of what both engages and disengages employees.
What is the Best Way to Measure Employee Engagement?
Surveys are a feedback staple as old as time. Their presence holds true for employee engagement measurement. However, given the wide array of survey types, each with a different end goal, your company should ensure you are using the right type, along with asking the right questions, to receive the intended insights.
Pulse Surveys: The Real-Time Reality Check
Pulse surveys are brief, regular check-ins designed to monitor employee engagement. They’re perfect for identifying potential issues early and tracking the impact of new initiatives. By shaping or creating pulse surveys that have short, direct, and actionable questions, your workforce can answer effectively, leading to the precise insights you need.
Annual Engagement Surveys: The Deeper Dive
Annual surveys give you a big-picture view. They’re your chance to benchmark engagement year-over-year, identify trends, and uncover thematic, systemic issues that have been happening consistently.
eNPS and Engagement Scores: The Numbers
The Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a simple, powerful way to gauge employee loyalty. A staff engagement score or employee engagement scorecard quantifies (typically on a 0-100 scale) the level of loyalty, motivation, and involvement employees have with their work and employer. The higher the score, the greater the engagement.
Pair the two metrics, and you’ve got a dashboard that tells you, at a glance, whether you’re winning or losing the engagement game. However, to gain a deeper picture of what your winning moves and losing ones are, you’ll need to implement deeper dive measures (i.e., surveys).
Interviews and Open-Ended Questions: The Story Behind the Score
Sometimes, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Stay interviews and exit interviews add context and nuance, helping you understand what keeps people engaged and what leads to disengagement. Open-ended questions in your surveys can surface insights you’d never see on a scorecard.
Performance reviews, feedback meetings, and other types of 1:1 dialogue between workers and their team leaders also offer an opportunity for more connected conversations about engagement and current satisfactions and dissatisfactions.
Examples of dialogue starters here could be:
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with the level of transparency with your manager?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with the level of transparency with human resources?
- What advice would you give for a better new employee experience for incoming team members?
If you want to explore more options to gauge your frontline workers’ engagement, especially as they are often moving consistently to different sites and jobs, there are other types of employee engagement metrics that can be beneficial to your company and your type of workforce. This can be even more true if your team has exhausted surveys already and needs different, faster insights like turnover rate, absenteeism, and real-time metrics.
What are Other Metrics of Employee Engagement?
In today’s fast-paced, data-driven world, changes occur, and they occur fast. To keep tabs on a workforce with remote deskless opportunities, effective organizations know that tracking a suite of metrics is needed to get a fuller picture.
Employee engagement rate
This is the percentage of your team that’s actively engaged all around: in communications, events, etc. A typical solid employee engagement rate is above 70%, showing high emotional commitment to one’s employer. If this rate falls short of 70%, you’ll know it is time to make some adjustments to your engagement strategy.
Turnover rate
High turnover is a red flag for disengagement. Taking the time to measure your team or company turnover rate, how many employees are leaving your organization over a defined period, lets you uncover if a trend is taking place and what you can do to create an upward rise.
An effective employee engagement app delivers key metrics like turnover rate alongside other engagement rates – such as RedeApp’s Workforce Intelligence platform.
Experience an Elevated Engagement Exploration
Absenteeism
Frequent absences can signal deeper issues. They can allude to lower team morale and higher chance of the team completely checking out. Utilize this metric to uncover the underlying causes of employee absences and explore actionable solutions.
Level of participation in employee recognition programs
Are your team members celebrating each other’s wins? Are your employee recognition programs making your workers feel appreciated? This is especially important with a deskless workforce that doesn’t have the same regular face-to-face interactions as in-office or remote employees do in virtual meetings. If a disengaged employee isn’t tuned in to the successes of their co-workers, it signals a level of disconnection.
Level of involvement in training and development:
Engaged employees have a strong desire to grow. If an employee isn’t responding to training or development initiatives, it indicates whether your company’s programs are as invested in their growth and capabilities as the employees are themselves.
With the right engagement tools, you can gather these metrics in real time, spot trends, and act fast. Being able to gather these metrics with seamless workflow analytics in real-time and other helpful components in engagement tools helps move companies to the next step.
How Do Companies Measure Employee Engagement?: Using the Right Strategy and Employee Engagement Measurement Tools
Even after many return-to-office mandates, the companies that win at overall employee engagement align on benchmarks, set clear goals, and use the right employee engagement measurement tools to track progress. Maintaining engagement checks is just as much a team effort as fostering ongoing employee engagement.
Start with buy-in across departments on what success looks like by engagement benchmarks, score goals, and the like. Then, pick a measurement tool that’s built for your workforce and its unique benchmarks—especially if you have a mix of deskless, frontline, and remote team members. RedeApp’s Workforce Intelligence platform delivers real-time engagement insights, customizable scorecards, and seamless integration with your existing systems — so you’re always in the know, never in the dark.
Ready to measure and improve your workforce’s engagement for greater satisfaction, productivity and retention?