The Best Tools For Measuring Employee Engagement

What is it?
Survey Monkey is an online survey development cloud-based SaaS company, providing free, customisable surveys as well as a suite of paid back-end programmes.

What it measures?
Employee Engagement

One of the most effective ways of measuring employee engagement is to deliver a tailored engagement survey to your current employees. You can build a series of questions, asking employees to rate answers on a scale to determine how they feel. Answers are usually set on a scale of 1-5, ranging from strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree or disagree, agree and strongly agree. Your questions can be around any aspect of your company or the employee’s role there, but you must include questions that allow the employee to record how much they enjoy their role, how positive they are about your organisation, how likely they are to recommend to a friend and exactly what it is that makes them want to stay. The survey will help you retrieve results that give you an honest representation of not only how engaged your employees are, but also to pinpoint what is keeping people engaged, and what you could be doing differently to improve employee engagement.

Top Tips:

Don’t make the survey too long
Employee’s may be willing to take part, but if it takes longer than a couple of minutes to complete you may end up with a lot of incomplete surveys. Instead break down into smaller flash surveys to increase the number of completed surveys.

Incentivise people
Employees, no matter how engaged they are in their job, will not always want to take time out of their day to complete tasks that aren’t in their usual remit. So why not offer an incentive for completing the survey e.g. entering their name into a prize draw for a £100 store voucher?

Measuring Employee Engagement: JobHoller

What is it?
JobHoller are a full service employer branding agency, but we also own a bespoke technology platform with a range of tools to help companies promote their employer brand and transform their recruitment processes. One of the many JobHoller tools allows companies to build employee advocacy campaigns and measure live results through social media.

What it measures?
Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy refers to the action of your employees recommending or endorsing your company, often through social media to their own network connections. For an employee to share or recommend your company off their own back they are likely to be classed as an engaged employee as they are more likely to be happy in their role and invested in their employer’s company culture. Employee advocacy is a great way to understand which of your employees are engaged, but it’s also something that can have a great impact on your organisation too. Employee advocacy can increase your online visibility enormously. If you have 100 employees, each with an average of 400 social network connections, a single share can reach a potential 40,000 people! Employee advocacy can also build trust in your brand, as 84% of consumers’ value recommendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertising. The JobHoller employee advocacy tool allows you to build individual advocacy campaigns, select user groups to promote this to (to ensure you are sharing relevant messages to the right demographics), select a unique hashtag and measure the live results of Twitter mentions and retweets from your employees.

Top Tips:

Educate your employees
Your most engaged employees may like and share your content without any encouragement, but if you want to get the most from your employee advocacy initiative you will need to explain to your employees how this works and give them clear instructions for what they can do to get involved. It’s also advisable to have a robust social media policy in place to avoid any mishaps from disengaged employees sharing negative content on social media.

Tailor your campaigns
Employee advocacy campaigns can be a great way to get your posts seen by potential candidates, but instead of asking everyone to share something why not be more targeted with your approach? For example, if you are asking employees to share a post about a vacancy for a “PHP developer in Liverpool”, you may only want to promote to people in the IT department and people that work in your Liverpool office to ensure your content has a better chance of hitting the right candidate demographic.

Gamify it
If you are measuring levels of advocacy for your employees, you can give employees visibility of this and turn it into a bit of a competition. If you really want to boost this then you could offer an incentive or a reward for the most engaged employee too! While this might encourage people to share more than usual, you will find that disengaged employees are unlikely to get involved at all, meaning it is still an effective way of measuring employee engagement in your organisation.

Measuring Employee Engagement: Talkwalker Quick Search

What is it?
Talkwalker is an online platform that analyses online, social, print and TV/radio content. Their “Quick Search” product lets you analyse billions of conversations instantly, giving you statistics on various things including the sentiment of the content online.

What it measures?
Content Sentiment

Whether you realise it or not your employees are sharing content online, potentially about working for your organisation or your organisation in general. Measuring the posts alone will give you an idea of content reach, but it is important to also understand the sentiment of what is being shared online too. Tracking the sentiment of a post basically refers to understanding what the view or opinion is behind each post shared. If you can identify the levels of positive posts and negative posts from your employees, it will help you uncover an idea of how engaged your employees are. One thing to note here is that you may only be able to track public posts that mention your company name, but if you are a large organisation where it is difficult to keep track of every employee and how they feel it is a useful tool to measure.

Top Tips:

Don’t always take it on face value
Sentiment tracking will only uncover so much, so while it might give you some indication of employee engagement levels it’s also likely that employees sharing negative comments will be doing so on “private settings” without mentioning the company directly.

Use this for your customers
Sentiment tracking is a great tool to track the online tone from your customers comments too. If a customer is frustrated with your services, they are likely to take to places like Twitter to vent their frustrations. Tools such as Talkwalker’s Quick Search will allow you to monitor this but to also determine the real sentiment, which is particularly important for people posting sarcastic comments online.

Measuring Employee Engagement: Company Feedback

What is it?
OK so this isn’t exactly a tool, but measuring employee engagement through feedback is something that we recommend all companies implement in their organisation. You need a method for employees, anonymously or not, through an online platform or just through a comment card and box system, to give you feedback 365 days a year. This will allow you to collect honest feedback without having to wait for your bigger engagement surveys to take place.

What it measures?
Employee satisfaction

Giving employees an outlet to vent their frustrations, make requests for change, or to simply tell you what they love about their role will give you invaluable information to help increase employee engagement (and improve employee retention in your organisation). If you want to use this as an outlet for measuring employee engagement then consider adding a “sentiment marker” to the comments cards (which might just be an unhappy, a neutral and a happy face) so you can report each month on percentages of unhappy vs happy comments to measure employee engagement.

If you are interested in finding out about how JobHoller can help you start measuring employee engagement then get in touch at [email protected] or call us on 01244 567 967.