People Analytics
February 6, 2020
Dave McKean
X min
By now, most HR professionals understand the importance of employee engagement.
Bottom line: employees that are truly engaged are more productive, make customers happier, and are less likely to leave their organizations. Here’s a good overview of why engagement matters, and even some tips on how to achieve it.
The best way to measure engagement is to create benchmarks. For example, you can conduct a survey. There are many different kinds of surveys, so let’s take a look at what sets them apart:
Simple. Fast. Powerful.
The NPS lets you know the overall mood of your team, which gives you an idea of their level of engagement. Check the whole team or get snapshots of subgroups by department, location, etc. to see micro trends.
The NPS is based on the idea that every employee can be put in one of three categories: promoters, passives, and detractors.
You simply ask the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend [your company] to a friend or colleague as a great place to work.”
Responses are measured on a 0 to 10 point rating scale:
Your NPS is the difference between the percentage of promoters and detractors – passives don’t factor into your score. The NPS is not a percentage, it is an absolute number between -100 and +100.
Here’s an example: if you have 30% promoters, 50% passives and 20% detractors, your NPS is +10 (30 minus 20.)
According to the creator of the NPS, Fred Reichheld, the average American company scores less than +10 on the NPS, while superstar employers get between +50 and +80. But these may vary a lot depending on your sector and other factors like culture.
Remember, you are benchmarking, so what matters most is the change in your score overtime – per month or quarter, for example.
It is important to note that “Net Promoter” is a registered trademark of Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix. If you do use the NPS in your engagement benchmarking, you should provide an acknowledgement in the small print.
Fast. Frequent. More in-depth.
An employee pulse survey asks simple questions of your team weekly or monthly. You get a quick take on the health of employee engagement at your company, hence the name 'pulse'. A pulse survey is more in-depth than the NPS, but still simple enough. You’ll get the most honest results if you make the survey anonymous.
You know this type of survey. You present a number of statements, and ask team members to rate their agreement on a scale: Strongly Disagree (1 point), Disagree (2), Neutral/Neither Agree or Disagree (3), Agree (4), Strongly Agree(5).
Pulse survey questions on employee engagement
Below are the questions we use at Kudos to help us measure employee engagement. Of course, you can ask any questions you want. These are just the ones that work for us.
Leadership Questions – looking at how employees see senior leadership
Purpose Questions – about vision, mission and values and how they relate to individuals
Respect Questions – about an employee’s relationship with their immediate supervisor or their team
Opportunity Questions – about how an employee feels about their growth and career opportunities
To get your overall score, just add the values of all the responses. Divide the total by the number of your employees to get an average per person score. Of course, you can also check your score against each subsection. Based on the responses, you’ll get an idea of which areas you may need to make improvements in order to increase engagement.
Delivering NPS and pulse surveys
As for conducting an NPS or pulse survey, there are a variety of survey tools, such as Survey Monkey that make it easy to gather data.
Need to dig deeper?
If you find that the NPS and pulse surveys just scratch the surface on organizational employee engagement, try an in-depth annual survey. Search online and you’ll see that there are many organizations that specialize in workplace surveys.They can design, conduct, and prepare detailed reports with insights and actionable strategies to address issues.
Kudos, our online employee experience and culture platform, provides several ways to help you measure employee engagement. Everyone in your organization can see the Engagement Leaders module, which shows your company’s top senders and receivers of Kudos.
Your leaders with admin privileges can see a variety of data showing how individual employees, departments, or the whole company are being recognized by their peers for demonstrating engagement-related values like collaboration, communication, passion, and accountability.
You can easily see and track this data over time, so benchmarking is a breeze.
Here are some handy links about using data to be a better manager:
How to Use Employee Feedback for Business Growth
Are you missing out on the benefits of HR analytics?
Whether you use NPS, pulse or comprehensive surveys, or the many benchmarks in Kudos, make a commitment to stay on top of employee engagement in your organization.
Looking for tips on how to improve engagement? We have some great ideas here and here.
Kudos is an employee engagement, culture, and analytics platform, that harnesses the power of peer-to-peer recognition, values reinforcement, and open communication to help organizations boost employee engagement, reduce turnover, improve culture, and drive productivity and performance. Kudos uses unique proprietary methodologies to deliver essential people analytics on culture, performance, equity, and inclusion, providing organizations with deep insights and a clear understanding of their workforce.
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