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14 Employee Engagement Metrics to Track

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Learn about the employee engagement metrics that can help you boost employee wellbeing and reduce attrition, absenteeism, and turnover rates.

When it comes to reducing employee turnover rates, increasing job satisfaction, and improving overall employee wellbeing, collecting some form of employee feedback is essential. Many organizations still track engagement via methods like employee net promoter scores (eNPS) and pulse surveys, which is great for measuring at a specific point in time. Pair these methods with modern employee engagement software, and you can get a more complete read on your employees’ level of engagement.

In this article, we’ll explain why identifying both disengaged and engaged employees is so important and then give you tips on how best to do just that. Plus, we’ll give an in-depth explanation of the most important employee engagement metrics and how to measure them, which will help you understand and improve the employee experience and your work environment at large.

Choose where to start:


What Are Employee Engagement Metrics?

Quantitative employee engagement metrics empower business leaders and team members alike to track engagement and better understand how employees work.

Employee engagement is a fundamental concept in the effort to understand and describe, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the relationship between an organization and its employees.

At ActivTrak, we believe engaged employees are the best employees, and they make for the most productive company culture. Measuring and understanding employee engagement by using the right metrics is the first step towards creating a strategy that helps your team members work wiser and stay enthusiastic about your company’s vision.


Why Measuring Employee Engagement Metrics Is Important

Measuring employee engagement metrics is critical to better retention and performance. Knowing your employees helps managers extract the best out of staff members. As a leader, you should want to create an environment that makes your workforce happy and empowers them. Employee engagement is directly tied to other business outcomes such as:

  • Higher profits
  • Improved customer experience
  • Improved productivity
  • Increased innovation
  • Improved employee retention and well-being

71% of business leaders agree that engaged employees are essential to their organization’s success. In addition to increasing employee retention and boosting employee well-being, having an engaged team can increase your bottom line. According to Gallup, a highly engaged workforce increases profitability by 21% while disengaged employees can cost companies as much as $550 billion annually. Without engaged employees, your organization might also suffer from high absenteeism rates or turnover rates.

Achieving and maintaining employee engagement should be a top priority, but how do you know if you have engaged employees or not? Measuring employee engagement helps you identify and solve problems before they worsen. However, employee engagement can be difficult to measure objectively. Organizations must use data-driven workforce insights that complement engagement surveys and OKRs, enabling managers and employees alike to play an active role in improving engagement, satisfaction, and well-being.


14 Employee Engagement Metrics To Watch

The following employee engagement metrics indirectly or directly measure the state of employee engagement at your organization. By measuring these employee engagement metrics, you can take action where necessary and design interventions to improve employee engagement across your company.

Understanding what drives an engaged workforce and preventing disengagement on both an individual and team level is well worth the extra effort. When you have an effective employee engagement strategy, you can help employees do their best work, boost your business outcomes, reduce absenteeism, and so much more.

1. Workload Balance

One of the biggest detractors from employee satisfaction and engagement is a sense of being overloaded, which can quickly lead to team burnout. By tracking workloads among team members and keeping an eye on who might be at risk of overwork, and who has some additional bandwidth, you can ensure employee engagement doesn’t suffer due to an uneven distribution of work.

2. Personal Productivity Insights

This data offers a great window into the traits that could indicate employee disengagement, both for individual team members and for your employees in general. Managers gain insight into how individual employees work and employees can access those same insights themselves. This feature helps you take an open and collaborative approach to increase employee engagement.

When analyzed, this data can provide insights into how work gets done, how teams interact, how employees can learn and improve in their jobs, and how results can be optimized.

3. Benchmarks and Goals

These insights offer a great baseline to work from as you create an engagement strategy for team members. You can see how your teams and individual employees are performing, compare that performance to your goals and theirs, then use that information to make adjustments as needed. As you see what’s working well and what needs improvement, you’re better equipped to create a targeted engagement strategy.

4. Employee Absenteeism Rate

Absenteeism means chronic or habitual workplace absence, often spontaneous and unapproved. High employee absenteeism can indicate employee engagement issues and measuring the employee absenteeism rate helps you keep track of this. A higher absenteeism rate results in a greater workload for other employees, which, in turn, causes more stress and decreased job satisfaction.

Absenteeism Formula:

Absenteeism rate = (Total number of absent days per employee) / (Total number of working days) x 100

5. Employee Turnover Rate

Employee turnover rate (ETR) considers the percentage of employees who left a company within a certain period. This is essential to track, as most times highly engaged employees are less likely to voluntarily leave. When done right, building an engaged workforce can drastically reduce a high employee turnover rate.

Turnover Rate Formula:

Turnover rate = (Total number of employees who have left the organization) / (Total number of employees at the beginning of the period) x 100

6. Employee Retention Rate

Employee retention is the inverse of employee turnover. A company’s overall retention rate refers to its ability to keep employees over a period of time, which can indicate their engagement. Keeping your top employees at your organization and committed to their roles is a must if you want to build a healthy, sustainable workplace.

Retention Rate Formula:

Employee retention rate = (Total number of employees – Total number of employees who left) / total number of employees) x 100

7. Employee Performance Rates

Highly engaged employees do their best work to achieve the business’s goals and they are likely to perform well in their jobs. Analyzing both work performance with employee engagement metrics can provide more insight into an employee’s level of satisfaction with their company and role.

Four Categories of Employee Performance

Generally speaking, you can split employee performance metrics into four core categories including:

  • Work quality metrics
  • Work quantity metrics
  • Work efficiency metrics
  • Organizational performance metrics

 

8. Employee Satisfaction Rates

Employee satisfaction is defined as how happy an employee is with their job and work environment. There are many factors that make up employee satisfaction including remuneration, stress, leadership, management, teamwork, employee experience, company culture, and work-life balance. Employee engagement and employee satisfaction often go hand in hand since satisfied employees are more likely to be engaged in the workplace.

9. Employee Net Provider Score (eNPS)

Net Promoter Scores were originally introduced to measure the levels of satisfaction and loyalty of customers, but have since been adopted internally by progressive employers to ascertain the same information from their employees. This is done by asking the simple question, “How likely is it that you would recommend working at our company to a friend or colleague?” ‍Generally, the question is answered on a scale from 0 to 10, where anyone answering 0 to 6 is considered a detractor, 7 and 8 are considered passive, and 9 and 10 respondents are considered promoters. To calculate your employee NPS, you subtract your detractors from your promoters (and ignore the passives) and divide by the total number of respondents.

eNPS Formula:

Employee NPS = (promoters – detractors)/ total respondents

10. Customer Satisfaction

Low employee engagement rates often cause low customer satisfaction. Engaged employees are described as being fully immersed in and enthusiastic about their work. Measuring customer satisfaction is a common method used to determine how well your employees meet or exceed customer expectations. This measurement can help determine how engaged your employees truly are.

11. Employee Engagement Scales

Employee engagement scales are often used to measure employees’ level of engagement. These scales were developed through academic research studies that have demonstrated these scales to be statistically valid and reliable, and have shown the scales to measure engagement in such a way that it is clearly distinct. Oftentimes, organizations use these scales as part of a wider employee attitude survey to measure engagement levels and see how engagement is related to other factors in the working environment such as leadership style, communication, job design and so on, which can be measured using other questions. The two best-known questionnaires are the:

  • Utrecht Work Engagement Scale
  • GALLUP Scale

 

12. Employer Review Site Ratings

For larger organizations, watching these ratings can provide insight not only to how current employees feel, but how those who have left feel. What people say about you online tells a lot about how they feel about working for you. Poor employee satisfaction will reflect in both the quantitative and qualitative data shown on employer review sites like Glassdoor. These sites also use algorithms to emphasize recent reviews and to give viewers the most up-to-date satisfaction score at the company. A recent study shows there is a correlation between engagement and Glassdoor ratings and it’s likely to be stronger the higher the number of reviews there are. Companies can use employer site ratings to find ways to improve engagement for current and future employees.

13. Employee Engagement Surveys

Employee engagement surveys are used as an indicator and provide insight into self-reported engagement levels. The cadence of the surveys can vary, but it is generally a good idea to perform them on a frequent basis. By performing surveys frequently, you are empowered to benchmark your results against other companies in your industry. The use of surveys enables organizations to ask tailored questions about the employee experience.

14. ROI on Employee Engagement

It’s important for businesses to understand the return on investment of high employee engagement. When businesses understand the value of the highest engaged employees, they can better understand the impact on productivity and profits. A study from Aon Hewitt found that engaged teams were more likely to reach their sales goals. The analysis found that for every 1% increase in engagement, teams could expect to see an additional 0.6% increase in new business.

When deciding between metrics, remember that the metrics should benefit both employees looking for job enrichment and improvement, and employers looking for employee engagement and improved results.


Collecting Employee Engagement Metrics: Why Surveys and eNPS Alone Aren’t Enough

Employee engagement surveys and employee net promoter scores (also called the eNPS or employee NPS) are two of the most common ways to measure employee engagement.

These methods allow managers to get insight into their employees’ experiences through questions about thoughts, feelings, and motives that can help managers understand employee job satisfaction and wellness. In the case of the employee net promoter score, unlike standard employee surveys, there is only one question to answer: “How likely are you to recommend working at your organization?” This question alone can give managers a sense of engagement and satisfaction.

Though undeniably useful, these traditional methods on their own aren’t always effective employee engagement KPIs. In fact, only 22% of companies get good results from employee engagement surveys or eNPS. There are a couple reasons for this. One major issue is that employee engagement surveys and eNPS aren’t conducted frequently enough, meaning they suffer from recency bias and typically only give insight into point-in-time sentiment instead of overall engagement. And as with any survey, these measures are also easily skewed by self-reporting.

Another concern is that neither measure offers any plan of action. Even if the surveys and eNPS effectively demonstrate that your employees are struggling, they don’t tell you what you need to fix to improve either employee engagement, nor do they tell you how to go about fixing it.
For organizations looking to go further when it comes to understanding and tackling workforce engagement, job satisfaction, and well-being, employee engagement surveys and employee net promoter scores alone aren’t enough.


Understand and Improve Employee Experience with Quantitative Data

Engaged employees are the best asset of any organization. Engaged employees are more productive, more invested in their work, and more likely to stay with their current organization. Plus, engaged employees tend to experience greater job satisfaction during their workdays and a healthier work-life balance outside of them. With the ActivTrak platform, you can access the quantitative metrics needed to understand employee engagement and identify action plans to improve it among both new hires and seasoned employees.

Pro-Tips:

  • Incorporate quantitative measures to effectively measure employee engagement with standard forms of employee feedback.
  • Let employees track engagement for themselves by giving them access to your collected data.

Use employee activity to offer employee recognition whenever possible — positive recognition is a great way to boost levels of engagement!


When it comes to unlocking employee engagement in an organization, quantitative data is essential. By leveraging workforce analytics alongside employee engagement surveys and eNPS, organizations can surface opportunities to provide support quickly to those employees that need it most, enabling managers and employees alike to play an active role in improving engagement, job satisfaction and well-being.

Employee monitoring software offers the most accurate way to collect the quantitative metrics needed to measure employee engagement in your organization. Employee engagement can be difficult to gauge and relying on personal introspection or external observations doesn’t generate the actionable insights you need. When you use data to analyze how your team members work, you can get insights into which employees are engaged, what traits and behaviors indicate engagement, and make targeted interventions that will improve engagement within your work environment. Only then can you accurately assess and address your employee engagement.

The ActivTrak platform delivers data-driven workforce insights that will help you measure employee engagement and highlight opportunities to help your employees work wiser. With ActivTrak, managers can spot early indicators of employee burnout and disengagement and get advice on how to address them with the aid of ActivTrak Coach. Plus, the tool’s dashboards make it easy to understand and optimize workload balance across teams and to identify and address any sources of distraction or inefficiency that could be interfering with engagement.

ActivTrak’s Personal Insights dashboard empowers employees to understand their own work habits and engagement, comparing them to team and individual benchmarks and identifying information that can drive productive conversations with managers.

With this kind of quantitative data, you don’t need to just rely on subjective reports or vague questions to try to gauge levels of engagement. Instead, you can use real-time data to understand how your employees are working and create initiatives that boost engagement and retention while decreasing employee turnover and absenteeism.

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