Employee Engagement * WHAT Do I Measure?

Two common questions when it comes to measuring employee engagement are what do you measure and when do you measure it. Today I’ll be addressing what to measure; my next post will speak to when.

I’ve blogged before on our best practices for what to measure and also have a white paper that dives more deeply into the topic. Today I’ll share insight from a couple other bloggers in this space.

First, Winning Workplaces, a small-business focused blog, offers these company-wide metrics commonly tracked in the companies that win their Top Small Workplaces competition:

1. Low annual turnover. Benchmark: 1-2%
2. Multi-year revenue growth, especially in a declining industry. Benchmark: 15% annually
3. Strong revenue per employee. Benchmark: $233,700
4. Better-than-industry-average employee tenure. Benchmark: 5 years
5. Long CEO tenure. Benchmark: 17 years
6. Good portion of open positions filled from within. Benchmark: 25%

At the individual employee level, Tim Wright, author of the Culture to Engage blog, recommends survey questions built on a Likert scale on:

• Job performance
• Job satisfaction
• Quality of peers' performance
• Quality of management
• Communication
• Clarity of company goals, mission, values
• Clarity of expectations
• Loyalty to company (likelihood of leaving)

Of course, Gallup’s Q12 is always a strong basis for an employee engagement survey, and also strong for measuring the role and success of a recognition program.

What tools do you use for measuring employee engagement? What do you benchmark yourself against?