Spotlight — 3 Key Signs of Employee Engagement

HR professionals have a broad range of responsibilities, which include assisting managers and senior executives in boosting employee engagement. When employees are engaged, a company gains a competitive advantage that few others share.

That’s not merely a theory. Research consistently shows that employee engagement is not common. Luckily, that means if you take steps to boost employee engagement at your organization, you’ll stand out in your industry.

You might already know it. However, striving to engage your workforce is not the same as knowing whether your efforts are successful. In order to truly boost engagement, you need to know which strategies are working and which are not.

That’s why you also need to familiarize yourself with the signs of increasing engagement throughout your organization. The following are particularly important ones to look out for. While you should never rest on your laurels and assume the engagement mission is thoroughly accomplished once you notice these signs, they do indicate your strategy is yielding results.

Improvement in Key Metrics

There are many metrics you can use to gauge the effectiveness of an employee engagement strategy. You should coordinate with other members of the organization to identify those that you may have overlooked. Certain metrics may be more valuable to your company than they are to others.

That said, there are also certain general metrics that all companies can use to measure employee engagement. They include basic ones such as turnover rates and revenue.

Disengaged workers are not generally inclined to stay with the same employer for very long if they have the option of finding work elsewhere. As a result, retention will suffer. Thus, when a workforce is engaged, one of the telltale signs is improvement in this area.

So is increased revenue. Although it’s true that many factors may be involved when a company starts to make more money, employee engagement is often one of them.

That’s because engaged employees tend to be more productive than their counterparts. They’re also more enthusiastic during interactions with customers and clients. Together, these qualities help organizations to achieve their goals and improve revenue.

Positive Social Media Posts

The degree to which employers should monitor the way employees talk about them on social media is debatable. While you don’t want to intrude on their privacy, you also don’t want to work at the kind of organization where people feel comfortable making unflattering comments about it online. It takes trial and error to strike the right balance.

Either way, you shouldn’t necessarily ignore employees’ social media use completely. Paying attention to how they represent the company on social media is an easy way to find out if engagement is improving.

Employees who are not actively disengaged, but not engaged either, will probably say very little, or make a few relatively neutral comments about their employers on social media.

Only those who are engaged will be likely to praise the organization. The more often employees do so, the greater the odds are that you’ve implemented an employee engagement strategy that’s working.

It’s also worth noting that companies can help their employees share positive information on social media by distributing shareable content. Examples include pictures from company events, news stories that portray the company in a good light, and summaries of new perks or office upgrades, among others.

Positive Survey Results

Don’t make the mistake of relying only on your own observations when determining if an employee engagement strategy is working. It’s always a good idea to regularly survey your company’s employees about their experiences on the job. You need to find out what they genuinely feel.

You should also keep these surveys anonymous. Employees are less likely to provide honest feedback if they fear that there will be repercussions down the line.

Compare the results of surveys as you implement your engagement strategy. It will be fairly evident whether you’re achieving your goals. If you’re not, the survey results can help you to better understand what you’re still doing wrong.

That’s the most important point to remember. Although HR is by no means the only department responsible for boosting employee engagement, it’s unique in its capacity to educate managers and other decision-makers. You might not be the only person at your company addressing the engagement problem, but there’s a good chance you’re one of the people who is most involved in coming up with solutions. Managers and others may simply be the ones to put them into practice.

They likely won’t have time to measure the results. You can. When your strategy involves constantly monitoring performance, you’ll ensure that those results are as strong as possible by making any necessary changes to your plans. The entire company will benefit when you do so.