Employee Engagement * WHAT Do I Measure?

2009/08/03: motivation / recognition / rewards, recognition, strategy, performance management, motivation
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?