Talent Graffiti

Drive (and Measure) Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a concept that is generally viewed as managing the discretionary effort of your employees. That is, when given choices, employees will act in a way that furthers the organization's interests. An engaged employee is a one who is fully involved, enthusiastic, and finds personal meaning and motivation in his or her work. 

Employee engagement affects the bottom line because engaged employees deliver high-quality, committed service and they form work teams that produce high-quality results. Further, when engaged employees come into contact with the public, their commitment comes across and the people they're serving respond by becoming engaged in kind. 

To measure engagement companies need to ask employees for opinions and feedback on multiple issues that influence their attitudes at work. Often, disengagement occurs due to issues of communication and trust. According to a Towers Perrin survey on employee communication just over half of employees say their employers try too hard to "spin" the truth instead of giving it to them straight. 

What can you do? 

• Connect the work employees do as individuals to the big picture. Research shows that employees who are motivated will rally behind their employers, through good times and bad.
• Give your employees challenging work. Put people in roles that use their strengths.
• Provide training and opportunity for advancement. Assign projects that let employees grow and allow more authority over how they do their job along with clear measures of accountability.
• Ask the Gallop Q12 and analyze the results.   

How can you do it with TM Technology? 

• Utilize the goal linking functionality in your Performance Management solution to clearly communicate how individual goals align with, and affect corporate goals. 
• Access  coaching ideas and development planning resources offered by your Performance Management vendor to create succession and development plans that clearly lay out career path and development opportunities.
• Utilize the more strategic features of your Onboarding solution to deliver clear objectives (job description) and automate the provision of tools employees need to be successful from day one. 

Need to go deeper? 

• Access The Conference Board’s "Employee Engagement, A Review of Current Research and Its Implications" 
•  Read the white paper: Getting Engaged: The New Workplace Loyalty  
• Read the DDI research, Measuring Employee Engagement  

Deliver Metrics That Matter

To turn HR data in to essential business intelligence, first determine what workforce metrics matter to the business. These will vary widely based on many factors, including your industry, company size, culture, business goals, organizational structure and other factors.

And the impact of these metrics can differ within the same organization. Operations leaders may want to better understand staff development, while sales leaders may need to see the impact of compensation plans on deal closing.

These measures can be grouped into transactional (HR quantity metrics like head count, number of reviews completed, hours of employee training, etc.), operational (outcome metrics like time to hire, talent retention, employee satisfaction, etc.), and effectiveness (business performance metrics outside of HR like cost of turnover, effect of competency alignment on key positions, effect of training programs, etc.).

What can you do?

• Work with your internal stakeholders to determine what to measure and deliver it in a way that they can adopt (fancy word for use). List the requirements as must-haves and nice-to-haves to help design your solution.
• Determine how often your stakeholders need new data to analyze – daily, weekly, quarterly, etc.
• Use the communication method they use to access and share information. Email, web-based self service, formal presentation, slide show, printed report with charts and graphs, whatever works for them.
• Establish the form that will help users derive the best insight into the data to make better decisions – dashboards, detailed reports, drill down, etc.
• Understand their place in the organization to ensure they have the right level of access to the data you provide – department, organization, which employees, etc.

How can you do it with TM technology?

• Utilize existing reporting/analytic applications – and people who know how to use them – already in use in other areas of your organization. These systems already manage data, ensure its integrity and security, and facilitate its use for statistical analysis and modeling.
• Explore the feasibility of using service providers that specialize in data extraction from business applications, delivering analysis and extending your HRMS’s reporting capabilities.
• Establish a pilot program using manual data extraction and analysts (spreadsheets), wow the C-suite and start building your technology road map and business case.

Need to go deeper on this topic?

• Take the online Human Capital Institute course, Talent Metrics That Matter 
• Visit the Knowledge Infusion Center of Excellence and check out On-the-Money Metrics Corner – What Matters to You? And get involved with the discussion. 
• Check out HRMetrics.org for a growing list of metrics that matter.