Two Simple KPIs for Measuring Employee Engagement

I'm a big believer that employee engagement is one of the most important metrics for measuring the future success of any organization. Engaged employees are more likely to to take pride in their work, provide support and encouragement to co-workers and offer up a continuous stream of ideas to make the company better. Most people agree with these points, but a common question is how do you effectively measure employee engagement? At Solstice we use two simple quantitative measures, one internal and one external.

Employee Net Promoter Score

The internal metric we use is the "Employee Net Promoter Score" (eNPS), which is based off of the popular Customer Net Promoter Score framework introduced by Harvard Business Review in 2003. NPS was developed as a simple way to measure customer loyalty. This same simple framework can be used to measure internal employee engagement.

How does it work? On a quarterly basis, we send out an anonymous survey that asks all employees one simple question: "On a scale of 0-10, how likely would you be to refer someone to work at Solstice Mobile?". Those that answer 0-6 are considered detractors; 9s and 10s are considered promoters and 7s and 8s are passives. To calculate your eNPS you subtract your detractors from your promoters (ignoring passives) and divide by the total number of respondents.

eNPS = (promoters-detractors)/total respondents

The best possible score is +100, the worst possible score is -100. A positive number is considered to be good (more promoters than detractors) while a score over 50 is considered outstanding. Some firms use a slightly modified version of the formula where 8s, 9s and 10s are all considered promoters, with 6s and 7s as passives. Our most recent score, taken last week, was 68 (83 if we use the 8,9,10 scale).

We also follow up the required question with an optional free form question, "What could we do to increase the score?". It often breeds a lot of good feedback that our HR and Executive teams can use to make the score better for the next quarter.

The key point, however, is that this is a relative score. Even if your number is low, after running this survey you now have a guide post you can use to make changes and see if they are helping or hurting employee morale. Our score is up 23% this year. That means we're on the right track and making the right moves to further increase our employee engagement.

Glassdoor

The external metric we use is our www.glassdoor.com rating. Have you looked at your company's Glassdoor rating? Chances are your job candidates have. Glassdoor is quickly becoming the defacto source for employer reviews (think of it as a Yelp for the job market). As an employer, you can't control your Glassdoor reviews, but you can respond to them, and I think that's important. Our Glassdoor rating is 4.8/5.0, which is strong, but we have a couple negative reviews out there. I believe the negative feedback from past disgruntled employees is just as valuable as the positive reviews from current employees. Negative feedback needs to be acknowledged in the public eye by company leadership so others know any legitimate concerns either have been or will be addressed.

We tell our folks that our company is not perfect and never will be; but we will always strive to make it better. This philosophy was inspired by one of my favorite Lombardi quotes.

“Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.”

Achieving high levels of employee engagement is more of an art than a science, and is often very dependent on the organization at hand (I've shared a couple of our tactics in a past blog). But measuring employee engagement doesn't have to be complicated. These simple metrics are good indicators if you're on the right track. At Solstice Mobile, we consider them two of our key performance indicators on the health and future potential of our business.