How to accurately measure employee engagement

Something big is on its way over here at goHappy. 

goHappy is an engagement platform for your frontline workforce. That means an easy way to reach your entire frontline workforce through an app-free, adoptionless channel: text. 

But it also means being able to accurately measure employee engagement. Because at goHappy, one of our key perspectives on engagement is, “What gets measured gets managed”. The inverse is also true. 

Before you can manage or improve anything, you first have to know how you’re performing. So how do you accurately and efficiently measure the engagement of your frontline workforce? 

Currently, it can be challenging. And that’s where goHappy comes in. Starting in the next couple of weeks, we’re rolling out an entirely new Feedback module in our product that will allow you to get real-time, consistent, accurate feedback from your frontline. The data produced will be displayed in a user-friendly dashboard that helps bubble up key insights and help you take action. 

Whether you are a goHappy customer or not (yet), we want to share some of the thinking that went into our new Feedback module so that you can begin accurately measuring your frontline engagement and managing it for a better customer and employee experience. 

Define Engagement Metrics

Before you can measure frontline employee engagement, you must establish clear and relevant metrics. Employee engagement can be multidimensional, so identifying key indicators that reflect your organization's unique needs is essential. 

The goHappy Engagement Model is based on the premise that feeling Valued and Connected are the two most important determinants of the employees’ workplace experience and, in turn, have the greatest influence on their level of engagement. 

Our new research-backed Engagement Survey, specifically designed for the frontline, measures the drivers that most contribute to an employee feeling Valued and Connected. Here’s a very limited sample of what we help our clients measure when it comes to their employees’ experience:

• Do your employees feel appreciated for their efforts? (Valued)
• Do they feel respected? (Valued)
• Do they feel their leader or manager cares about them? (Valued)
• Do they know what’s expected of them? (Connected)
• Do they feel informed and in-the-know? (Connected)

Beyond your employees’ experience, you’ll want to directly measure engagement as well. (Yes, this is possible!) Engagement is the emotional connection that results from an employee’s overall workplace experience. In our model, engagement is demonstrated through three behavioral outcomes: 

• An employee’s performance and readiness to go above and beyond
• The employee’s commitment to the job and the organization
• The employee’s pride in and intent to promote the organization to others

How might you define Value and Connection for your frontline staff? How about overall engagement? Defining those metrics (or using the suggestions above) is a great way to begin. 

Survey your Frontline 

The only way to truly measure frontline employee engagement is to get their feedback. The best way to do this is anonymous, regular surveys through a platform that employees already use, like text.

Even if you don’t have a frontline engagement tool like goHappy, you can still survey your frontline workforce with workarounds like setting up a survey in a platform like Survey Monkey, Typeform, or Google forms, and sending it to them through your current communications channels (have you established those?). 

Granted, we’ve worked hard to provide our clients with the most seamless and useful way to gather feedback, through our Feedback module. But surveying your frontline is so important to employee engagement that we feel it’s well worth the effort - even if it’s a little tedious or clunky. 

Gather feedback at key moments

Although we advocate for regularly surveying employees throughout their employment journey, some moments are crucial when it comes to soliciting feedback. 

goHappy’s goPowered surveys are research-backed, frontline-focused surveys that allow for internal and competitive benchmarking and, over time, predictive analytics. Our suite of goPowered surveys include the following key types of feedback:

• Engagement Survey - a yearly overall look at frontline engagement
• Pulse Survey - gathering feedback and metrics at regular intervals
• New Hire Survey - gathering feedback from new hires several times throughout their first 90 days can improve retention! 
• Exit Survey - if an employee voluntarily leaves, you’ll want to know why

It’s not enough to survey your frontline only once a year or at random intervals. Your survey strategy should be regular, ongoing, and consistent. Remember: what gets measured gets managed. And you manage your frontline staff (well or poorly) every day.

Analyze and extract actionable insights

Gathering employee feedback can actually improve retention! But not if you don’t do anything about it. 

We know. Poring through feedback and trying to make sense of it all can be time consuming and overwhelming. That’s why our new Feedback module does the heavy lifting for you, pulling data into an easy-to-read dashboard for actionable insights that you can immediately begin to act on. 

But even if you don’t have the Feedback module, analyzing the data and pulling out its juicy insights is still really important. (Before we built our Feedback product, we did this for our clients by hand!) 

A few things to look for when analyzing your data:

• How is your frontline scoring on your most important experience and engagement metrics (as defined above)? 
• Do trends hold true across locations, roles, and tenure? (Be sure to capture this data when setting up your survey - unless you’re using goHappy - we integrate directly with your HRIS to capture it for you)
• What areas could use the most work? What can you do to make improvements and how will you operationalize those improvements so they happen regularly? 
  
  

Again, what gets measured gets managed. And employee engagement is worth measuring, as it impacts so much about your business, including employee retention, customer experience, and even revenue. If regularly measuring employee engagement isn’t already part of your strategy, make a plan to include it today. 

If you want help gaining consistent, accurate feedback from your frontline (or communicating with them in the first place) we hope you’ll reach out. Frontline engagement is our passion and our dedicated team is here to help you when you’re ready to make it a priority!