Your best employee quits suddenly. Then another leaves a few weeks later. You hire a replacement, but they’re gone in three months. Each new hire seems so competent in their interview and enthusiastic during their first week, but their performance never meets expectations. The high turnover is eating into your revenue, and customer satisfaction is suffering. What’s going on?
To fix the problem, you must first correctly identify the problem. The issue here may be employee engagement (or, more precisely, a lack of engagement). A disengaged workforce can have negative effects on your business, but it’s hard to diagnose. A data driven approach helps you get to the root of the problem and rebuild failing systems and processes.
Why Does Engagement Matter?
An engaged workforce is motivated to do more than the bare minimum. Everyone is at work to collect a paycheck, sure, but engaged employees take pride in their work. They derive meaning from their work. They feel supported by coworkers and management, and in turn, they want to support the business and help it succeed. There are many reasons to foster the kind of environment that increases employee engagement. As we outlined in this article, an engaged workforce offers your business more resilience, greater innovation, and lower turnover.
Workplace Factors That Drive Engagement
We have an article here on what drives employee engagement if you want to learn more about these factors. Briefly, the main factors are timely, constructive feedback, a sense of competence, a sense that decisions at work are rooted in a sense of fairness, professional development opportunities, and work/life balance.
Measuring Employee Engagement
Engagement can be hard to observe because it isn’t obvious who is engaged and who isn’t. Someone who is slumped in their chair with a glaze of lethargy in their eyes could be deeply focused on a task and motivated to do it to the best of their ability, while someone who appears alert and attentive could be simply going through the motions and putting in the least amount of effort they can get away with. That’s why you need data to detect engagement issues.
Identifying Your Best Employees
The right data will help you identify your most valuable departments and employees. Use this information to determine which departments and employees should be prioritized in hiring, budgeting, and professional development decisions. If a particularly talented salesperson were to leave, for example, how much revenue would you be losing? What is it worth to you to keep them? Data analytics will keep this from being a gut decision.
Uncovering Hidden Patterns
When you look at the data, and not just what you can observe, you uncover the patterns of engagement and disengagement hiding in plain sight. Do resignations increase after certain events or during certain times of year? Do people in certain roles quit more often than others? If you see a spike in resignations after a particular policy or process was put in place, for instance, it is possible that employees were unhappy with the new way of working and mentally checked out. Use employee surveys and customer feedback alongside qualitative data to get a full picture of what’s happening behind the scenes.
Data Helps Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement
Using data to understand and improve employee engagement gives you a framework for improvement. Instead of just guessing why productivity is down or why your best employees are leaving, you have concrete evidence that points toward a problem. When you know the problem, you can develop a solution. It’s all part of creating a culture of continuous improvement, where everyone feels supported and motivated to work toward achieving the business’s goals.
