ONE of the common challenges that organizations face is retaining their top talents. When this happens, some organizations instinctively focus on gimmicks and programs to stop their people from resigning, but these employees eventually leave. These organizations fail to effectively identify why their talents leave, or rely heavily on engagement tactics that do not work at all because these do not address the workplace issues their employees face. When it comes to something as complex as maintaining workforce engagement, you need to look at all the indicators that point to whether your team is in it for the long haul, or are they packing their bags to leave.
Attrition rate, or how fast people leave the organization, is just one indicator of engagement. If you have an exit interview, it is easier to discover the common reasons why people leave. Information from the interview will help you generate strategies and programs to retain your existing talent. If their reason for leaving is a core value or desired culture in the organization, you can use it as a screening question for incoming applicants to ensure culture fit with the organization.
Another common tool for measuring engagement are organization climate surveys. While this is the most comprehensive and widely used tool to measure engagement, it can be time-consuming and, if not done properly, can yield conflicting results. If done by Human Resources, there is a tendency for the results to be tweaked based on what the management wants to hear. To be truly objective, it needs to be done by a disinterested third party to ensure the results are interpreted impartially. Of course this needs to be validated by focus group discussions and interviews, but a third party can provide better recommendations and solutions because of their lack of familiarity and bias with the people in the organization.
Another common engagement indicator is your team’s absences. When people frequently do not show up for work, this could be an indicator that they do not find their work fulfilling or rewarding. Worse, they are absent because they are looking for new work. Absenteeism can affect not just the performance of the absentee, but also the team members who have to take on more work to make up for lost manpower.
On the other hand, you should also be on the lookout for how many of the vacation leaves are used by your team. Unutilized vacation leaves can also be an indication that a team is overworked to the point that they could not take a vacation, or they have bosses who do not know how to manage their workload and time well. When your team does not take the time to rest and avail of their leaves, they lose the chance to regenerate and be exposed to other experiences which can help them think critically and creatively.
Which brings us to your team’s productivity. As a people manager, you have your own way of measuring your team’s output whether you are using a people analytics app or by closely monitoring your team’s deliverables. Changes in productivity can be caused by factors other than disengagement, like the lack of tools or training. But these should be addressed as soon as possible because these could contribute to your team’s lack of engagement and motivation later on. When your team’s productivity is taking a dip, find out why as soon as you can.
You can also look at your onboarding program for new hires. If it is difficult to retain new hires in the first 90 days, you might want to invest in an onboarding program. If you do have an onboarding program, ask how many were regularized and chose to stay in the organization after the probation period. The first 90 days are crucial in the engagement of new employees because it will determine how well they have adjusted to their new role. And even if they did finish their probation period, this is not a guarantee that they will stay because by then, other factors would have affected their engagement. But this will help you catch early on what is causing people to disengage.
Another key indicator for engagement is how many have been promoted internally. A key factor in a team’s engagement is the availability of a professional development plan. A review of your organization’s succession planning and how many of your top performers are promoted indicates the level of your team’s engagement. While external hires can provide a fresh perspective and new ways of working, this could also frustrate and discourage existing employees who are eyeing the position. Also, hiring external applicants indirectly tells your team that no one is ready to take on the role, which in turn indicates your lack of succession planning or poor mentoring skills.
When available, read online company reviews or even mentions in social media. These will give you an idea how current and past employees view the organization, and provide insights on what previous and present employees feel about the organization. You can make informed decisions on retention programs that can be sustained, and which ones need to be stopped.
One indicator you can include in the engagement survey is the Employee Net Promoter Score, which asks the respondents to answer, “How likely are you to recommend working at our company to a friend or a colleague?” and then a Likert scale of up to 10, with 10 being most likely. You can tally the scores with those answering 9 and 10 as Promoters, 7 and 8 as neutral, and 6 below as detractors. This will give you an idea of how your workforce perceives the organization generally, and how engaged they are with their work and their work environment.
At the end of the day, all these indicators need to be validated by the collective experience of the organization to validate results and should be used to generate projects and programs that address the root cause of the disengagement. Some organizations think that the solution to any engagement issue is to have events and give corporate giveaways when, in fact, employees need better benefits or working conditions. You need to discover the best combination of engagement indicators given the nature of your organization, and then develop the right combination of activities, benefits and rewards to keep your team consistently engaged.
Image credits: Jason Goodman on Unsplash