Two types of Data that can Improve Employee Engagement

Author: Luke Rees (AccuraCast)

Many businesses of today will be finding it harder and harder to attract and retain their top talent. Due to the increasing transparency of the job market, employees are seeing their bargaining power increase massively, and have consequently become much more comfortable switching companies. In addition, Millennials, are gradually starting to dominate the job market, who are a notoriously hot-footed demographic with high expectations.

In order to build a place where people want to come to work every day, management teams now need to have the right tools and data in order to leverage what it is that makes employees feel valued and engaged. Here is an overview of these tools and the different types of analytics they can provide.

Statistical and Psychographic Employee Data

In order to make the smartest decisions about their organisation, HR first need to be able to collect and interpret the relevant statistical data: retention and attrition rates are clearly the most obvious indication of this, since they demonstrate in hard numbers whether employee engagement is currently high or low within your organisation.

But there are also types of psychographic data that can be used to gauge employee satisfaction; real-time employee engagement surveys, like Thymometrics (Thymometrics.com) , as well as emotion monitoring devices and apps, like Celpax (Celpax.com) , are great tools for collecting this. These software vendors provide the data insights that allow employers to build a more accurate picture of the health of their organization. Plus, by monitoring engagement data trends in real-time, they mean employers can quickly address any issues before they escalate.

Retention and attrition rates providing the hard facts about how satisfied employees are, whilst psychographic data allows management analyse the collective mood in real time. When combined, the company can make smarter decisions about how to keep people engaged in the long term.

How to Leverage These Data Sets Within Your Organisation

Statistical data (retention rates) and psychographic data (real-time engagement surveys) together arm HR with up-to-date information on their employees. But what’s the best way to leverage this information within your organisation?

Data silos are almost always a hindrance to innovation. To overcome this, a great habit is to open up a dialog with employees – the data comes from employees, so they must surely have some ideas about the changes they’d like to see. In addition, employees are likely to feel much more engaged if they can see their opinions are being listened to.

Google’s People Operations department (or ‘POPS’ for short), are a great example of this. In 2010, they ran a ‘conjoint survey’ in order to figure out the best pay increase option. They gave employees a choice: Googlers could either receive $1,000 more in salary, or $2,000 as a one off bonus.

The results of the survey were clear: employees valued base pay above all, and so as a consequence of this finding, all Googlers received a 10 percent salary increase. Apparently people were overjoyed, and attrition to competing companies consequently declined.

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