Why You Should Share Employee Engagement Metrics (And Where to Start)

Sharing Company Culture & Employee Engagement Metrics

An engaged workforce is an incredible asset to your business - companies with highly engaged employees outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share. Despite the power of engaged employees, only 46% of companies report they're prepared to tackle engagement within their organization. For the companies that do tackle the challenge, more than 60% still only measure employee engagement annually.

Looking to boost employee engagement at your organization? Start by regularly measuring company culture and employee engagement. And just as importantly: follow up by sharing findings with employees and explaining what they mean for future strategy. Doing so goes a long way towards creating an engaged workplace.

Read on to learn why sharing your results is so important and to get best practices on how to do so.

Why is Sharing Engagement Metrics Important?
Sharing the results of your company's culture or employee engagement survey is important for two key reasons:

1. It demonstrates leadership's commitment to honest and open communication, which increases employees' trust in leadership
2. It helps employees feel their voice matters to the company, its strategy, and its mission

Demonstrates Leadership's Commitment to Honest and Open Communication

By sharing survey results and engagement metrics with their teams, your leaders will set the example that open communication is a valued attribute. And in setting that example, employees will both follow suit in their day-to-day and trust their leaders to always communicate honestly. 

Here at Great Work, we've identified effective communication as one of the 10 key qualities common to high-performing cultures. And as we've covered here, engagement is an outcome of a strong company culture. 

Further, in our Top Company Cultures program, the biggest difference between "winners" (companies with the highest culture scores) and all other participants was employees' confidence in leadership, driving home the importance of this characteristic. 

Showing Employees Their Voice Matters

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, not feeling appreciated is the number one reason people leave their jobs. By creating an ongoing dialogue around your company's culture and engagement results, you'll show employees that you value their perspective in the conversation.

Ask for feedback thoughtfully and without ego. Your employees will feel encouraged to take an active role in bettering their company's engagement results - improving the results will have a direct impact on their experience, after all. 

Best Practices on Sharing Engagement Metrics

If you regularly conduct culture surveys, which ask specific questions on topics like leadership, your mission, and workplace experience, then you have enough data to share the results. Here are four ways to share your findings and generate a conversation around continuing to improve the employee experience. 

Share Top-Level Results Across the Organization

Does your organization regularly holds a company-wide town hall? If so, then share your engagement survey results during one of the sessions. Ideally, the results are shared by your CEO or a member of leadership team and cover:

• Top-level results from your most recent survey
• How the results compare to past surveys
• What contributed to the highest scores
• What contributed to the lowest scores
• What areas the organization plans to focus on going forward
• What employees can expect next in the next three months, 6 months, and year
• Questions from employees

Sharing your engagement levels in a company-wide forum helps connect employees' sentiment to the organization's top-level objectives and mission - something that has proven to increase engagement. Sixty-seven percent of working Millennials are engaged at work when their company's mission makes them feel their job is important. Yet, only 26% have discussed how their work ties back to the organization's mission in the past week. Leadership-led town hall meetings are one way to close that gap.

Don't hold town halls? Consider holding a company-wide meeting after each culture survey. Or, consider sending a company-wide email walking through the results. 

Share Team-Wide Results in a Team Meeting

Ground your company's top-level engagement metrics by sharing how the team compares to the overall survey results.

Most teams have regularly scheduled check ins, whether weekly or monthly. As the team leader, commit time to covering the same agenda points as in the town hall - but this time, just cover your team's survey result.

By doing so in a smaller setting, you can speak to successes and challenges that are specific to your team. Perhaps more importantly, you can open up the floor in a smaller setting where they may feel more comfortable speaking up. Devote time for employees to contribute ideas for improving the team's experience. 

Only do this step if your team is larger than five or so people; employees should feel that their feedback is respected as anonymous. If your team is smaller, skip right to one-on-one conversations.

Ask For Feedback In One-On-One Follow Ups

Once you've shared results in your town hall and your team-wide meeting, follow up with your team individually in one-on-one conversations.

Use this time to listen, rather than to share results. Your one-on-one is a valuable opportunity to collect feedback and make your team feel heard. Ask thoughtful questions following up on the survey results, like:

• Do you have any questions about the survey results?
• Do any of these results worry or frustrate you? Why?
• Can you provide feedback on how we conduct the survey or share the results?
• Can you provide feedback on progress we've made since the last survey?
• How can I help our team continue to improve these results?

And, of course, stress that anything employees decide to share is confidential. 

Continue the Dialogue by Referencing Findings Whenever Possible

Finally, we encourage you to approach this as an ongoing process. It's all too easy to lose momentum after working through the layers of sharing results, but remember that you collected this data for a reason: to inform decision-making.

Regularly reference the findings when making decisions, in conversations with your team, and while developing programming. And then, make sure employees know when a new initiative or program is inspired by the survey results. For example, "From our survey, we learned that people are looking for better cross-team communication. We're excited to announce that we are trying out this new tool..." This further demonstrates the company's commitment to listening and taking action from employee input.