Once you take the first step to jumpstart your employee engagement, defining employee engagement in your words, it's time to take the next step: Pick Your KPI or Key Performance Metric.
The impact of employee engagement levels is always, always, reflected in your business results. For the skeptics, answer this: Which business result is independent of your employees' performance?
Before your begin your employee engagement journey, know where you're going and know the markers that measure your progress. In business, that comes down to your KPI or your Key Performance Indicators.
This continues in line with Dr. Stephen Covey’s first two habits in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, be proactive and begin with the end in mind. Two tips.
- Pick one that measures what's important.
- Pick one where your team’s performance has a direct impact.
If you’re a sales manager, pick sales conversions or upsells or crosssells or testimonials or referrals.
If you’re a customer service manager, pick customer churn or testimonials or referrals.
As an operations manager pick error rates or accidents or damaged goods.
I recommend you share that metric and its importance with your team, collectively and individually. Show them how reaching it will impact their work, their career, their rewards.
As CEO I used three or four, then tied them all together to show their relationships. It started with sales growth and cash flows. Cash is king and cash flows keep the crown on your head. Then I looked at sales conversions and referrals.
As we redirected our marketing budget towards our employees and away from Google Ads and ad agencies we saw our referrals rise, our sales conversions grow from 50% to 80%, our topline revenues grow even as prices in the industry were dropping through the floor and we kept our cash flows positive.
I celebrated those results in aggregate with everyone. Privately, I shared with each employee their contribution towards that goal. For instance, our initial sales conversion rates were quite good at 50%. As they moved towards 80%, I shared the news of that progress with the entire company. With the group, I connected their dots - their individual and daily wins - that helped draw this result. That recognized and reinforced the right behaviors and mindsets. Oh, every employee - myself included - received a bonus based on cash flows. So I showed how rising conversion rates led to improved cashflows.
Then separately I shared with each sales agent their sales conversion rate. There was no need to drill on that sales agent whose conversion rates were below the group's average. It was obvious.
As a first step in your journey of increasing employee engagement levels, pick the KPI whose current results concern you the most, where employee engagement among your direct reports has the most direct impact. You'll want to measure its change as you progress and you'll want to share that change with all of your stakeholders including your bosses as well as those whose accomplishments deliver that improvement.
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