Employee engagement, as measured by eNPS, a scoring system designed to help employers measure employee satisfaction and loyalty within their organizations, has proven to be a vital ingredient in a company’s productivity. ENPS or the Employee Net Promoter Score is a way of assessing how likely are employees to recommend their organization to others. With the growth and sustainability of a business organization, whether it's a fledgling new start-up or an MNC spanning continents, depending on how engaged its employees are, eNPS provides a valuable tool when quantifying and improving employee engagement levels. 

Leveraging eNPS for better engagement

While the importance of having an engaged workforce is not lost on HR professionals, building impactful engagement initiatives can remain a challenge. Here where using eNPS comes in handy:

• Identifying organizational health: Efforts to improve engagement levels have to begin by assessing what the employees have to say. Factors such as pride in work, contribution to overall business growth etc, play a major role in understanding whether employees feel connected to their organisation. Conducting in-depth eNPS surveys provides vital insights crucial to improving engagement. By benchmarking their eNPS score to the larger ecosystem, HR professionals can better understand their short-comings, wins, and improvement areas.
• Designing initiatives: Once eNPS surveys have been used to reveal the positives and drawbacks of the organization, HR professionals can build specific initiatives that are targeted towards improving their score. Depending on the nature of problems, different interventions can be brought into play to reshape organizational culture and engage employees more effectively.
• Improving regular check-ins: By conducting regular pulse surveys helps to check whether specific improvement areas are being achieved. This involves a wide range of activities, all from assessing managers’ effectiveness in keeping their teams engaged to ensuring organizational culture and health is conducive to employees. Using eNPS surveys periodically can greatly improve such check-ins as it provides valuable feedback on how employees feel about the company. 

A data-driven approach

While the importance of employee engagement has grown in the previous decade, so have the tools that can today help HR leaders make better, more effective decisions. By following a data-driven approach, engagement initiatives can be rooted in sound principles, helping businesses have an engaged cohort of employees. Not only does this help with growth but also retention of key talent. ‘Employee engagement data points like eNPS, a measure of employee loyalty, is also a way to assess attrition that a company is going to face,’ notes Arun Vigneshvaran, Head of People Excellence at xto10x. Moderating a panel of experts in a recent People Matter and xto10x virtual session on employee engagement, he adds ‘Our studies have shown that 40 per cent of the detractors in an eNPS survey end up leaving the company in six months. 

By implementing a data-driven approach that segments and categorises the employee base into different cohorts and then collects data to generate trends and patterns. This helps HR professionals identify gaps in specific areas among individuals, departments, or groups which can then be specifically addressed. This step also helps refine data collected to be subsequently used to inform engagement initiatives so that employees can see that they are a driving force behind changes in company policies. 

Importance of culture

A company’s culture plays a supremely important role when it comes to improving employee engagement. It is a commitment by the organization that seeks to translate healthy organizational value into actionable behaviours. The company culture can be leveraged effectively in transforming employee engagement initiatives. They can help make such initiatives more robust and data-driven. But to be able to do so, company culture has to translate meaningfully into the lives of employees.

To make company culture more effective,’ notes Smriti Krishna Singh, Founder, Kristalball, ‘it is important to define culture through behavioural anchors.’ For engagement initiatives to be successful, it's necessary to break down values into what they mean in terms of behaviours. Not only does this help employees engage with the companies in more effective ways, but it also improves the data points that can be collected to make engagement more robust. ‘To create a better understanding of how company culture translates into employee behaviour is key for companies,’ adds Smiriti. ‘ A way of monitoring this is to measure ‘say to do’ ratio.’ By creating a culture where managers and leaders walk the talk, employees feel more engaged and trust the company culture. 

Building leadership investment

Business leaders and managers have perhaps the most important role to play when it comes to improving employee engagement. They become the first point of contact between the employees and the company and can often directly influence how connected employees feel with their respective companies. But to ensure a data-driven approach to improving employee engagement is a success, senior leaders have to be bought into the idea. "Often companies can bring consultants and third party stakeholders to improve engagement without really creating a buy-in from their leaders and founders,' explains Atma Godara, Production HR Generalist, APAC, Netflix. This problem remains the same across different companies, irrespective of their employee size and spread of operations. ‘One may create multiple engagement programs and run different surveys that capture sentiments,’ adds Atma, ‘but to ensure leaders are invested in the process is imperative. 

To use digital systems effectively in monitoring and improving employee engagement is a tough call. It is natural today for managers and directors to feel encumbered by data. Especially when employee engagement had been for the longest time, all about instinct and intuition. But companies today operate In a world where over 59 per cent of the workforce is not engaged or actively disengaged, supporting engagement initiatives with a data-driven approach, a robust company culture, and creating a process that involves business leaders right from the star, can help drive employee engagement.

What should you do next?

Watch the full webcast here (https://www.peoplematters.digital/webcast/watch-a-data-driven-approach-to-employee-engagement) 

Join the likes of Vedantu, Cred, Meesho and other high-growth organisations in creating a data-driven eNPS employee engagement framework: https://www.xto10x.com/10xpeople/