As a manager or HR professional, employee engagement should be at the top of your priority list. But do you know how to go about actually measuring employee engagement, or what to keep an eye on, more specifically?

There are several metrics you should measure to assess your team’s engagement levels, and each one is essential to the larger employee experience puzzle. These pieces come together to paint a portrait of how your employees feel and how invested they are in their roles and within the company.

Since we know a thing or two about the best ways to measure employee engagement, we've outlined the 10 metrics and several key sub-metrics you should keep tabs on and how each one contributes to team performance and the larger employee experience.

Assess your organization’s employee experience in minutes

Blog Cta Category Officevibe Assessment Tool

What are employee engagement metrics?

Employee engagement can best be described as a person's commitment to their day-to-day work and their investment in their organization. To measure employee engagement and better understand their people, managers, business leaders, and HR professionals use 10 fundamental employee engagement metrics.

These metrics provide insight into several themes that matter to your team, including employee feedback, job satisfaction, personal wellness, relationship with their manager or peers, and employee recognition.

How to measure employee engagement

Knowing which employee engagement metrics to measure is one thing, but it’s equally important to get the hang of how to best assess them. One of the most crucial things to remember when measuring employee engagement is that you do it consistently over time. If you only gauge how your employees feel once in a while, you’ll end up with a disjointed picture of your team's sentiment only on that particular day or week, with no sense of how those feelings have evolved over time and how they fit into your team's collective employee experience.

So how do you keep up with your team’s engagement level without adding to your workload? Employee engagement tools like Officevibe help you understand how people feel with a simple, two-minute weekly pulse survey sent automatically to every team member. The algorithm covers 10 metrics on an ongoing basis, so the data you collect allows you to stay on top of budding issues and track trends over time.

Check on your team's engagement levels and nip issues in the bud before they arise with this free employee engagement survey template.

Officevibe engagement metrics dashboard
Track engagement metrics with Officevibe

10 employee engagement metrics (and 10 sub-metrics) to watch

1. Relationship with manager

Now, this is an engagement metric you definitely want to measure, and one you have a direct influence on. People want to feel supported, understood, and appreciated by their managers. Nurturing a healthy relationship with your employees is fundamental to the success of your team and organization, but this takes trust, open communication, and close collaboration. If you notice your score on this metric slipping, follow these four simple steps to build better relationships with your employees.

Sub-metric to watch: Trust with manager

As with any relationship, trust is earned and worked on over time. Without it, the odds of fostering an engaged workforce are substantially lowered. Trust begets collaboration, and collaboration begets productivity and ultimately team success.

2. Feedback

The importance of giving consistent feedback to your employees cannot be overstated. It helps your people grow and builds an engaged and productive workforce. While knowing how to give feedback will help you better understand your team's communication styles and comfort levels, it's equally important to ask for feedback from your people to increase employee engagement. By implementing a continuous feedback loop, managers and employees can share their thoughts openly and without judgment to build a stronger, more collaborative team dynamic.

Sub-metric to watch: Feedback frequency

According to Officevibe data, only 25% of employees feel they receive feedback frequently enough to help them improve at work. Learn the ins and outs of employee feedback in the workplace to boost employee engagement with our comprehensive guide for managers.

3. Personal growth

Employees want to feel challenged at work and see a clear path forward for their professional development. This means working to sharpen their skill sets, having autonomy in how they complete their work, and feeling a sense of purpose in the tasks they’re completing. According to recent Officevibe data, only 60% say they have a clear plan for their professional growth.

Measuring employee sentiment around their personal development at work helps you build an environment where they can thrive. This means better performance and fosters a workplace with highly engaged employees. When you know where people want space to challenge themselves, and where they need support, you’ll be able to set up the conditions for everyone to do their best work and evolve in their roles.

Sub-metric to watch: Purpose

We all want our work to have meaning. When you send pulse surveys, ask your employees some of the following questions to gauge how they feel about their personal growth:

  • Do you feel your work has an impact on your organization's purpose?
  • Do you know what the main purpose of your organization is?
  • Are you proud of the work you do?

4. Relationship with peers

Effective collaboration is essential to your team members forming a united front. When teamwork is off, performance suffers, so building strong peer relationships is a must to improve engagement and achieve collective success.

Having a strong foundation of trust and understanding helps people work better, together. When you track this metric, it helps you spot any important fluctuations that could indicate something is awry. From there, you can work with your team to get them back to performing at their best.

Sub-metric to watch: Collaboration between peers

Strong team dynamics are fundamental to the success of your organization. If collaboration between your team members feels off, check out these five strategies to build team trust and boost collaboration.

5. Wellness

Offering support and resources for the well-being of your employees is a non-negotiable as a manager or team leader. By monitoring the employee wellness metric, you can spot issues or challenges that people might not feel comfortable bringing up in a one-on-one meeting or in their employee engagement surveys. From here, you can provide your team with appropriate services or resources, and work towards cultivating a positive and healthy work environment. This will help reduce the risk of workplace stress and burnout, absenteeism, and high employee turnover.

Sub-metric to watch: Stress

The signs of workplace stress can be subtle and often go unnoticed. Check in on the well-being of your employees with this free template on work stress.

6. Recognition

Your team members need to know that their contributions count in the grand scheme of things. Employees also want to feel valued for the work they do, and to know that their peers and manager see and appreciate the effort they put into their daily tasks. Offering your people kind recognition messages is one of the most low-cost, high-impact ways to boost employee retention. Yet, only 66% of employees are content with the frequency at which they receive recognition. You can make your people feel seen and start improving employee engagement by asking simple but poignant employee recognition survey questions like:

  • Is the recognition you receive meaningful?
  • Do you know which behaviors receive recognition?
  • Is the recognition for additional effort sufficient?

Sub-metric to watch: Recognition frequency

Recognizing your employees consistently for their contributions is one of the best ways to improve employee engagement. Learn how to create a culture of recognition in the workplace with our comprehensive guide.

7. Company alignment

To reach broader company goals and ensure team alignment, employees must first be aware of their organization's main objectives and how they fit into the bigger picture. Knowing where your team stands on larger company goals helps you spot areas where things are unclear before employee engagement starts to slip. If people don’t understand the company's strategic direction, schedule some time with them to explore it more thoroughly. Or if team members don’t feel a personal connection with the values, you can build team values together that will have more impact in their day-to-day.

Sub-metric to watch: Values

But company alignment is about more than just understanding and getting on board with the vision and mission. It’s also about company culture and corporate values, and whether employees are aligned with them; it’s about people's satisfaction with the company’s ethics and social responsibility.

8. Happiness

Every manager wants their team to be happy. While general happiness obviously relies on a number of factors in and outside of the workplace, the point of measuring happiness at work is to assess those that are work-specific. Do people have a good level of work-life balance? Are they supported as they deal with their day-to-day affairs? Do they enjoy the work they do?

There are many things managers can do to support a happier, healthier team and inclusive work environment. Checking in regularly in one-on-one meetings on happiness levels helps you better understand each employee’s experience. From there, you can find ways to make people feel happier throughout their work day.

Sub-metric to watch: Happiness at work

Whether your people are in the office or working remotely, there are tons of budget-friendly employee engagement activities your team will love that can help boost happiness and morale.

9. Satisfaction

Job satisfaction generally means people’s satisfaction with their role within the team or company, the physical and technological setup, and their compensation. Employee satisfaction is a key engagement metric to watch out for because it includes important topics like:

  • Do people feel they’re in the right role, and on the right team?
  • Are they well-equipped to do their work?
  • Do they think their pay is fair?

To keep employee satisfaction high, you can work with your team members to set individual goals so they can develop their skills and establish clear career pathways. If your team needs additional resources, you can act as a liaison to help get them what they need to do their best work and keep your employees engaged.

Sub-metric to watch: Role within the organization

Your employees want to know that they're playing an active role in advancing the company's mission and vision. Discover more ways to improve employee satisfaction including making sure their responsibilities are clearly outlined, providing them with appropriate resources, and supporting their professional growth.

10. Ambassadorship

Last but not least, ambassadorship gives you a great idea of whether employees are true advocates of the company, as an employer, and for its services. When an engaged employee goes from “I like my job” to “everyone should have an employer as great as mine,” it helps you retain (and attract) the best talent to your team.

Why is this metric important for managers? Because you have a big impact on how employees feel about their organization. And the more advocates you have on your team, the better they’ll perform. Tracking ambassadorship and asking the right employee Net Promoter Score questions help you spot what employees love most about working at your company, and where there’s room to strengthen that loyalty. That way, you have a lower employee turnover rate and continue to develop your team.

Sub-metric to watch: Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

Get actionable insights into whether your employees champion and advocate for your organization by using the employee Net Promoter Score.

More than a score: Beyond employee engagement metrics

The main purpose of measuring engagement on your team isn’t getting your engagement score up to 10/10. There are major benefits to keeping your employees engaged, and monitoring how people feel over time helps you spot fluctuations and understand the impact of workplace changes.

While it's important to track these engagement metrics, what you do with your employee survey results and feedback is arguably the most important step to improving employee engagement and boosting team happiness. Make sure you communicate results and subsequent decisions to your team and ultimately create realistic employee engagement action plans.

At the end of the day, engaged employees are happier, more loyal to your organization, and perform better in their daily tasks. Start taking the pulse of your team today with Officevibe's employee engagement solution and elevate your entire employee experience.

Equip HR and managers with tools to engage, recognize, and drive performance.