3 Strategies to Measure Remote Employee Engagement

Nowadays our workforce has become more mobile and dynamic than ever. Since quarantine has tightened, the importance of employee engagement has quickly grown into a focus for many organizations. Despite this challenge, is there a way to truly demystify employee happiness and engagement in our current moment of uncertainty? Better yet, how can strategies be upcycled to address remote working?

Breaking away from tradition

As the traditions of a nine-to-five office arrangement seem to lose efficiency and are riskier due to workplace safety regulation, remote working has forced many employees to makeshift home offices, relying on internet connections and videoconferencing tools like Zoom. This sudden and somewhat unexpected change to working routines has challenged how we could traditionally measure employee happiness and engagement. New barriers prevent more personal conversations and can even hide the ways our staff are feeling and coping throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

A metric that may already have felt elusive to managers has been exacerbated by remote working. Traditional practices of performance reviews and everyday conversation are no longer fit measurements; managers are having to reprioritize how they assess, monitor and measure this sense of engagement. And with employees split between work and home and operating at indetermined timelines, the unspent potential can hold back an otherwise effective team from meeting its goals. 

With so many variables to consider, how can managers supervise their teams from afar?

Start by defining employee engagement

Employee engagement is hard to capture in any one metric. Not every company will define this by the same meaning. Some organizations might, for example, focus on satisfaction or happiness as the major metric, whereas others might choose to explore it with a sense of measurable performance, professionalism and the overall productiveness of an employee to support and align their work with business objectives.

The lack of a universal definition is nothing new. In David MacLeod’s report “Engaging for success: enhancing performance through employee engagement”, a series of definitions, all competing, are exposed.

Despite the elusiveness of any precise definition, and how schemes aren’t typically shared between firms, the challenges remain the same. These often include:

Saturated channels for communication

The influx of new technology can both support and distract remote workers from meeting their objectives. Reach the point of oversaturation and you run the risk of confusing employees and scattering their work. Too few and there’s a real risk of isolating your talent.

The solution is to strike a balance by ensuring that teams have the proper tools and clarity regarding the appropriate lines of communication but are never inundated with too much. Always consider the value of any new platform before introducing it: is it helping with strategic objectives?

Secure and stable investment

A kind of prerequisite for employee engagement programmes, investment and approval from seniority will help secure and embed these types of schemes for the whole company. Backup your plans with written policies, then distribute and manage them regularly. This will create a shared expectation across your business. An engagement programme is only as effective as its key leaders, which is a collaboration between HR, the L&D department and key seniority figures.

An unsure culture

The emotional lives of your employees may be a little troubled right now, but you can leverage company culture to reaffirm them. If the culture is founded properly on pillars of professionalism and commitment, then strong work outcomes will follow. It’s in the absence of a structured culture that employee performance can more easily struggle.  

New tips for measuring employee engagement

1. Stable and encouraging metrics (for example: OKR)

Even Google have been known to apply metrics like OKRs (or Objective Key Results) to employee engagement schemes, because data can be collected, measured and tells a story. This solution embraces metrics to clarify performance and will make it easier to define the success rate (or failure) of an engagement scheme. Collect and interpret data in a way that makes it easier to define employee engagement. This will help employees to understand their performance, too. It also eliminates interpretation and helps the process of reflection become more transparent than before.

2. Lead with (and learn from) results

Other than OKRs, another useful metric is eNPS (or Employee Net Promoter Score). This provides an honest evaluation of the satisfaction of employees. The process uses employee experience, asking them to reflect in order to judge their satisfaction with a company.

Unlike objective-based OKRs, eNPS aim to demystify employee experiences and will assess their perceptions about the business, its culture and their role within it. Yet it uses scores that, when collected, form a shared opinion about your internal culture, just like an ‘employee recommendation’ system.

3. Become a better detective 

Guesswork will only lead to misinformation and could ignore tells that your employees are feeling troubled. Instead, build plans that use real information from your employees and arrive at decisions from their opinions.

You can do this by introducing touchpoints throughout your engagement scheme, including tailored surveys, one-to-ones and focus groups and exit interviews. Make sure that surveys are confidential and avoid diluting your results by prompting answers: the goal should be to collect honest opinions about your company.

This toolkit should help uncover the layers of employee perception.

Key takeaways

Companies should embrace flexibility and new strategies in order to overcome the challenges with employee engagement when supervising a remote workforce. These schemes can improve metric-or-objective based methods of assessing happiness and satisfaction with work. Metrics can tell a more honest story about your businesses culture from the inside.