How to develop an employee engagement index

Not surprisingly, we run a metrics- driven shop here at KDPaine & Partners. Each of our client service teams is evaluated monthly on 4 key criteria:

1.   Profitability (Client billing minus time+materials)
2.   Efficiency (number of clips read per hour)
3.   Accuracy (intercoder reliability scores—minimum acceptable level is 90%)
4.    Client delight (number of “happy customer” emails, renewals or other communications)

Whichever team scores best in each category wins an Amazon gift certificate.  This  allows us to easily identify best and worst practices, and figure out what we need to do to continuously improve. And it works, since we implemented the system a year ago, almost every team has seen its performance on each criteria double.

But now that we’ve gotten the basics down, we’re going to add another metric – engagement – i.e. the degree to which an employee is engaged in the present and future of KDPaine & Partners.  And so we began to talk about what an engagement metric would look like.

As with any good measurement system, we started with the goal:

• ·         Our goal is to have a team of people all of whom are essential to the success of the company not just today but five years from today.

And we came up with some easy metrics:

1. ·         The number of blog comments or yammer messages that an employee makes, since that’s where we discuss measurement theory and the bigger issues facing our industry.
2. ·         Time spent on our internal blog
3. ·         Number of times you get voted “hero of the month” – a monthly honor given by the entire company that goes to the employee who has gone the farther above and beyond their daily job responsibilities.

Another component, for me, is the ratio of "organizational impact" messages to the “all about me” messages.

The former being those messages that start with “Maybe we should try this” with a link to an article, blog posting.  Or the demonstrations of big picture understanding. “What implications does this have on us or our competitors? Or even the “why do we do it this way?” questions that can alter the way we do business.

And then there are the “all about me” emails. You know the type and I'm sure can fill in the blanks. “Sorry I’m late/can’t come in/will miss the meeting ______ ,  I have to take my kid/pet/parent/significant other  to school/doctor/hockey practice/court. “  All legitimate, but all about the employee, and no information that is of any benefit whatsoever to the organization.

You need and obviously see both, but am I wrong in thinking that there should more of the former than there are of the latter?  Is there a proper ratio?

More importantly, what are we missing, what other metrics should I consider?All ideas are welcome.

Comments

[Katie Paine]

Just to follow up. Jason: We are starting to track the number of new ideas or suggestions now. The criteria is that it has to be a NEW idea that is relevant to the business. It doesn't matter whether they are profitable or not, or when it might be implemented. Just want to encourage the innovation.
Christina, most of those numbers are derived from our billing and timeslips programs, but each team leader has to deliver the numbers each month. The reliability testing is done by the director of research, independent of the team leaders. The client delight has to be in some written form (email, Skype) or come directly to me -- i.e. at a conference, one of our clients makes a point of coming up to me to tell me how wonderful his AE is.

[Christina Klenotic]

Katie,

Do both the employee and management have roles in tracking the five metrics or is it incumbent on each employee to share data points for each pillar for his/her monthly evaluation? Just curious if internal tracking cuts into your first metric for each employee.

[Julie Christensen]

My team was just discussing employee engagement measurement yesterday. We're talking about ways to quantify the big picture environmental scanning piece, too. I love your ratio idea. But figuring out how to efficiently capture it/code it might prove too challenging for us.

[Jason Peck]

Do you track/measure the number of new or good ideas employees come up with that may be profitable right away or may not be profitable for months?