How to Measure Employee Engagement

Fewer employees are leaving. Does that mean they’re more engaged? Not necessarily. Turnover is only one piece of the story, and by the time someone leaves, you may have missed earlier signs that something was wrong.

In this HRCI Insights session, HR leaders Kelsey Tarp and Cynthia Doi share practical ways to measure employee engagement and understand what the numbers are telling you. They also discuss how to build enough trust for employees to give honest feedback, even when that feedback is hard to hear.

Key topics covered:

Webinar Transcript

Megan Hayes
Good day and hello everyone. Welcome back to our event called HRCI Insights. These are episodes that provide insights on current HR services, developments, and technologies. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Megan Hayes. I'm the Director of Corporate Sponsorships here at HRCI. Today's topic is how to measure employee engagement. It is my pleasure to welcome back our speakers, Kelsey Tarp and Cynthia Doi. Kelsey leads the newly created HR Business Partner team at BambooHR.

Previously, Kelsey has partnered with executives in tech and finance, both at companies in the heart of Bamboo's target market and at large global firms. Regardless of company size, Kelsey likes to leverage business acumen, people insights, and data to help leaders drive decision-making and create an environment their team thrives in. Kelsey holds an MBA and enjoys keeping current on HR and business strategy. Kelsey lives in Seattle with her husband and two dogs and loves spending time outside while listening to podcasts or audiobooks, and a special album launch this week.

Megan Hayes
Cynthia is the Principal HR Business Partner at BambooHR, where she brings extensive experience in Human Resources and Operations Leadership. She has held roles at organizations including Barrow Bank and 650 and spent more than a decade at American Express in positions ranging from Director of Operations, where she led a team of over 150 customer care professionals, to manager of HR operations overseeing the Transform HR project management office and participating in the company's Human Resources Global Rotation program.

Cynthia holds a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA in Organizational Behavior and Human Resources from Brigham Young University. Known for her ability to combine strategic insight with data-driven analysis, Cynthia is passionate about building people-centered solutions that drive organizational success. It is my pleasure to welcome both of our speakers who will take over from here. Thank you both for being here today.

Kelsey Tarp
Wonderful. Thank you so much for the introduction. So Cynthia, thank you so much for joining us. And I'm really excited for us to jump in how to measure employee engagement. One thing that really jumps out to me is that, why should we do this? Why does engagement really matter? And ultimately, we know it translates into high productivity. And one stat that we found really talked about the extent to which engaged employees are 21% more productive. I really think about that in terms of headcount and headcount planning.

We're all going into the next year probably thinking about what resources do we need in different groups. And you might need fewer resources if each headcount is more engaged and productive. Cynthia, what jumps out to you?

Cynthia Doi
Yeah, to me, I think about what is the correlation? Like, why does it make such a big difference in productivity? And I think a lot of it has to do with discretionary effort, right? So what effort is one willing to spend? Most of us, if you value your role, you will do what your leader asks you to do, but I think that difference between those who are engaged and not engaged is they're doing what is asked, but they're also going that step further and going above and beyond. And you don't see that with every organization. You don't see that with every team.

When I think back to my call center days, there was a moment where I had a team that was highly productive. We were just crushing all of our stats. And I think back to like, well, why, like what did we do that was so different? What was the secret sauce? And I will say that we spent a ton of time and effort with employee engagement. And some of it was ill-advised. Like there was one moment I found myself manning a cotton candy machine for several hours and it was like one of the most torturous experiences of my life. Have we gone too far with our employee engagement efforts here?

But I really feel like a combination of some of those kind of fun, silly things and some just deep, rich employee engagement activities can really help just build trust within the organization. And I have seen that it leads to a more productive team.

Megan Hayes
For sure.

Kelsey Tarp
And like our little image shows too, if you've got 4 people who are able to deliver the productivity of 5, there's a "so what" in a business case that I think we can't ignore.

Cynthia Doi
Yeah, for sure.

Kelsey Tarp
One thing that I really like to think about is the extent to which psychological safety really drives a foundation for any listening strategy or any employee engagement strategy to be effective. I know you all can read, so a couple of stats that really stood out to me. one is just the extent to which it's really driving an increase in engagement when there's strong psychological safety. And why it's worth prioritizing it being such a strong driver of retention. Cynthia, what jumps out at you here?

Cynthia Doi
One thing I think it's important is to level set on because we'll probably talk about psychological safety a few times because it is so important and foundational. So what is psychological safety? I think if as HR professionals, we probably talk about it more than the average human, but it really is just your perception of whether it's safe to speak up. So if you go back to kind of its origin story in the '90s with Amy Edmondson from Harvard, she was studying error reporting in hospital wards.

And her hypothesis was that teams that had better teamwork would make fewer errors, but they actually found that the opposite was true. And she couldn't figure out why. And this is where psychological safety emerged because what she realized is that it wasn't that these successful teams had more errors, it's that they were reporting them more. So if you translate that to your engagement survey, often leaders, I think, make a mistake in thinking, I just want the highest results possible. What you should be seeking is honest feedback, right?

So even if your initial results are a little bit lower, that could be a great indication that people are being candid and honest with you, and that is a win, right? Because that indicates that you have psychological safety in your organization.

Kelsey Tarp
Yeah. And I know later we're gonna talk through some red flags and other things, but I think it's so important, like I've been in numerous organizations where we get tough but actionable feedback. I always think about that as people, number one, had enough psychological safety to be open and honest, and two, they care enough about making the workplace better that they're giving recommendations that they really thought about and they think would be of benefit to everybody. And so we'll talk more about that too. But I think you're right.

Sometimes when you got really glowing results and you go, I know that there's some concerns, that's an indicator for sure that maybe there's a psychological safety concern. One thing that I think about is sometimes you hear, oh, but engagement, it's so hard to measure. Maybe it's a little bit squishy. People find it really hard to drive kind of quantitative insights. And I think it's both, right?

There's quantitative insights, there's qualitative insights, but you really want to understand holistically where you stand and a couple of things that you could really invest in or changes that you could make that might make a positive difference. And at the end of the day, like engagement impacts productivity and our business success. So we want to make sure that we figure out what does engagement mean at our organization and what's worth really focusing on.

And sometimes, like Cynthia, I know Cynthia talked about a cotton candy machine, nothing I think we would recommend, but there are some things that you can do that sometimes are small or subtle changes that make a really big difference in the lives of your team. And I know we've got people dialing in from all sorts of different industries, but I think about things that impact people's quality of life. And one small change I made was really partnering with the business ones to really help schedules be more predictable.

And it was a consistent pain point in surveys that leaders said, ah, but we really value the flexibility when we're able to schedule more last minute in kind of a larger non-exempt environment where we had a pretty big cohort. And there was a couple of things that we could do that made scheduling a little bit more predictable and known more in advance. And it made a huge impact and it wasn't that much effort, but it did require getting everybody's noggins together and really thinking through some solutions that might work.

But those kinds of things can sometimes have a disproportionate positive impact on your engagement data because they're really, they're paper cuts for your team members, but what I always say is paper cuts get infected. Cynthia, anything else that's top of mind for you on this topic?

Cynthia Doi
Yeah, just one thing that I've been thinking through is there may be some of you who don't have a great survey tool or any robust way of measuring employee engagement. And I would say like, don't do nothing, right? Like there are things that you can do. And I found, in my role leading large teams, one of the most effective things I did for engagement was just to have quarterly skip levels. I did them consistently with every team, and I learned so much. Like, I would have a poll occasionally, and like, there were some things that I would measure, but mostly I just listened, right?

I tried to get a sense of what was on employees' minds, and I learned a lot about how they were feeling about the organization and a lot that could help me in my role. And so I would just recommend start from where you're at. There's always something that you can do, and you can certainly build from there.

Kelsey Tarp
Well, and tying back to psychological safety, right? Like having a leader take time to invest and learn more. I think that can really grow psychological safety in a team. But we're going to jump into kind of the core content of our discussion today. There's kind of 4 metrics, warning signs, and action items that we want you to consider as you look at your own employee engagement data. We'll start with the first one, which is turnover rates. At the end of the presentation too, we're going to drop in a link to an asset, and there's also going to be a QR code you can scan.

That has kind of a deep dive on how we think about some of these metrics that I think is just really useful. So if you were, taking down notes and you want kind of a follow-up resource, rest assured that one's coming. But let's talk first about turnover rate. Cynthia, let's— can you walk us through some of this data and what jumps out to you?

Cynthia Doi
Yeah, so definitely when you think about employee engagement, one of the clearest metrics we can track is turnover rate. It's a great way to just kind of get a sense of the health of your organization. When employees are disengaged, they are far more likely to leave, and so it's a great way to see, if your engagement is low. One reason it's important as well is because the cost of turnover is really high. On average, it costs $18,000 to replace an employee, and in some technical roles, it can be nearly 100% of their annual salary.

Megan Hayes
Yeah.

Cynthia Doi
One thing that I'll say though, on turnover is while it is very reliable, it's also looking in the rearview mirror. Like once you've gotten to turnover, the problem has already manifested, right?

Megan Hayes
Yeah.

Cynthia Doi
And so one thing to think about is how can you almost predict turnover? Like, how can you measure it before it happens? And one way that I've seen companies do it is in their engagement survey, a pretty popular question that I think is a really effective one is something to the effect of, if offered a similar role elsewhere, would you stay? So this is essentially testing stickiness. Like, how strong is the pull of the organization when you're controlling for external factors? And that can be a great forward indication of are you going to have some turnover in the future?

Kelsey Tarp
One I love to pair with that too is how confident are you that you're able to achieve your career goals in this organization? Because sometimes you find a very prominent theme in exit data, survey data, right, tends to be whether or not people believe they can achieve their career goals. And if you're likely to stay in the same role or you're wanting to think about if you can achieve your career goals in your current organization, Both of those indicators together can help you understand if you're satisfying people's desire for career growth, which might mean mobility, it might mean something lateral.

But those are often questions that can really help you get at the heart of what's on people's minds. And then these two metrics, what jumps out at you on these ones, Cynthia?

Cynthia Doi
Yeah, we know that happier employees stay longer. So when they feel excluded, their performance drops pretty significantly and the risk of turnover increases really significantly too. One thing that I appreciate though is that we can do something about those numbers. So more than half of employees say that their manager could have prevented them from leaving. And so that's kind of a sobering metric, but one that is hopeful in a way as well, because we— a lot of this is preventative.

Kelsey Tarp
Yeah. And I think that's the thing that stands out to me when, half of employees say their manager could have convinced them to stay. My question number one I have is how do we solve for that upstream and know when people are starting to get loose in the saddle up front? And how can we have an intervention at that point. But I think it also shows the extent to which when there's strong relationships between the individual contributors and their managers or between reporting lines, that there's a lot that we can do to really influence these outcomes.

And I think it really starts with strong relationships that have to have good psychological safety. So I really see all of it fitting together that way. And at the end of the day too, we know that high— we all know that high turnover really drains resources for us and our businesses. But I think sometimes in the HR seat, we're in a position where we're trying to compel the business to take action, or we're really trying to influence them to think about this differently. And I know I've sometimes seen what I would call learned helplessness, where leaders go, this is just the way it is.

And they don't always think about really diving in and influencing things they can control. And that's what really stands out to me about how we might measure these turnover metrics and help us get a sense of what is more in our control and what we can drive more meaningfully. Cynthia, what do you think?

Cynthia Doi
Yeah. One thing that I think is important when looking at turnover rates is to understand the story behind it, right? So don't just take the number at face value. Make sure you understand what's in there. So one example that I feel like is really common, especially in kind of the CX environment, is, if you have a lot of high-volume hiring, you probably have a lot of 0 to 6 month attrition. Like, that's typically the time people leave, either they're not making it through training or they're realizing, hey, this role isn't for me.

And so, I had an experience recently where the, our leadership team was kind of high-fiving itself because they're saying like, oh, our attrition has gone down so significantly this year. But the reality is our hiring had gone down. And so our 0 to 6 month attrition had gone down. And so it just wasn't as compelling of a story as they thought it was. And so it's always important just to kind of look under the hood and say like, do we really understand what this number is telling us?

Kelsey Tarp
Yeah, and I always talk about that as the difference for HR leaders in reporting the weather and then being kind of a weather advisor, right? If you just look at the pure metrics, you would say, oh, our attrition looks better. But if you go down one more click, then you're really starting to be an advisor to your business and saying, hey, where and when does this give us a signal? And is there actually a there that might influence our direction? And I think you have to get really curious in your data, but I love that callout.

It's just as important for us to double-click on and investigate metrics that maybe aren't so great and we really want to understand the why, and metrics that look to be improving but also wanting to make sure we understand the why underneath them. Let's talk a little bit about some of these red flags that we're looking into.

So a couple, when Cynthia and I put our heads together thinking about what were red flags for us when we're looking at turnover data, when we see spikes and exits from leaders or departments, Depending on how your reporting works, you might have, different insights that you can aggregate there. But is there something that new that seems to be happening? And that might suggest a change that's worth double-clicking on.

Same, really looking at your most regrettable attrition, your top performers who are leaving at higher rates. or if you have pockets of high performers that seem to be leaving, for other organizations, getting really curious about the why. I know in places I've worked, there have been some career paths that are fairly terminal. There's a point at which The organization didn't have a career ladder for them to grow higher, and we were seeing exits in this role that was fairly terminal.

And that really led us to say, hey, we don't want to be a training ground for these folks to go somewhere else and bring their knowledge and skills. How can we think about our career pathing in ways that we can create options for them to continue to grow internally that also suits our business needs? And then one that always stands out for me is employees voicing reasons for leaving that you've already addressed. And of course, there's a time component here. If you've made a recent change and maybe someone is already loose in the saddle and then was exploring other opportunities.

But if you hear people leaving for persistent reasons that the company has invested resources to address, let's say that you're having folks leave for compensation-related reasons, but you've just made a really material market adjustment in those populations. That can sometimes give me an area to get really curious about. Did the messaging not land? Was our intervention not sufficient? So those are some red flags that we'd recommend you double-click on as you're looking in your data. Cynthia, anything else that you'd add?

Cynthia Doi
Yeah, just kind of going back to the makeup of your attrition, because I do think that some attrition is healthy and there are going to be some for whom the role was not a great fit. They're not performing in the role and whether they self-select out or whether there's some performance management involved, like that's all kind of normal, healthy attrition. But if you do find that you are losing a disproportionately high number of high performers, you have to ask yourself why. Right? Have you identified your high performers, but you haven't recognized them at all?

Or are you recognizing them by giving them a lot of extra work and not holding anyone else accountable because you trust them and know that they'll do it right? There are subtle things like that I think sometimes leaders overlook, and they don't— they almost take their high performers for granted and don't realize they're— they may not be recognizing them appropriately.

Kelsey Tarp
For sure. And I go back to where we started this webinar with The connection between productivity and engagement. If we have someone who was engaged and was delivering quite a bit through discretionary effort, and then they're doing so well, we continue to overload them. Those are all signals that you, at this point when you're looking at data in a turnover report, those people are gone. But what can we learn from it and how can we partner with our leaders to help prevent future instances of those recurring? That's what I really think about.

And I think these are places where you can double-click and really get curious in your data. So things that we would recommend that you can do, I really think one of the most powerful ones here is this idea about stay interviews with high performers to get ahead of potential turnover. Again, like we talked about, turnover, when they are showing up on your turnover report, they are gone from your organization. How can we solve for this more upstream? One of my favorite questions that I always recommend in stay interviews or career conversations even is, when was your last really good day at work?

And what happened on that day? How do we get you more of those days? You can really quickly find if one of your top performers is like, I cannot think of a recent good day. That is a signal that's probably an area that they need more support or we need to get curious about what's going on. Cynthia, what else jumps out at you on these ones?

Cynthia Doi
Yeah, just going back to that notion of stay interviews. I've experienced this many times. I'm sure you have as well, where a leader will come to you and say, oh, my star employee has another offer. We need to keep them. I can't do without them. So they want to throw all this money at it right at the end. And I have found that rarely works. Like we're kind of past the point where it's going to make a difference. Typically, even if you give a counteroffer and the person stays, like studies have shown that they'll leave within 12 months typically.

And it goes back to what have you done before you get to that point, right? Like, are you recognizing them? Are you helping? Are you letting them know how valued they are in the organization? Because I think a lot of managers are surprised that the employee hasn't heard that and they don't know it, right? It's not always obvious. And the other thing I'd say about exit interviews, if you can do them in person, and I know some organizations are large and it doesn't make sense, but I really love exit interviews.

And I find that employees are in no place as candid, forthright as they will be in an exit interview because like they're leaving, and so I have found that I get really great information about how things are going, like the dynamics with the leader and the employees and all kinds of things that may be useful to learn during exit interviews.

Kelsey Tarp
For sure. I often find that especially if they care deeply about their team or their peers, sometimes they give a lot of recommendations that might help that team be healthier in the long run. Yeah. Okay. We're gonna jump to number 2, which is retention rate per manager. And we'll talk a little bit about that one. So sometimes leaders— so big picture, sometimes we look at our engagement data and then we don't click in more specifically to think about how individual managers' performance and how leaders show up day to day might influence the employee experience.

And then I really think about the extent to which it's that number one factor in someone's employment relationship with us. Sometimes we just look at overall company level retention, or we don't have the full context of why someone left. So as an example, I had a leader once who said, well, my employee left because they went to a company that offers unlimited PTO and we don't offer that. And I just, there's nothing I can do about that. But we got a little bit more curious and their employee had requested PTO a number of times and each time they had been declined because the team was short-staffed.

And the team was short-staffed because the manager hadn't really been prioritizing the open role in the team. It had been open for 4 months. And meanwhile, we had a star person who was wanting some time away. I'm not super surprised unlimited PTO was attractive to them, right? So how can we get curious and really think about where we can systematically improve? And I think that's one of the ways that we can really identify whether or not managers have an opportunity to be more effective. Cynthia, what jumps out at you?

Cynthia Doi
Yeah, I definitely agree that the manager plays a huge role in employee engagement. But there is some nuance. So I wouldn't say that a manager who's getting exceptional scores in their employee engagement is necessarily a great leader or a better leader than someone who's not. And I think about kind of different styles of management based on how— to what extent do they hold their team accountable and to what extent do they support their team? Those two factors are really critical and they need to be balanced.

You can have really an authoritarian leader who gets compliance, like really high accountability, but very low support. On the other end of the spectrum, you could have a permissive leader. I've heard them referred to as country club leaders as well, who are very supportive, have great harmony, everyone loves them, but they do not hold their team accountable. Right. And so I think hitting that sweet spot of both, like that's where you get ideal leadership.

And so if you are seeing something on employee survey, which I have in my past where it says, I'm really frustrated because I'm working really hard and no one else is, no one's being held accountable, right? Like, yeah, that's a red flag that you could have a country club manager on your hands.

Kelsey Tarp
Yeah. And I love this bottom one, right? Like sometimes we have star managers who we say, oh, be more like this leader. They're doing it right. But they actually have practices that we wouldn't want to amplify and scale because they might be related to accountability, other things. So I always like to look at what does the team say about working with this leader and what does the team's performance say about how effective they are?

We want to amplify the leaders who are driving effectiveness through their people, through means and methods that we think are really great and are in keeping with our company's values and how we achieve our mission. So I think there's a lot to really explore as you look at line manager-specific data. Yeah, a couple of red flags that we wanted to recommend you keep an eye out for as you're looking by leader. So again, high turnover for a specific— for a specific manager. I think that's an important one to keep an eye out for. And I like to look at that over time.

Sometimes I look at like a trailing 12-month look, or if they've been in seat for a while, even a trailing 24-month look. And I think about the growth of the team or changes on the team, but especially for a leader of a larger organization, it can sometimes be a really effective signal. If you have an organization where people can transfer within the organization pretty easily, do we have a lot of people that are looking to leave this team? They're trying to find another manager to work under. do they seem to be lagging in their engagement versus teams that do pretty comparable work?

That can sometimes be a signal. We also sometimes have limited or poor data. We talked about the importance of psychological safety earlier on. sometimes when I have hardly any responses or my responses don't really have any texture or data in them, that can sometimes be a signal that people are not feeling safe enough to be candid. And then again, if you've got exit interviews like Cynthia was mentioning, often those are where people are so candid. If we've got people citing manager-related reasons, I think that's a signal for us to really keep an eye on. Cynthia, anything else that you'd highlight?

Cynthia Doi
Yeah, just along the lines of manager red flags, something that has jumped out to me over the years is when you have really great manager scores and really poor leadership scores. And it's, and leadership is always this ambiguous, like, who are we actually referring to here? But it's, to me, what it may signal, unless you have legitimate problems with trust in leadership, which is a thing, right? Is that perhaps the manager is passing the buck, right? Is saying like, oh, I really support you moving to this new role or getting this promotion, but my leader just didn't approve it.

And so I do see a lot of that, especially, with maybe less mature managers who just are not willing to also have that personal accountability and deliver hard messages. And so that's something that I've seen as well. And if you're seeing a big disconnect between those two things, it may be worth looking into.

Kelsey Tarp

I love that highlight. And I think about those as the difference between like, my manager gives me helpful feedback to grow in my role. And then you sometimes say, see questions like, Our leadership team involves us in changes that impact our day-to-day roles. And if on aggregate you've got scores that are there that are telling really different stories, those might be ones to double-click on. I love that insight. All right, so what can you do? We really recommend that you think about how managers operate and lead as potentially a KPI, or you use it to tell a story about overall performance.

And then really come alongside leaders and give recommendations about ways that they can drive engagement and satisfaction with their teams. Using their specific results. And I find often leaders get their results, especially if they have something that's just for them and their organization. Maybe it has a little bit of benchmarking information. They're not in this all the time. Very often they find themselves overwhelmed. And so I think that's sometimes a really good opportunity for us to come alongside and partner meaningfully.

And then those skip-level meetings or ways that you can kind of have more listening sessions to get deeper insights. Syndea, anything else that jumps out at you here?

Cynthia Doi

Yeah, this notion of tying KPIs to engagement retention, not every company does it. I think you can have very different opinions about whether it's appropriate or not. I worked at an organization for many years that took employee engagement very seriously to the extent that in manager calibrations at year-end, we would pull up our engagement scores by leader. And I saw performance ratings for managers impacted by the engagement scores. And I'll admit, as a leader, I was legitimately anxious waiting for those scores to come back every year because it kind of felt like, okay, my job's on the line with this.

So, I think you could debate whether that's a good thing or not, because I can see it producing some strange behaviors on the parts of managers. But one thing that I did appreciate was working in an organization that valued employee engagement to that extent. I always knew that it mattered. And so, to some extent, I think, yeah, like if this is something that matters to you, of course, you should attach a KPI to it.

Kelsey Tarp

Yeah, and I think that's where you wanna think about some of these best practices and really think about what's best for your organization. Or if we don't do anything today, what's one step that we could take forward and really meeting your organization where it, where you're at. But I agree, like there's so many different ways you can go about it and if it's taken that seriously, it can also result in other behaviors. And so I always try to think about where the balance is. I know we wanna make sure we have time for questions and we have two more topics, so I wanna make sure we get through these.

But we're gonna talk quickly about employee net promoter score or eNPS. It's a way to measure employee satisfaction, and I'll give a quick overview of how it works. So you might have heard about net promoter as a way to think through how likely your customers are to recommend you. And so net promoter, you take your promoters, your 9s and your 10s, and then you take the count of promoters. So 33 in this example. Minus detractors, which are people who rated you a 0 to 6. We have 21 of those. You would take 33 minus 21, and that's our net promoter score.

It's really helpful, I think, to understand where are employees landing us on this scale with their feedback. Cynthia, anything else you'd add or highlight about either NPS or eNPS as a metric?

Cynthia Doi

Only that, it's what we use at BambooHR, and it's simple but effective. I've really liked this standard.

Kelsey Tarp

Yeah, and I really love using it too, thinking about our customer engagement and our employee engagement, because if you've got totally disengaged employees and highly engaged customers, often not an outcome that goes together, right? Generally you have highly engaged customers who are being supported by highly engaged employees. And so I really think about it as a way to kind of measure those together. And then when we have employees where they feel like they're really heard, we know that their performance increases and turnover decreases.

What would you, what would you really highlight based on these metrics, Cynthia?

Cynthia Doi

Yeah, something that this reminds me of, I had a leader who had kind of a framework that he used pretty consistently and he, it was listen, believe, act. I think that sometimes leaders stop with the listen part. They're like, hey, I read the survey comments. Like, I hear you. But then they may not believe what they're hearing. They may get defensive. I've seen that happen where it's like, oh no, you're saying that our compensation is poor and yet our compensation is perfect. So what are you talking about? So belief is really important too. And then action. What are you doing about it?

Even if you're not solving for everything, like what actions are you going to take?

Megan Hayes

Yeah.

Kelsey Tarp

And one question I always like to really think about is Do they have a point, right? Like my coaching to leaders when they're reading through their survey, do they have a point? Is there something that we think that we could improve on and what would it look like if we really heard them out? So hopefully some of these recommendations will help you think through if I were to stand something up, where might I get started?

But we really know that low employee satisfaction can sometimes show us where big picture we've got some blind spots that maybe leaders aren't seeing day to day, but they are really hindering the employee experience, but there's also a couple of watchouts that we wanted to make sure we flagged for you. So one, if you've got a survey that's like multiple pages, especially if you have nothing today, I would recommend you start small and really think about how long does it take for that survey to get completed? What is the right amount of data for you to wrap your arms around so you can take action?

But sometimes people go, ah, I'm just gonna make a really big survey so I get enough data. But sometimes that really impacts your completion rates because it is a big burden to complete your whole survey. So I would really recommend you are thoughtful about the design there. And then again, focusing just on numbers without reviewing comments or trends, I would recommend open text responses wherever you can plug them in. So people have an opportunity to add other thoughts and context about their experience.

I find often that really helps us contextualize low scores or numbers and kind of what was top of mind as someone completed it. And then if you're collecting data but you don't have a strong process to really analyze and then follow up regarding the information that you received, I would recommend creating a very thorough plan that talks about the whole survey process from the very beginning when you're designing your questions. How are you gonna get buy-in? What's our method to survey? And then how do we analyze and follow up and close the loop with those who responded?

Those are all gonna be really important things to bake into your plan. So you're building in that psychological safety. And trust. And that really brings us to the next point about making sure it's a continuous feedback loop. If your surveys are one and done, it can create an expectation in your team members that this might be something more regular and that we value their opinion. So if you're going to put something in motion, I'd recommend really be getting the buy-in, from your leaders to have it as a recurrent, practice in your organization.

But the fifth bullet is one Cynthia and I talked a lot about too when we were preparing for this. A big pitfall I see that leaders often have is they need more survey data. And so they do a survey and they go, okay, but I'm seeing signals that people are feeling burnt out and like the workload isn't, the work, the workload is just, not balanced and people aren't clear on priorities. So I need to send another survey about what priorities they're not clear about. You can't survey your way out of person-to-person insights.

I think the surveys give you a place to go digging, and then we need leaders to really get face time with their team members and understand the signal versus the noise that might come out of a survey. Cynthia, anything else you would hit here? I know we talked a lot about this topic.

Cynthia Doi

Yeah, and just quickly, I think, underemphasizing the comments, I think, is a big pitfall. Like, where I use the numbers the most is actually kind of that year-over-year comparison. Like, that tells you has actually moved, but the comments tell you what to move. Like, that's actually what's going to help get to your action plan.

Kelsey Tarp

Yeah, I love that insight. And again, sometimes it's those simple yet effective ways to think about how you're going to approach your data that really help you partner in a more effective way with leaders. A couple of red flags that we would ask you to keep an eye out for. So again, big picture, do you have scores declining? And if you do have scores declining, what's going on? Do we understand what might have led to those scores declining. And then a big gap between promoters and detractors.

So I always like to look at the composition of the score over time, especially if I have multiple years of data, and understand, do I seem to have promoters that slid into neutrals, or do I seem to have a detractor group that as a percentage of my respondents got a lot bigger? What does that tell me? And then also your response rate changes are gonna be a really important factor in that too. If you had a 75% response rate on your first survey, that would be awesome. And then you would get a sense for some of these clear themes and signals, and then in your next survey you got a 28% response rate.

I hope you don't, but if you did, it would be really hard to do survey over survey comparisons when your sample sizes are those that different. So those are some things that we'd recommend too if you're looking at a multi-year storyline. Cynthia, anything else you'd hit?

Cynthia Doi

Yeah, definitely if you're not taking action and your scores are declining, you should know why your scores are declining, probably because you're not taking action. But if you feel like you're doing everything that you can and you're really making an effort with this and they're still declining, certainly look into that. One thing that I'll note as well that I think is often forgotten is that when you mess around with your questions, you're changing the scale to some extent. Like you can't actually compare year over year.

And it's tough because I'm someone who loves to make little tweaks and I'm like, ooh, but wouldn't it be better if we phrased it this way? Or why don't we add this question and drop that one. You can absolutely do that, but you just have to keep in mind, once you change a question, you don't have that point of comparison anymore. And so that's why I would spend a lot of time upfront when you're designing the initial survey, feel really good about it, and then from there try to make minimal changes.

Kelsey Tarp

I love that tip. And for the 20% of you who haven't started any employee listening mechanism yet, or you don't have an employee satisfaction mechanism, I think that's key. Do we feel really confident that these are the right questions that we wanna ask moving forward? Because that cycle-over-cycle comparison is so helpful. A couple of things that we would recommend you do, again, keep the survey short and focused. We really think that those long surveys that may be very thorough often lead to lower response rates, and we're not likely to get the information we need.

We recommend open text responses, really thinking about sentiment analysis. That can be a really good way for AI to play a role too, depending on how you use AI in your organization or what might be available in your product. And then also just making sure that there's kind of a top area of focus and a closed loop mechanism for employees about what we heard. Cynthia, anything else you'd hit on this one?

Cynthia Doi

Yeah, something to think about is looking at both frequency and intensity of comments. So something that I found is that something like compensation, oh, it would be great if I were paid more. I have seen that on every engagement survey in the history of All time, right? All the time.

Kelsey Tarp

Yeah. Right.

Cynthia Doi

But depending on the frequency of those comments and the intensity of those comments, are they very specific? Are they very heated? Or is it like, yeah, it would be nice if you paid me more, right? Like that's kind of a different sentiment. And so considering that when you're looking at key themes in your analysis is critical as well. I think there are also a couple of themes that really correlate highly to overall engagement, things like career growth, workload.

Trust in leadership, recognition, there may be some heavy hitters that you look at that are probably going to have the biggest impact on the overall engagement.

Kelsey Tarp

Yeah, I love that. There's so many things you can do. What should you do? And I would really focus on those things that drive engagement. One thing that I really emphasize here is that we do not earn the opportunity to ask for feedback that we don't have a plan to close the loop or take action on. And again, I already shared one of my— oof, least favorite issues, which is we've just got to do another survey. And I think it's really thinking through how we can create a high-touch experience with the data that we have and how we can help leaders go into follow-up conversations meaningfully.

But if we have leaders that are not interested in doing this, so for the about 20% of you that doesn't have anything set up today, if you don't have leaders that actively want this data and want to make improvements, I wouldn't recommend launching something because I think when you do, you're sending a signal out to your employees that we care about them and their opinions and we want to take action. And if our closed-loop mechanisms for, hey, we heard these themes and these are changes you're going to see as a result, is weak or it doesn't exist, it can impact trust and psychological safety so much.

Cynthia, anything else that you'd mention here?

Cynthia Doi

It is also okay that you're not changing everything. You may get some feedback that you're like, We are unable or unwilling, I guess, to make that change at this time, but just be honest about that. And I have found that employees really appreciate just being candid when you say like, we have some constraints and so we're not able to make this change, but here are the things we are doing and really focusing on that as well.

Kelsey Tarp

Yeah. And I think when people understand the why and they understand how you thought about their request and why it may not be able to be addressed at this time. It still builds a lot of trust to close the loop. And I think that's just something that sometimes leaders get very afraid, like, what if I get, data I can't action? There are already thoughts that are in your employees' heads. I think it's an opportunity to really build trust. So we'll close out with our last topic, which is survey participation rate.

And then this is one again that in the interest of time, I don't think we'll go deep on, but Cynthia, any recommendations that you would have? I would have one that to really like slice by department or division, I found it sometimes very effective to create some competition between like executive leaders. this team's at this percent, this team's at this percent completion. Sometimes those are strikingly effective. Any best practices you'd hit here?

Cynthia Doi

No, I feel the same. I am a huge proponent of high participation rates in these surveys because you get so much better data, when you have it. And I'll be honest, and I think we need to be honest about saying, No one likes taking surveys. I don't like taking surveys and I worked in customer service for years, right? So just sending out one email and expecting this amazing response rate is unlikely, right? And so I do find that if you can report out throughout the process for leaders, it can be really effective and then they can remind their team.

I've even had leaders who, during a team meeting, like, hey, we're going to end 10 minutes early. I want you to take the survey right now. So, and while like, I don't, I don't think leaders should try to encourage particular results because again, psychological safety, we want people to be honest. I do not have any qualms about putting a little bit of pressure on actually completing the survey.

Kelsey Tarp

I agree. And I think the core why is that when we have low participation, it's really hard to know that if, we have a small signal from the results would intervention benefit most of our employees in those particular areas, or might it actually have other effects that we haven't thought of? Do we have a vocal minority, or is this a pretty prominent theme? So these are all ways that we would recommend you really be thoughtful about how you go about driving completion rates. And then a couple of red flags that we'd hit here, participation being below 60%.

I think also just thinking about survey over survey, how is my participation rate changed? If you look at your results right now and you go, oof, I'm at 40%. What can I do to get it higher? Is probably the first thing I might focus on. And then do we show that there's kind of a drop-off in people completing the results over time? Sometimes people leave the survey open really long, like 3 weeks. And you'll notice there's like a spike when people get the survey link and then the spike on the communications for the last day reminder. What's the right time horizon to get your survey completed in?

And then back to that composition of responses. When you look at them versus other data that you have, does something— does it make sense, or is there maybe something that needs further follow-up? Cynthia, anything else that you'd recommend people heed as a red flag?

Cynthia Doi

Yeah, definitely if you see your response rate declining over time, that could be a signal that, A, you are not demonstrating you're taking action, so employees are like, what's the point? Or also like they could have survey fatigue. Like, have you sent out too many surveys and they're like, oh my goodness, I just said this and why am I saying it again? And if you're asking, similar questions over and over without action in between, that's also not a great signal for employees.

Kelsey Tarp

For sure. So again, what you can do, we'd recommend that you are really thoughtful about your purpose for the surveys, how you plan to follow up, how you're going to share results and commit to visible changes, and then connect the dots. This is my favorite tip. Be very specific. We heard, as an example, at Bamboo, we heard a pretty persistent signal that people wanted more holidays that aligned to a federal holiday schedule. So when we made that improvement in our kind of new plan year for our benefits, we were super explicit. We've heard this signal from you.

There was verbatim quotes like these, and that really helped influence our leaders to add additional holidays. And I think those kinds of, those kinds of really explicit dot connecting can really build trust in the organization. And then these are just some ideas. Again, we'd really recommend that you have kind of a senior leader emphasize how important this is, really emphasize anonymity, and really think about ways that you can analyze open text responses.

Because like Cynthia mentioned, the intensity and kind of the substance of the feedback can really help you know what would be nice or what's really a burning platform for your respondents. And then using AI to help, we're going to hit on these really quick. There are often ways that AI can really help you analyze your open text responses, really help you get at key themes and words, especially if you've got a really large organization. I can find it very effective to help me parse some comments and go a little bit deeper.

I used to have to do a lot of this manually, so this has been a way that we've really been able to translate some of these verbatim comments into better and clearer priorities. A little bit about BambooHR, and then we're going to jump into questions. So we are a platform that really helps you as an HR leader do everything from hire to retire. We have over 30,000 companies that use us, both big and small. And we really help our customers think through how they're going to do everything across the employee lifecycle.

And then one of the stats that really jumps out at me about what we know our users say when we think about our Net Promoter Score from our customers, on average, we're having customers save 15 hours per week. And I think about what I would do with 15 more hours, or Cynthia, what you would do with 15 more hours if you're really finding yourself in a spot where you could use some time back to really focus on things like employee engagement and satisfaction that really drive the needle for your business, I would really think about how you might be able to use your HR software partners to help there.

And then, like I mentioned at the beginning, we do have this QR code that will bring you to a resource that you're able to download that just talks about ways that you can measure employee engagement. Megan, I think we've hit our content. If it's time for us to jump into Q&A.

Megan Hayes

Fantastic. Thank you both so much for this amazing presentation. It's so insightful, and I loved hearing both of you give your feedback on all the, all the different insights. I especially love the red flag slides as well. Very great to have.

Kelsey and Cynthia, I will let you both just decide who wants to jump in first with these questions, if that's okay. Sure. First question, I know that you addressed this, but I wanted to see if there's a training that might be available. Psychological safety being so important, increasing honest feedback. We, as you mentioned, some tips for improving psychological safety, but where can the audience find ways to get through training, more in-depth training on psychological safety?

Kelsey Tarp

And Cynthia, I know this is an area you're super passionate about. there's a couple of books by Amy Edmondson. I believe that's a big topic in her body of work. There's also a couple by Adam Grant. Those are the two that come to mind for me. What else would you hit?

Cynthia Doi

Yeah, I was thinking the same. I was just looking up the one that I really like from Amy Edmondson. The Right Kind of Wrong is her book. And the thing that I think is really important is It really makes a difference, like how you are interacting with your team on a day-to-day basis, right? What happens when someone makes a mistake? That, and that is so critical to the psychological safety on your team. Are you celebrating mistakes because you see them as an opportunity for growth, or are you punishing them, like trying to causing employees to hide them? That makes a big difference as well.

This is kind of tangential, but I'm just gonna throw it out there as well. Mindset by Carol Dweck, I think is really important too, because encouraging your employees to have a growth mindset, I actually think does a lot for psychological safety as well.

Kelsey Tarp

Well, and I think when leaders are vocally self-critical about mistakes they've made or ways that they could have led better, I've had some of the leaders who I'm most proud of what they've done on the other side of really tough results. And then in the engagement survey, they go, hey, I read these. There's a lot of things that I can influence and I can do better. And this is my commitment to you. Thank you so much for caring enough to be open and honest. Like how leaders respond when they have had some tough surveys or feedback.

I think it's a huge builder of psychological safety too, because it's a leader being vocally self-critical about where they could have improved. and so what do your leaders role model is another thing I would really inspect. Like when your leaders make a mistake or the company gets a black eye from something, like, what do we do? And what does that say implicitly or explicitly about what matters at our organization?

You could even just do some retrospectives on some tricky incidents and like, what is the likelihood that people have strong psychological safety based on what you see in employee relations issues or otherwise?

Megan Hayes

I think that's so important. And admitting, just being transparent, admitting when you're wrong, I think that's such great advice. Yeah, well, we have some new HR employees on the call today. So question about skip levels. What is a skip level and what is the purpose of a skip level?

Cynthia Doi

Yeah, that's funny because it might be a term that I used in an organization that not everyone uses. So the way I define skip levels is when I am meeting with the team of my team. So I have team leaders who report to me. I'm meeting with those teams underneath. So you're just going— you're skipping a level and then going one level down. And so it gives you, like, if you have a large team, like I had mentioned previously, like I had over 150 people who ultimately reported up to me. I wanted to be able to talk to them once a quarter just to hear from them because otherwise I'm only hearing from my managers, right?

And you don't have that on-the-ground voice. And so that's why I find skip levels to be really powerful.

Kelsey Tarp

Yeah. And I've also, I totally agree how powerful they are. I've also found it effective to even take like small— again, if you've got big organizations and you've got a leader who's like, I want to have a better listening mechanism, but how do I get started? Sometimes I've taken samples of like people who were hired in the last 6 months or people who are recently promoted.

Like, you can think about different ways to slice and dice employee cohorts and think about who might have put together in kind of a small focus group or a listening circle so we can ask some of those follow-up questions about what we're hearing in our engagement data. So those are some helpful ways to get started, but I think a leader at kind of skipping a level and really meeting with folks that report into them can be so impactful. And I think it's often underutilized.

Megan Hayes

Definitely agree. I'm gonna skip around just a little bit because I wanna get to this question, especially I recently heard a new term called job hugging. Do you think some people are not turning over due to today's climate of reductions in force fear or just not having potential alternatives to leave? I love all the new terms that consistently come.

Cynthia Doi

There is always a new one. Yes.

Kelsey Tarp

I do think it's possible, right? So that's where I would really get curious, especially if I have multiple years of engagement data. What do we know? The macro environment is uncertain. What does that likely mean? That people, assuming that they can, might be trying to really stick where they are for a little bit. But I think when I think about what the data would tell us, when you otherwise had employees that are moving about inside your organization, you often see kind of turnover to other organizations. When we have people staying longer, the biggest risk in my mind is that they quit and stay.

They are disengaged, but their body is still showing up for work every day, but they're not bringing discretionary effort. They're not bringing their full ideas and recommendations about what will really make a difference for our customers. That is the risk that I really worry about with job hugging is that you're going to have people who are hugging their job, but they have quit and stayed. They have mentally quit, but their body shows up. And I think that's the biggest risk that your employee engagement data might help you figure it out if you have strong enough psychological safety.

If you don't, you're likely to get really low response rates for people who don't want to stick their neck out there and be honest. Cynthia, what's your take?

Cynthia Doi

I agree. And if you, if you do see a disconnect between your engagement results and your attrition, that could be a signal. And I've had leaders in the past say, well, yeah, our engagement scores. The engagement scores are low, but no one's leaving, so it must be fine. It's like, well, that may not be true, right? Because there could be some macroenvironmental issues that are impacting it. And so do use those survey results as a good indicator, even if it's not resulting in immediate attrition. You may be kicking that problem down the road.

Kelsey Tarp

And employees have long memories, like they remember when you said, oh, we are launching this survey and you have our commitment to share with you what we learned. Cricket, you didn't share, right? Like, they remember that. And even if you don't see it in immediate impact where people are leaving, your biggest risk is quit and stay, and they'll remember how you treated them in the long run. And like Cynthia said, everything is cyclical. And those are, those are, those are some of the things I really highlight with leaders.