There are a few things you could put on a list of employee engagement program success factors, but the most important is that you get the results you need.
While this might sound obvious, we’ve seen organizations who reach out for employee engagement programs and treat it like one of many things they have on their todo list. We’ve also seen organizations who seem excited to get an employee engagement program and then once we get up and running they are on to their next three initiatives.
There’s very little that’s more important than building and keeping the right team. If you have the right team in place, other important success factors (such as profit, customer service, product development, marketing, etc.) should be taken care of. Focus on the root of those factors, which is your team, and the results should be awesome.
On the other hand, focus on anything other than your people and you will find it’s hard to retain the right people and maybe even harder to attract the best candidates.
5 Employee Engagement Program Success Factors
It’s critical to differentiate between real employee engagement program success factors and factors that are essentially red herrings. A red herring is basically a distraction. Imagine a report with twenty success factors listed, with all the accompanying data and statistics. As you read through what looks like a comprehensive report you realize that much of it is just fluff. It might seem meaningful at first glance but you realize that most of the factors are meaningless.
It feels good to have a report that seems comprehensive but when most of it is fluff you have a problem. Either you don’t really understand what the most important factors are or you are trying to hide something (hence, the red herring).
So what are employee engagement program success factors that really matter? Here are some critical success factors:
Employee Retention
Think you have an engaged workforce? Why is your retention bad, then? If you had a well-engaged workforce they should stick around. Developing a well-engaged workforce could be harder than it sounds, but you can find a partner (like Snowfly!) to help. We’ve seen all kinds of employee engagement programs in all kinds of organizations and industries. We study this stuff all day long. And we’ve seen successful programs that actually and really improve employee retention numbers.
Hiring
There are various metrics recruiters use to monitor hiring success. Spend time learning how to hire better, smarter, and more effectively. Find recruiting experts to audit your hiring processes. When you hire smarter you hire more of the right people and less of the wrong people. This can have a massive impact on the culture and workplace you are working so hard to create, your organizational results, and factors such as retention.
Employee Satisfaction
Employee satisfaction is like a unicorn. Organizations are keen on figuring it out but not sure if they’ve really seen what they’re after. They don’t even know how to measure employee satisfaction, even though it is definitely an employee engagement program success factor. We wrote an ebook on how to measure employee satisfaction (and your culture), by the way, and talk about important considerations to get accurate insight into your team.
Productivity
This is another one of those things that sounds right but seems hard to measure. But you could measure this in the heaps of data your operations or finance teams keep track of. If your team is producing more widgets, responsible for more revenue or profit, takes care of more customer issues, enhances the product by adding x new features or fixing y new bugs, resolves your call center call time by 10%, etc., you will be able to prove and quantify productivity has increased. Everyone will think your employee engagement program success is well worth the investment.
Customer Satisfaction
Perhaps as important as your employee satisfaction is your customer satisfaction, which you can measure and track. When you have happy customers you might have repeat customers. Happy customers could mean customers advocating for your brand. Customer satisfaction might sound cliche but the opposite, unhappy customers, can result in drastic harm to your organization. Unhappy customers can lead prospects away, tarnish your brand/reputation, and undo all of the good you are trying to do.
Those are just five employee engagement program success factors. What are success factors that are important to your organization? We’d love to talk about our tools and programs, and what we’ve learned, to help you develop an employee engagement program that actually works for your team!
Let’s jump on a call! You can reach out here to set up an appointment.
