Are you apprehensive about fixing a budget for investing in employee engagement initiatives? Do you feel that direct outcomes of such initiatives are hard, if not impossible, to measure? That is precisely what naysayers will have you believe but that is far from the truth. You can not only measure the Return On Investment of your employee engagement strategies but also measure it in terms that would help you understand direct implications for your organization.
While the importance of employee engagement workshops is widely acknowledged and coming more into focus with every passing day, the ROI of strategies to increase actual engagement is often a concern.
How can you get a projection of employee engagement ROI? How do you establish benchmarks to chart the progress of your EE strategies? Here are a few pointers to get you started: –
Be SMART in setting goals
You have to understand and measure ROI based on the goals you set out to achieve. Make sure to set goals that are simple, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Moreover, take up objectives that echo the over-all goals of your organization while allowing you to focus on employee engagement.
Evaluate where you stand now
To move ahead, you need to not only know where your goal lies, but also how far you are from it right now. There are many scales and tests available to help you understand and even numerically simplify the present levels of engagement or disengagement in your organization. There are work engagement tools and surveys that can help you quantify even a concept like engagement that is seemingly purely qualitative.
Post-implementation
Once you’ve implemented certain employee engagement strategies, you can get your employees to re-take the same test or survey. This will give you quite a clear depiction of any change that your new strategy has been able to cause. One issue with these surveys, however, is that there might always be some attribution error. Based on survey results, what you might think is a “person problem”, might actually be a “situation problem”. In-depth interviews, though time-consuming are helpful in analyzing and ruling external factors that might skew results.
Number crunch
Suppose you decide to study the ROI of your new strategy in terms of attrition. A point to be kept in mind is that replacing an employee costs the organization about 100-150% of the employee’s salary. Quite a big sum, right? Let’s say that after the implementation of the new EE strategy, you see that attrition has gone down by 25%. So if you had 100 employees, you get to save 25 times 100-150% of the average salary at your organization. That’s a lot of savings and money saved is, after all, money earned! You get your ROI by comparing what you save with what you have invested in the employee engagement program.
Imagine if you had an employee engagement ROI calculator to ensure that the initiatives you execute will be data-driven. Moreover, you get to have a more customized plan of action rather than just trusting your gut and hoping that things work out in the favour of your organization. Mapping out and measuring the returns from your engagement strategy will look into and understand what went wrong and what went right. It will also help you to strategize better and create an environment that will make your employees feel happy to come to work.
Looking for tailored employee engagement workshops that would be just right for your organization? Write to us at info@willnevergrowup.com
