When It Comes To Corporate Training, What Does “Engagement” Look Like?

Disengaged employees and a high turnover rate impact your business’s productivity, level of innovation, and ultimately the bottom line. Yet Deloitte’s 2015 study found that 87% of surveyed organizations called engagement one of their “top challenges,” and half of those organizations went on to call the problem “very important” to their corporate culture.

Chances are that you recognize the value of engaged employees, which is why the Deloitte study also tells us that two-thirds of all HR professionals plan to take action in 2016 to update their strategies for retention and engagement going forward. Here are our top tips for measuring employee engagement, accompanied by strategies to build a better informed and more committed workforce.

Building, measuring, and improving upon engagement.

Perhaps the hardest part of building employee engagement is knowing where your staff currently stands. Use a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to survey your employees and learn how effective your current employee engagement strategy is–and where you need to improve.

• Provide the opportunity for anonymous feedback. Use your corporate training app to collect closed responses or open-ended feedback. Your team is more comfortable being open and honest when their names aren’t attached to their responses.

• Distinguish between self-reported and actual engagement–but be sure to measure both. Actual engagement metrics include work hours, both inside and outside of work; networking activity; meeting and initiative participation; and time spent engaging with colleagues and prospects.

• Think about how your team perceives each other. Engagement is infectious, and a team with many highly engaged members practically motivates itself. Ask your employees whether they perceive their teammates as highly engaged and involved.

• Consider teammates’ relationships with management. Team members that spend a lot of time collaborating one-on-one with management tend to report themselves as being more engaged. Enable them to check in frequently with set “office hours,” where employees can come to you with questions and feedback.

Provide interactive, dynamic content.

Once you have an informed analysis of engagement levels, you can re-evaluate your strategy, set goals, and begin providing your employees with the tools that they need to be better informed and more committed. Corporate training is more engaging when your employees are in control of when and how they access their training materials. It’s easy to feel motivated to learn when materials are highly accessible, dynamic, and interactive.

Just-in-time content for corporate training lets your employees engage in self-directed learning and catches their attention with simple formatting, effortless navigation, and easy-to-find materials.

Most importantly, you don’t have to guess whether your content is contributing to employee engagement. Measure metrics such as completion rates, time spent per page, pages that are viewed frequently, and page elements that are utilized the most. You’ll know instantly what’s working and what needs to be tweaked.

Realize the benefits.

Of course, having high employee engagement benefits your company’s culture and makes it a great place to work. However, don’t forget that there are concrete benefits to focusing your attention on employee engagement.

• Gallup suggests that there are “close ties” between employee engagement and company success metrics such as productivity and turnover.
• Companies in the top 25% for engagement achieve 4.5x more revenue growth than their competitors, according to a Hay Group study.
• Organizations with engaged employees experience 54% less turnover than organizations with less engaged employees, says the Hay Group study.

It’s clear that the employee engagement is going to make big waves in 2016. To compete, make sure you’re measuring, building, and improving every aspect of your corporate training program to keep your employees on board and actively committed to being part of the team.