If there’s any doubt in your mind, rest assured: Employee experience has a huge impact on customer experience.
We’ve recently taken a deep dive on exploring the relationship between employee engagement and employee experience (EX) and how both connect to customer retention to deliver an unsurpassed customer experience (CX). Our research demonstrated that satisfied employees in their work environment are crucial to maintaining and developing loyal customers and that without long-term customer engagement, your P&L top-line (sales turnover) and gross margins will suffer, severely impacting the bottom line.
Missed the insights? Start here! Then, move on to the follow-up, focused on fundamental benchmarks stakeholders should regularly monitor to assess customer engagement health. Why are these KPIs vital?
- When these veer off track, it’s likely your connection to hard-earned customer loyalty will also.
- Moreover, earning a new customer can cost close to twenty-five times more than retaining a loyal one.
- Thus, the profitability impact of such a metric can be devastating.
You’re seeing an important call to focus on customer retention within engagement strategies crossing with employee experience. The metrics we have looked at so far are employee NPS (eNPS), customer NPS (NPS), Employee Absenteeism (EA), Employee Retention Rate (ERR), and Employee Learning and Development (EL&D). However, the more benchmarks in the mix, the better the perspective and fine-tuning for your strategy team. So, we have five more insightful yardsticks to add to your armory:
- Employee Turnover Rate (ETR)
- Glassdoor.com Rating
- Vacation Days Used
- Employee Participation in Surveys
- Employee Satisfaction with Compensation
Five more employee engagement benchmarks that connect to CX
1. Effective Employee Turnover Rate (ETR) calculation
Here’s how to calculate Employee Turnover Rate in order to maximize its usefulness when strategizing.
- Select a period in months
- Register the number of employees at the start of the period (call it A)
- Register the number of employees at the end (call it B)
- Deduct B from A = C
- Calculate C/A x 100 = ETR in percentage terms for the window you’re looking at
While ETR tells you something, I suggest breaking C into employees who exited as the following categories:
- From remote/in-office/hybrid arrangements (D/E/F)
- Voluntarily (G)
- In response to an unexpected change in personal circumstances (H)
- Involuntarily, such as firing (I)
- Divide each of the above (D to I) by A for a percentage to derive the employee category turnover rate
Compare the resultant benchmarks to industry historical expectations (generally available from archives, via Google searches, or acquiring them from dedicated research companies). The latter should provide a picture of possible discontent or, if only by circumstance, work disruption. Whenever team harmony tilts off balance, it affects your brand presentations significantly. For example, excessive firings or voluntary terminations signal that onboarding or corporate culture is somehow misfiring.
ERR and ETR are the yin and yang of the same thing – successful and unsuccessful employee retention. So, why are we recommending it? Because ERR doesn’t involve exit interviews. The latter are windows that give stakeholders an expanded, more detailed look at category churn causes suggested above.
2. Glassdoor.com rating
Employer branding jumps to the forefront when people look to join a company. So, Glassdoor platformed itself as the #1 center for all prospects to appraise their future employers based on real-time, substantive employee reviews. Why? There’s no better or more anonymous directory for company culture insights and employer branding than anonymous (non-threatening or come-back) reviews. In other words, what Yelp is to customers, Glassdoor is to employees.
How does it work? A business’s rating rides solely on employee feedback slotted into a 1 to 5 range, as follows:
- 1.51 to 2.50 = Highly disengaged and dissatisfied employees
- 4.01 to 5.00 = Highly engaged and satisfied employees
- 2.51 to 3.50 ratings (Lukewarm) and 3.51 to 4.00 (Satisfied employees but not over-enthused) fill the middle
Suppose your company reflects numerous employees providing GDR feedback. In that case:
- Add up the total number of reviews (A).
- Add up the highly engaged and satisfied and divide by A x 100 for a percentage (B)
- Add up the highly disengaged and dissatisfied and divide by A x 100 for a percentage (C)
- Deduct C from B. The maximum possible negative is -100, and the uppermost potential positive is +100.
Of course, anything negative signifies net employee dissatisfaction and disengagement. Conversely, when one gets into the positives, 80+ denotes best-in-class, and 50 to 79 is exceptional. A rating of 30 to 50 is good, and between 1 and 29 is on the right track, with room for improvement. Compare this to similar calculations to derive eNPR and NPR – they should all more or less agree with one another.
3. Vacation Days Used
Vacation Days Used closely connects to Work/Life balance on the premise that employees well rested with time for stress release are more engaged. It goes to both the mental and physical health of your staff. In a frenetic work environment, task overload for an extended time is a looming danger to team stability, as is focusing on job insecurity, fear of scrutiny when absent from work, and work-addictive personalities. These extremes test employee satisfaction at every turn and throw out alarm signals.
Calculating Vacation Days Used:
- Calculate the total annual vacation days for all employees (X)
- Calculate the number of vacation days used by all employees (Y)
- Calculator Y/X x 100 for an all-employees metric (Z)
- Calculate the (a) to (c) above for individual employees and compare to Z, discovering those above and below the benchmark
Vacation Days Used metric integrates with others on our list, for example:
- High Absenteeism/Low Vacation Days Used
- A three-way perspective – Faster ETR/Low Vacation Days Used/Poor ERR
4. Employee Survey Participation
How to calculate this metric: The number of completed surveys/The total number of employees invited to participate x 100 = Percentage of active employee participants.
For surveys to be successful, structure direct questioning showing unambiguous objectives without suggesting a direction to the audience. Use yes/no questions with enough open-ended ones to fill in the gaps; keep surveys brief, anonymous, and focused on priority considerations.
Low participation indicates too many employees refusing to provide feedback and obstructing insights into many of the ten benchmarks I’ve covered. Data is an invaluable asset as long as significant survey participation is evident. If you want to boost employee survey participation rates, a few simple tips can make all the difference!
Also, the mark of a positive company culture is employee willingness to improve things with innovative ideas. In this and other articles, I’ve provided compelling reasons to believe that eagerness to express views and opinions – even anonymously – aligns closely with employees who feel at ease in their work environment. Thus, they are also likely to be good customer ambassadors.
Finally, the best survey follow-up is implementing employee suggestions with recognition for creativity and innovation.
Note: Sogolytics is a professional entity in the EX and CX arena, providing quick, penetrative survey options that are easy and seamless applications. In addition, Sogolytics directs clients on responding to employee feedback with proven benchmarks to actionable insights and executing next-step strategies.
5. Employee Compensation Satisfaction
Losing employees leaving for slightly more money is the last thing you want, taking your training and company know-how to competitors. Thus, surveys focused on employee remuneration and incentives are crucial. Sogolytics resources have the technologies to help you develop the right survey questions with regular timing to understand how content your employees are with their net take-home dollars.
These days, compensation surveys fit into an automatic process, including collating the results seamlessly and automatically via state-of-the-art software. Engagement isn’t all about money, but, unfortunately, unfair compensation perception can kick all other drivers to the curb. Inclusion, belonging, innovative thinking, and all the higher-echelon employee engagement contributors can’t see the light of day if employees are underpaid. It’s as simple as that.
Conclusion
So, add these five to the others described in our introduction and explained in Part Two, and you have ten of the best employee engagement benchmarks ready to work for your employee and customer retention. Sogolytics is the company to elevate your teams by establishing usable, practical, and mind-blowing benchmarks with all the processes that come with them. Don’t waste your time and money with software that’s half-baked or inappropriate for the purposes you have in mind. Sogolytics will get you the results faster and less expensively than “do-it-yourself” trial and error.
