As employees return to work, whether it’s on-premises or at home, the best way to understand the effect of all the organizational changes you’ve made is by establishing some employee experience metrics and gathering regular feedback.

Each minor change to the physical workplace or to work processes ripples through your employee population and will have an affect on productivity, morale, service, etc. Monitoring feedback as to how the changes affect your employees eliminates surprises and reduces costly missteps. 

Start With What’s Different

Each organization is different, faces different challenges and is subject to different changes required to operate a safe workplace.

The best place to start mapping out your post-Covid metrics is by focusing on changes first. reconfigured workplaces allowing more distance. Or shifts. Or larger numbers of employees working remotely. 

Whatever the changes are, list and intuitively prioritize them from most disruptive to least disruptive. Choose the most disruptive changes to monitor.

A few of the metrics that would be very useful for understanding post-Covid employee experience could include:

Work Environment Satisfaction. Break this down by on-premises and remote and include specifics about changes. More remote work is a big change, but also gather feedback on on-premises changes.  It’s important to gather that feedback in a way that can be segmented to analyze the metrics by department, region, manager – even job families (which jobs thrive remotely?). 

Management Support Satisfaction. As workplaces change, so do management requirements to support employees. How supported do employees feel by their managers?

Technical Tool Satisfaction. Remote employees need new tools and technologies to be effective. What’s working? What’s not? This requires constant feedback and analysis to ensure that the tools in place are helping all employees work effectively.

Leadership Communication Satisfaction. As economic headwinds blow, new strategies and  revised missions and visions are laid out. Layoffs or rapid expansions are executed. How well are these being communicated by leadership and management. Are employees on board? Do they understand it? What’s the impact on overall satisfaction and engagement?

Include the Old Standards

There are many proven employee experience metrics designed to understand employee performance and morale. These are still essential to evaluating the effect of a post-Covid workplace on your workforce.  A few of these are:

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). This broad measure of satisfaction isolates the most satisfied employees (those that are likely to recommend you). Because it uses a widely adopted standard for identifying promoters, the eNPS is easily benchmarked against other organizations and is invaluable for pinpointing your most satisfied employees (and likely, engaged).

Employee Satisfaction. This is best measured through satisfaction feedback about different aspects of the organization that creates an overall satisfaction index made up of various underlying satisfaction ratings. This is important because you can monitor satisfaction broadly, but also drill deeper into the numbers and understand what specifics are  increasing or decreasing employee satisfaction.

Employee Engagement. Employees can be perfectly satisfied yet not very engaged. Engagement is the emotional attachment that employees have to the organization. It’s  typically measured by pride in the organization and a sense of accomplishment at work. The feedback you get on certain aspects of employee experience can affect engagement, but engagement is demonstrated through behaviors. For example, whether I plan to be here next year is a measure of engagement. Dissatisfaction with my manager is a measure of employee experience that could affect engagement, but is not a measure of engagement.

Put It All Together

These are just a few of the metrics (and sub-metrics) to help organizations understand the impact of post-Covid employee experience. These are designed to be high level metrics to view trends. It’s important to bolster these high level metrics (i.e. how satisfied are you?) with more specific feedback (how satisfied are you with your manager?). That way you can analyze fluctuations in overall satisfaction by looking at sub metrics like manager support satisfaction, technology support satisfaction or work environment satisfaction. 

Finally, it’s important to automate the feedback collection process so metrics are gathered in the background and are available in real time. Make it a part of how the organization functions and keep it simple. This is the value of a talent feedback program! You can read and react to the effects of change quickly.

Sounds impossible, but real-time talent feedback platforms can integrate with your HR systems to automatically gather feedback year round.