No successful business can operate off the work of a single person. It also cannot function at its best without communication, transparency, and accountability. You need the involvement and investment of your employees and other partners to build the best organisation.
Working on this and what we like to call the ‘involvement economy’ is integral to optimum performance and quality products and service provision.
In today’s blog, we’ll discuss involvement as an institutional culture. We’ll share why involvement culture matters and three key performance indicators (KPIs) to focus on for increased involvement.
Why Does Involvement Culture Matter?
These are some of the primary reasons why it’s important to encourage a culture of involvement in the workplace:
Employees Expect Involvement
Your employees and their expectations have dramatically changed with the digital age we’re in. Today, in their personal lives, a typical person does nearly everything through their most personal companions - their smartphones. When we listen to music, we do not buy CDs anymore, we use Spotify. When we stay in touch with our colleagues, we don’t call them, we use Whatsapp, Slack, or Teams.
Employees expect the same level of usability, engagement and involvement from their workplace-related tools as well.
The difference between our work lives and personal lives is that most of us do not want to sit on the sidelines passively. The social media clicks, views and engagement have generated passive followers. This increases the need for a counterforce that actively involves people to say and impact what is important to them.
We seek meaning, autonomy and mastery in work and involving employees in important matters brings just that. Employees appreciate an active reporting and feedback system where they can make their opinions known and improve how they work.
It Improves Your Business’ Functionality
Under-involvement can affect your business in various ways. When employees don’t report observations, near misses, and other incidents, it impacts your workplace safety. This, in turn, affects your workers’ ability to perform at their best.
Not having input from your employees in this way also impacts your ability to deal with issues swiftly and effectively. You cannot find solutions and fix problems that you don’t know about. When issues go unresolved, it harms your organisation’s general functionality, too.
It Builds Community
Involvement also includes communication. With good communication and employee engagement, employees feel more involved in the workplace. They feel their voice matters and that their employers value their contributions. This helps to nurture workplace relationships that encourage a pleasant and harmonious work environment.
Building a community with your workers can also lead to boosts in morale, better performance, and higher productivity.
3 KPIs To Prioritise In The Involvement Economy
Using KPIs can help you measure employee involvement and engagement. These are three of the top indicators you should keep tabs on to see how involved your team is:
1. Employee Survey Open & Completion Rate
Employee engagement surveys are a key way to see how involved your team is. First, you can gauge involvement by seeing if the employees open or complete the survey at all. If your employees simply ignore the call to complete the survey, that’s a sure sign you have an involvement problem.
A digital survey will allow you to better follow the numbers relating to your survey process. By using a platform with feedback forms or surveys, you can observe the data and insights easily. Monitor the open and completion rate carefully.
The other upside of conducting an employee survey is that you learn how your employees feel. You can find out from their answers how they’re feeling about their role, workplace, colleagues, and more. You can use this to get actionable insights and make improvements that boost employee satisfaction and engagement.
2. Turnover & Absenteeism
When employees care and are engaged, they want to be involved. They will show up for work and do their best. Tracking your employee turnover and absenteeism rates will indicate if you are failing to keep your workers around.
These are lagging indicators that you can only observe after the fact. This means you can't really foretell them. However, tracking them can inform you of the involvement issue so you can find ways to boost retention and presence going forward.
3. Employee Satisfaction Index (ESI)
Employee satisfaction works hand in hand with involvement and engagement. When your workers are happy and satisfied at work, they are more likely to invest more energy, time, and effort into their work.
There are various factors that contribute to workplace satisfaction. This includes safety, communication, access to assistance, resource accessibility, employee benefits, management, and more. Management’s care for employees’ physical and mental well-being also plays a big role in their satisfaction.
The Employee Satisfaction Index measures workers’ satisfaction levels in the workplace. Human Resources teams can calculate the score by asking three questions. Employees answer them on a scale of 0-100. HR can then average these numbers to calculate the index.
The three key questions in the ESI are:
- How good is your workplace at meeting your expectations?
- How would you rate your workplace against your ideal workplace?
- How would you rate your satisfaction at work?
These questions highlight employee sentiment. They tell you how employees feel. You can tailor the index to departments, campaigns, and more. This will tell you employees’ feelings about these divisions. Aim for a score of 70 and higher.
Final Thoughts
Your employees are partners in your business and its success. They are the foundation for good products and services. Without a team that cares about what they do, your business may struggle to attain its goals.
Developing an involvement-centric workplace culture will help you improve productivity, performance, employee morale, and more. In turn, you may observe increased growth and success. You also build a reputation as an employer that cares.
By tracking the three key performance indicators above, you can observe employees’ involvement and satisfaction. Use your observations to build a workplace culture that encourages your employees to dig deeper and get more involved.
If you're looking for a platform to collect more data to have better involvement KPIs, we've got you covered. Falcony is easy-to-use, boosts two-way communication, has customisable workflows, automated analytics, vast integration possibilities and more. Start your 30-day trial or contact us for more information.
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
