Do Your Employee Adoption Metrics Overshadow Employee Engagement?

Evaluating the success of enterprise collaboration is a top priority for organizations around the globe.

If your organization is in the adoption stage of an enterprise collaboration platform (Slack, Workplace from Facebook, Microsoft Teams, etc), it makes sense that metrics around adoption capture the interest of organizational leaders. However, as the objectives of your digital workplace mature beyond adoption, the measured insights must also evolve. At this stage, forward-thinking communicators use their digital workplace to answer questions around employee engagement, sentiment or trending behaviors.

Adoption and Engagement: Next Steps in Your Collaboration Journey

Data-backed success stories of your platform rollout will help you garner the buy-in of project champions. However, these valuable insights can also uncover important surprises within your tool.

There are two distinct stages to measure enterprise platform success: adoption and employee engagement. Each of these stages, when measured correctly, present unique collaboration tool metrics. 

1. Platform Adoption

When you first start your collaboration journey, key metrics involve understanding who is sharing what, and how often within your platform. Consider some of the questions below to gauge your current understanding of your platform’s adoption.

• How many employees are using the tool?
• What is the message volume within the collaboration platform?
• Which pockets of my organization are the most active?
• Which are the least active?
• Where do employees share information?
• How frequently do employees visit the platform?

Fortunately, metrics that address these questions come as out-of-the-box dashboards in most common collaboration and communication platforms.

Active users

Use this metric to gauge channel popularity and measure the amount of time employees spend within the tool. Count active users and encourage others to join.

Check out Slack Analytics and Microsoft Teams Analytics for an inside look.         

Claimed accounts

Use this metric to understand the number of employees who claim accounts in each of your collaboration platforms. Is adoption widespread or limited just to the stakeholders vested in adoption efforts?

Usage over time

Track how message volume changes. This metric, when paired with claimed accounts, tells a data-backed story around how your employee community adopted the platform over time.

2. Measure Employee Engagement

Once your platform is part of your organization's daily operations, continuous measurement is even more critical than ever.

The average employee sends over 200 Slack messages per week. Imagine just how many messages travel within each of your platforms daily. As data accrues, organizational leaders can go beyond usage metrics and practice continuous listening to glean valuable qualitative insights into the employee community. 

Consider the questions below when gauging your organization’s current engagement:

• Are unhealthy employee conversations (e.g. harassment or bullying) trending up or down in my organization?
• When does the general sentiment of employee conversations trend up or down? What about as it pertains to certain topics or keywords?
• What hashtags or topics are trending? What is currently important to my employees?

These qualitative insights are generally not out-of-the-box for leading collaboration platforms and will require secondary investment. However, these people insights are invaluable to organization leaders who make critical people and culture decisions on a regular basis.

A few examples of people insights available from these platforms include conversation sentiment, conversation health and trending topics.

Conversation Sentiment

Conversation sentiment measures the emotion that lies behind the messages living in your platform.

A negative sentiment score can reveal surface level employee frustrations before they escalate further. This insight shows your leadership team how your people feel about everything from one unique topic to an entire campaign, in real-time.   

Conversation Health

Gauge the appropriateness and integrity of both one-on-one and group conversations with conversation health metrics.

Conversation health metrics expose how unwanted behaviors trend over time so organization leaders can identify the root cause of individual issues. Topics that fall under this category include all verbiage your enterprise considers unsuitable for the workplace. This qualitative metric is a great indicator for a leader who wants to understand organization pockets that trend in an unhealthy direction and need extra attention.

Trending Topics

Trending topics show how and where employees speak about subjects they care about in the digital workplace.

For example, the naming of a new CEO often requires extensive, organization-wide change management in order to protect employee morale and organization productivity. Topical insights can expose employee sentiment pertaining to the change, how employees are speaking about the issue and even surface areas of concern for change management leaders.

These metrics, and others, allow enterprise leaders to pull real-time, people insights from collaboration platforms. Use the data already living within your platform to support and back your most critical workforce and organization decisions.

Uncover Engagement Metrics with Aware

Tap into the data living in collaboration platforms (Slack, Workplace from Facebook, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, etc.) to understand your employees' conversation health, sentiment and topics of interest. Go beyond adoption metrics when you choose a qualitative insights and analytics solution, like Aware Spotlight.