What exactly is EX, and how does one find a good answer to the question ‘How to measure employee experience?’ Employee experience (EX) seems to be all the rage for some of the world’s most successful companies. According to one study conducted by Gartner, organizations spend an average of $2,420 per person per year on efforts to enhance the employee experience.  

To put this into perspective, a company the size of Microsoft could be spending tens, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars (!) on EX initiatives annually. And even a much smaller company with a headcount of several thousand employees would be looking at investments worth hundreds of thousand dollars – every single year. 

According to Gartner, companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on efforts to enhance the employee experience

Given the astronomical amounts spent on EX, the question of whether these efforts yield tangible outcomes remains open. How to measure employee experience? And which KPIs should you be using to quantify the success of your digital workplace strategy?  

In this article, we look at several critical metrics you should be monitoring to ensure that your digital workplace initiatives are on the right track. Each metric is accompanied by key questions to help understand its implications for employee experience, and, by extension, your company’s long-term bottom line.   

How to measure employee experience: EX metrics

Employee turnover rate

Key questions to consider:

1. How has implementing a digital workplace affected employee turnover?  

2. Have you noticed a decline in resignations?  

Why is employee turnover so important to measure? Well, top talent is hard to find, and it’s even harder to keep. It’s no secret that recruiters worldwide are struggling to secure qualified candidates. This applies especially to roles within IT and Infrastructure.

In one recent survey by ManpowerGroup, 7 out of 10 companies (a whopping 70%) reported talent shortages and difficulty hiring. This marks a 15-year high. And it’s happening despite the ‘Great Reshuffle’ that we know has been infusing the labor market with capable applicants at breakneck speed.

We can estimate that the average cost of replacing an employee is between 16% and 20% of that employee’s annual salary. Over time, and with a high turnover rate, this can add up to significant financial losses and negatively impact your business over time. 

Employee engagement KPIs

Key questions to consider:

1. Do people tune into internal live events, like your CEO’s town hall? Do they stay for the event’s entire duration, or do they lose interest and drop off mid-stream?  

2. What does the global employee absenteeism rate look like?

Employee engagement is the holy grail of company culture. There’s a reason HR functions at some of the world’s leading enterprises make this metric their top KPI and strive to improve it.

According to Gallup, highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability. Teams who score in the top 20% in engagement realize a 41% reduction in absenteeism, and 59% less turnover.

To put this into perspective from a revenue point of view, disengaged employees cost U.S. companies up to $550 billion a year. Combined with costs associated with hiring and onboarding new recruits, the devastating impact to a company’s bottom line becomes very tangible.

Internal content consumption

Key questions to consider:

1. Are employees actively accessing online training resources?

2. Has there been an uptick in internal on-demand video streaming?

There is a clear correlation between the level of employee engagement and how actively people are accessing corporate training and development resources.

These materials can come in a variety of formats, from articles on your company intranet to educational videos they can watch on platforms like Microsoft Stream (or any other corporate video platforms you may be using).

Adoption rate of company digital tools

Key questions to consider:

1. Are internal communication and collaboration platforms used actively across all regions?

2. Is adoption of your internal tools increasing steadily month over month?

The single most accurate way to predict whether your digital workplace strategy is on the right track is to understand whether people are actively using the digital tools at their disposal.

To give a real-life example, think of a pair of shoes. If you purchase a pair that looks good and is both practical and comfortable, you will probably end up wearing it all the time.

The same goes for digital tools we use, both at work and in our day-to-day lives. If an app or website has good UX and is easy to navigate, we’ll likely end up using it on a regular basis. There is a ton of research out there to back up this theory.

Think of company employees as your internal customers.

Do they actively use your intranet, chat channels, or live brainstorming tools? Do they engage with one another, ask and answer questions, contribute to discussion threads? When your leadership team invests in internal virtual events, do people actually attend them?

Some metrics to help you find answers to these questions include:

• Number of online meetings, video calls, or live events  
• Internal page visits and dwell time (for example on your company intranet) 
• Number and type of reactions/sentiment expressions
• Commenting frequency across departments/regions
• Use of mobile applications
• Use of digital collaboration tools
• And there and many more – depending on the channels and tools you use.

How Hive Streaming can help quantify employee experience

The question you may be left with now is “How can I access all of these data points?”  

When it comes to internal video communication, there is an analytics tool you can use to not only get insights into the adoption of digital tools across your organization but also set and track meaningful employee engagement KPIs. Read on to learn exactly how to measure employee experience in the digital workplace.

Hive Video Analytics collects, stores, and refines your video communication data, and presents it on a dashboard. Analytics helps understand reach, quality & engagement per event and over time, allowing you to track video adoption across the organization and learn how employees engage with video. It gives users access to a set of business intelligence dashboards developed by our data visualization experts.

Video communication analytics allow you to:

• Understand how to measure employee experience
• Dissect viewer behavior, engagement, and live event outcomes
• Provide instant live event reports to senior leadership
• Identify trends and areas of improvement
• Identify video delivery bottlenecks in an onsite, hybrid or remote environment
• Understand when and how to plan live events for the highest possible attendance
• Forecast video event performance
• Boost employee engagement
• Decrease employee turnover and talent loss
• Access high-quality data with Power BI
• Provide effective employee training and monitor on-demand video consumption
• Improve operations and reduce both IT and operational costs
• Maximize internal communications efforts

Investment and cost metrics for the Digital Workplace

While the focus of this article is primarily on employee experience, some of the metrics listed above may also prove useful for mapping out costs and/or savings associated with certain digital workplace initiatives and digital infrastructure investments. Below are some of the main expense categories with relevant questions to help guide your decision-making.

IT & Infrastructure

Key questions to consider:

1. Are you making equal use of all digital tools and platforms your company has subscriptions for? 

2. Are you actively identifying and phasing out tools that aren’t driving business value?  

If your answer is ‘No” to either of the questions above, you may be wasting thousands of dollars on tools that never took hold within your organization.

Travel

Key questions to consider:

1. Is your digital workplace experience good enough to eliminate the need for in-person gatherings?  

2. What are your annual costs associated with employee travel, accommodation, event venue rental and similar? 

3. Are your current investments better spent improving upon your digital employee experience?  

We’ve already drawn up a rough outline of the types of costs associated with large in-person events in an earlier article, where we also detail the negative impact an event such as a simple in-person company kick-off can have on the environment.

Training and development

Key questions to consider:

1. Is training and virtual onboarding streamlined and accessible to all employees?  

2. Do you have a way of understanding the ROI on your internal training and development content?  

Companies often invest greatly in educational content, such as security training or onboarding videos. In many cases, the built-in video analytics features of the video application itself don’t paint a complete picture of whether these types of content generate sufficient ROI.