Measuring Employee Experience: The Top 5 Types of Employee Experience Data You Need

Every single day, employees run into obstacles that get in the way of them performing their best work. If left unaddressed by employers, these challenges can lead to burnout, increased turnover, and declines in customer satisfaction. Measuring employee experience on a continuous basis can help organizations understand how their people are doing at any moment in time and uncover opportunities to strengthen engagement and morale and drive key customer outcomes. 

With millions having already quit their jobs as part of the Great Resignation and 55% of workers considering doing so, getting a real-time pulse on key drivers of employee experience — and having strategies in place to react to changing sentiment in the moment — is of the utmost importance for employers looking to attract and retain top talent.

So how do you go about measuring employee experience, anyway? The first steps involve collecting and analyzing key employee experience data. In this blog we’ll walk you through the five most important types of employee experience data your company needs to track to truly measure employee experience effectively. 

5 Types of Employee Signals for Measuring Employee Experience

Right now, your people are telling you how they feel on the job, what their toughest challenges are, and how your company can provide more support. They do so by leaving breadcrumbs or clues — what our experts refer to as employee experience signals — in their daily flow of work. 

These signals are what your employees say about your company through direct and indirect experience data points. Whether that’s in IT tickets they submit, their PTO usage patterns, or the feedback they provide via surveys or performance reviews. 

And when organizations pick up on these employee experience insights they can unlock critical information about employee engagement, well-being, and more and get a holistic view of how employees really feel. By first understanding the employee experience, organizations can begin improving it — helping recruit and retain the best employees and ultimately, driving business success. 

Here are the five types of employee experience data every organization should be gathering and acting upon.

#1: Lifecycle data

This category includes three key areas across people ops, employee interactions, and performance and growth milestones.

People ops: 

• Recruiter interactions
• Absenteeism
• Tardiness and breaks
• Time to productivity
• Violations and discipline
• Separation details

Interactions: 

• Socialization and volunteering
• Trainer or manager feedback
• Team interactions
• Customer experience

Performance and growth: 

• Goal achievement
• Performance reviews
• Learning and growth
• Promotions and transfers 

#2: Operational and facilities data

Because employee experience encompasses so much more than simply the experience of interacting with HR, it’s important to assess the impact of your organization’s other departments and processes, including the effects operations and facilities can have on employee experience and engagement. Key areas to track include:

• Service tickets
• Location and badging
• Meetings data
• HRIS and demographics
• Compensation and benefits 

#3: Direct feedback

Direct signals are what your employees say about your company, as directly solicited via annual and pulse surveys, idea factories, social media conversations, and crowdsourcing. These are the types of direct feedback data sources your organization should be tapping into:

• Engagement surveys
• Messaging
• Voice
• Video
• Web
• App
• Kudos and recognition 

#4: Indirect feedback

Indirect signals are data that indicate how your employees feel about your organization, collected via channels that aren’t expressly designed for gathering feedback. Some examples include:

• Slack or email usage
• Social media
• Customer feedback
• Referrals 

#5: Organizational design and culture

To understand how your organizational culture impacts your employees, be sure to capture data related to:

• Event participation
• ERG or affinity group participation
• Organization redesign
• Manager or team changes

Want to make sure you’re capturing all of your key employee experience data?

• Start by analyzing your employee journeys and lifecycles 
• Uncover every important engagement point and identify the relevant data generated at every step
• Combine any employee data collected from your current voice of the employee or employee listening program with the five key employee experience signals detailed here

Turn your employee experience data into action. Download Medallia’s eBook, Harness the Power of Signals to Improve Employee Experience, and get expert insights on how to activate your signals to unleash your people’s full potential.