The biggest myth in corporate operations is busted.
Frequently, attempts to reverse the global disengagement trend are stymied by a stubborn piece of conventional wisdom: employee engagement isn’t quantifiable.
Well, fantastic. Even the most robust engagement campaign can’t audit its own success without empirical evidence; how would an organization know when headway had been made?
They wouldn’t. For a long time, that fact has been the largest barrier to engagement efforts — it’s simply too abstract, like trying to quantify happiness or contentment. The result is that engagement has been reduced to a binary: yes or no. Engaged or disengaged.
This makes sense on a superficial level, but given the colossal quantities of data produced on a daily basis in a frontline environment, something doesn’t resonate.
Dynamic Data
The problem, as the MomentSnap team sees it, is that data tends to stagnate: employee customer ratings tend to hover consistently around the same values, as do sales rates, etc. The real window into engagement does not open until a new element is injected into the mix — something that jump-starts employee awareness.
One of MomentSnap’s clients is a casual dining restaurant with nearly 1000 stores nationwide. Seeking to boost customer satisfaction results, it launched MomentSnap across a region that was lagging.
Engagement Quantified
At entry, only 45% of servers at the launch restaurants were hitting customer satisfaction goals, with some individual averages dipping well below the ideal average.
Within four weeks, and without an official launch event, 80% of eligible users had downloaded MomentSnap and were consistently checking in at least once per shift. Once employees were able to access their ratings on-demand through their device, the correlating spikes in performance metrics spoke for themselves: an average of 8% improvement in customer satisfaction across all waiters, with those who were initially struggling the most seeing up to a 20% boost.
Accordingly, the percentage of waiters hitting goals in guest satisfaction leapt 20 percentage points, from 45% to 65% — in just a single month.
What would one call that if not a quantifiable jump in engagement levels?
Empowerment through Ownership
To measure engagement, a catalyst is necessary — something that stirs up the mix and causes stagnating data to move. The best way to achieve the desired upwards trend is to offer employees a glimpse at the performance metrics: if a waitress sees that her guest sat rate is less than 70%, and that the average for her store is well above that, she will naturally strive to do better. This is empowerment through ownership.
“Now that everyone can see my scores, I try to have a better attitude,” one waitress admitted. “Now I’m more positive with guests.”
Ownership allows for pride, and stirs a wave of competition that elevates the entire team.
“For me, it’s big to know that I am 3rd, 4th, or 5th place so I can make fun of the other people,” one waiter told us. “Some servers tell me they are ahead of me, so I say: ‘watch it! I will be ahead of you soon’ !”