How to monitor covert signals of employee engagement

As a people manager, I believe everyone should have an element of healthy paranoia when it comes to the retention of employees. If you are treating your team poorly (burning them out, compensating poorly, not valuing opinions etc), first off, please stop doing that. 

However, there are many many more reasons why employees might choose to look for greener pastures, some of which might include — 

• Long term employment is not a concept like it was back in the 80s/90s/00's.

• The itch people who have 2+ years of experience tend to have — especially if they feel like they aren’t growing in their role anymore.

• The shape of the changing technologies and companies that are rising including deep tech like OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX, climate tech etc. 

• Changes in personal life — that might direct to different life paths compared to when they started.

• The number of lucrative offers there are out there which are made transparent with apps like Blind.

• Ultimately, people are people and can be extremely hard to predict since everyone has different motivations.

Now all that being said, I think there are ways you could look for signals that indicate how invested an employee is in your company. There are the overt signals which include things like -

• listening to your employees concerns about their current situation

• the quality of work they are producing (sharp drops in quality might indicate a feeling of detachment)

• how engaged and motivated they are when they are working on the projects they are tasked with

• the thoughts and discussions they are having with stakeholders (if they are suddenly pessimistic and complaining about everything, it might indicate disillusionment)

However, I believe there are a bunch of covert signals that people transmit that are equally as important to keep an eye on. While these might not necessarily be the kind of thing that every single employee exhibits, a number of them are likely to show up.

• 👯 Recommending people to join the team — I believe this is one of the strongest indicators of employee intent when it comes to feeling good about their own situation. Recommending someone is such a big investment on the part of the employee . They need to be able to convince someone else or feel really good about having one of their network join the environment that they are currently embedded in. 

  • Employees recommending others is a strong sign of employee engagement.

• 🎤 Interviewing candidates — An employee raising their hand to interview candidates for open roles in your company is a good indicator. What makes this signal even stronger is the kind of analysis or thought they provide about the candidate they interviewed. The richer and more nuanced the conversation, the more invested they are likely to be. 

  • Active feedback and participation in the interview process is a strong sign of employee engagement.

• ♻️ Giving feedback about the manager and peers — Whether it is through team retrospectives, or managing upwards, proactively giving feedback (or even doing so upon being asked) indicates skin in the game.

  • Hearing from employees to see how they feel invested in their team and environment is a strong sign of employee engagement.

• 🏋️‍♀️ Participating in extra-curricular activities — Companies tend to have various forums for people to engage in either community building (things like Company Game Night or working with the company’s culture committee), skill building (like hosting meetups, having bootcamps for new grads, finding ways to hone your skills as an interviewer etc.), or networking (connecting with peers through guilds or what you would consider to be ERGs (Employee Resource Groups)). Engaged employees tend to want to participate in these non-work work activities to build camaraderie and to improve the culture of their company. 

  • Participating in these team building activities indicates positive intent of employees

• 🗣️ Speaking up in meetings — Many people can be fairly introverted, especially in Tech. In this case, I really mean speaking up in small meetings, where you would expect their inputs . For example, if its a Tech Lead or a Senior Engineer in charge of a project or service, you would expect them to opine when the architecture or design of a service or project is being discussed. If they are avoiding conversations or not providing their inputs, it could indicate disinterest or disillusionment with their environment. 

  • Providing inputs actively in small group sessions is a good sign of employee engagement.

• 🤝 Not avoiding 1/1s — This is a weak indicator but just wanted to list it out as it has proven useful to me in the past a couple of times. As a People Manager, 1/1s are your best opportunity to understand what is going on with your employees. It’s best to let your employees use the time the way they see fit, maybe with some poking and prodding on your part. Consistent presence and engagement in 1/1s is a strong indicator of intent. However, when employees duck out of several 1/1s, that might indicate their vagaries. Note — there could be real reasons like personal hardships that are causing them to have to skip your 1/1s, so don’t read too much into this. 

Trying to read the runes is definitely more of a managerial art than a science. It must be noted, that absence of these signals doesn’t always indicate flight risk of an employee. After all, there might be personal reasons for not being able to take one or more of these actions. Presence of these, however, does have a strong correlation with employee engagement.

In all cases though, it is the responsibility of the manager to keep a close pulse on the experiences that an employee is going through to see whether or not it warrants a conversation to keep things more interesting and challenging.

If you liked this article, please ❤️ to give me feedback! If you agree/disagree with anything, please leave comments or questions on the article and we can discuss!

🤓 This Week’s Top 3

• There is a reason why we talk about Steve Jobs to this day with a deep sense of respect. His story telling abilities was right up there with the greats. Watch this clip of him likening the computer to being a bicycle for the mind.

• Nothing puts you off to sleep like legal ToS 😂 

• Balancing consistency with productivity:

  Akash Mukherjee‘s post Is Consistency Hurting Your Sustainability?