Engagement Impact Drivers

Intention:

To create a strong team, you'll want to ensure you're keeping employees as engaged as possible. A more engaged employee is less likely to turn over, more likely to contribute, and is a strong team member.

But, it can be challenging to determine how to target your people-operations to increase engagement.

Impact Drivers provide insight into exactly how to do this by determining which areas (Impact Drivers) you should target that are more likely to improve engagement.

For example, does having a good relationship with your manager increase overall engagement? Or is a sense of ownership even more important? Does a sense of trust have no impact on engagement at all?

Leapsome's Impact Driver analysis, tailored to your company, can answer all of these questions.

(If you want to optimize for something other than engagement, read about customizable impact drivers here)

The Basics: What are Impact Drivers?

When creating a survey using Leapsome's built-in Best Practice questions, each question belongs to a category. Some of these questions measure how engaged your employees are, leading to an overall engagement score for each person. Other questions measure other areas (e.g., trust between manager and direct reports, feelings of inclusion, and more).

The idea behind Impact Drivers is that improving certain areas over others – ex. improving relationships between managers and direct reports – can improve engagement more than other areas. Those areas that contribute most to employee engagement are called the 'Impact Drivers.' In other words, they are the areas for improvement that have the highest impact on employee engagement.

These 'drivers' are other survey questions (in areas not pertaining to engagement) whose scores have a high correlation with overall engagement.

For example, suppose employees with a high engagement score also always respond that they have a strong and trusting relationship with their manager. In this case, there will be a high correlation between manager support and employee engagement.

Or, if employees with a low engagement score always say they feel their feedback is not taken into account, this indicates that increasing responsiveness to feedback may help with engagement.

A high correlation means, if you impact one, there is a strong chance you can impact the other. So, given the example above, targeting "responsiveness to feedback" may improve engagement, as the two are interconnected.

These Impact Drivers are specific to your company; based on the responses you collect with surveys. Of course, the clarity and strength of the drivers will depend on collecting sufficient responses to create more confident data. You can find more information on creating effective surveys here to both gather enough data and ensure maximum quality and quantity of responses.

To learn more about the value of introducing Impact Drivers, we recommend reading this blog article.

Where can I find Impact Drivers in Leapsome and how do I interpret them?

If you are the owner of the survey or an admin, you can find the Impact Driver score underneath a question or topic in the survey insights list. It will show a rating of: 'Very Weak,' 'Weak,' 'Mild,' 'Strong,' or 'Very Strong.'

The Impact Driver score is calculated with a correlation between each question and the target questions using either Kendall's tau or the Pearson's correlation for larger sets. The correlation coefficient is then translated into the following bands:

• > 0.8 = Very Strong
• > 0.6 = Strong
• > 0.4 = Mild
• > 0.2 = Weak
• < 0.2 = Very Weak

In the image below, we notice "My manager promotes an open [...]" is a 'Strong' Impact Driver, meaning focusing on helping managers foster more open team cultures (i.e., improving that 7.79 score) is more likely to lead to better employee engagement than the other questions with a 'mild' or 'weak' score).

For example, you may take this information and use it to create a manager training or a Learning path in Leapsome. Whatever the strategy, the aim is to increase openness in teams so as to improve your employee engagement.

Questions that have a 'Weak' Impact Driver score can be taken to mean that working to improve that area will have little impact on employee engagement. This does not imply they are not worth improving, but rather that if you are intending to improve engagement, they are less likely to have an impact.

Lastly, if the impact score is N/A, it means not enough data has yet been collected to be confident in the correlation's strength. This is also a general rule of thumb: the more data you have (i.e., the more instances of this survey you have run and the more responses) the stronger the confidence in a given score. Furthermore, questions in the 'engagement' category will be marked as N/A. This is because they would be self-correlated. In other words, seeing the impact score of an engagement question would basically tell you that engagement is necessary for engagement, which isn't very insightful.

Some examples:

Example 1:

You see that the survey question about "fostering a diverse and inclusive environment" is a 'Strong' Impact Driver for employee engagement.

You also notice that the average score for this question is relatively low (i.e., employees give a low rating for this survey question). This tells you that you should train your talent acquisition team and managers on what diversity and inclusion is and why it is important. Maybe you begin a workshop or provide tips for managers to know how to become aware of unconscious bias. 

Over time, with the survey analytics, you can then determine if the response to this question and engagement are improving. 

Example 2:

You notice "My manager provides me with the support [...]" is a 'Strong' Impact Driver. You also notice members of your engineering team score relatively low for this question, whereas other teams rate higher. You then know to target this group – maybe have an open discussion about where exactly the team would like to see more support. 

Or, you notice through Leapsome's performance quantile sectioning that your high-performance employees are also scoring low on this question. This means there is room for improvement in engaging – and consequently retaining – those top performers.