11 ways to use data for better team engagement

It’s remarkably easy for employees to feel disconnected from the company they work for. Hard work might be praised by supervisors or team leads, but that work can get lost in the noise of the daily grind. This can hamper engagement and morale, leaving people wondering exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Fortunately, more companies are now using data to determine more effective business strategies. To find out how to best use that information to encourage engagement, I asked members of Young Entrepreneur Council this question:

What’s one way your team uses data as a team engagement tool?

Their best answers are below:

1. Use Baremetrics to help drive best practices and engage the team 

We use Baremetrics to analyze different revenue events and see how expansions are improving our bottom line. The data collected helps point out issues and provides encouragement that we’re on the right track. When we see customers upgrading our software, we can cross-reference this with our marketing and support efforts in order to create best practices that engage our team and drive our company forward. – Jared Brown, Hubstaff Talent

2. Use Slack to share analytics 

We use Slackbots to ping us daily with a relevant increase or decrease in our core KPIs across the portfolio of our companies. This way we constantly stay on track with what’s going on within the startups we work with. The Slack chat aspect of this interaction makes it super easy and allows immediate feedback from everyone, in contrast to daily meetings or email reports. – Artur Kiulian, Colab

3. Hold weekly ‘pulse checks’ 

Recently, we instituted companywide “pulse checks” in the form of anonymous weekly surveys. Each employee ranks 10 questions — ranging from how productive they were to how inspired they feel — on a scale of 1-10 (classic NPS format). We then review as a team. The framework lets us show our staff we value their voices and helps us use real-time data to address challenges they may be facing. – Cooper Harris, Klickly

4. Ask ‘what’s your focus?’ to help collaboration 

In our company, we built a Slack chatbot to ask one single question each day: What’s your focus for tomorrow? Then, at the beginning of the workday, you’re sent everyone else’s focus and can collaborate on what those people are working on. At the end of the day, the bot asks whether you completed that task and the process starts again. It really helps with engagement and unblocking employees. – Liam Martin, Staff.com

5. Assign research topics, then compare notes 

I like to have several people research a topic and compile their own data in areas such as customer demographics, projected earnings or trends in certain markets. It’s interesting to have a meeting where people compare their findings and come up with slightly different results. I then look at these results and put them together in a way that utilizes these different sources. – Shawn Porat, Scorely

6. Facilitate gamification 

We use various types of internal performance data to facilitate gamification in order to set goals for the team as a whole, as well as individual team members. This also introduces transparency and accountability into our operations. – Reza Chowdhury, AlleyWatch

7. Share monthly goal status reports 

We compile data in a monthly goal status report that gets sent to each team member, which has information ranging from push notification engagement rates to site traffic. Not only does this report allow us to see the areas where we need to improve in the coming months, but it also allows us to acknowledge team members that have done a great job in helping us meet our goals. – Brian David Crane, Caller Smart Inc.

8. Measure happiness, voluntary attrition and tenure 

We measure team engagement by looking at the happiness index, voluntary attrition rate and tenure. These KPIs help us get a better understanding on how we are serving our team and the areas that need improvement. – Jared Atchison, WPForms

9. Show employee impact 

As a market services firm, we’re always looking at utilization and profitability by client. Through our open-book management meetings, we set targets and show the team how their individual workloads contribute to our overall utilization scores. The goal is to share data across the organization and help motivate employees to affect change by showing how their hours contribute to profitability. – Dan Golden, BFO (Be Found Online)

10. Improve the decision-making process 

We have different departments — such as sales, marketing and customer service — that are responsible for delivering monthly data that is raw, transparent and based on specific KPIs. When we meet each month, it is a meeting of the minds, where everyone feels engaged and accountable. Decisions are made more confidently when data is fact-driven and used as a tool of engagement and team building – Anthony Davani, The Davani Group Inc.

11. Set goals for growth 

To successfully manage a growth-driven team, you must set specific, number-based goals, not generic hopes and dreams. “We will drive X more users to our website next month” or “We will increase our conversion rate by X percent this quarter,” for example. Our team uses a company scorecard to track data surrounding the specific goals we set and to hold our team accountable to our forecasted growth levers. – Scott Baxter, PlayYourCourse