Find the friction hiding in your employee engagement scores

Engagement scores are useful tools for communicators to determine whether employees are feeling satisfied or frustrated about their workplace experience. But those scores can’t always pinpoint where frustration starts when it’s present.

During the preconference workshops at Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in Nashville earlier this month, Adam Perrow, senior director of employee experience at Ally Financial, said that one of the major issues comms pros face is an issue in identifying friction.

“Most organizations, I think, don’t have an engagement problem, but instead they have a friction problem,” Perrow said. “Sometimes we spend too much time thinking just about the high-level number, the employee engagement score, and we’re not digging into the opportunities where friction might exist.”

Perrow added that figuring out where friction lies needs to be the first step for comms pros, rather than rushing to find a solution.

“There might be too many places where that information lives, and the content or knowledge management of your organization might not be well thought out,” he said. “If we don’t name it, we’re not able to solve for it.”

Perrow also shared that Ally has developed employee personas based on the employee data and behaviors it’s analyzed.