Discover how employee survey data can drive business success with the Great Place To Work Effect.
Healthy workplace cultures have eye-popping financial performance.
Companies that make the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® List, a ranking based on employee survey scores, outperform the stock market by 3.5 times over 27 years in cumulative returns.
Researcher Alex Edmans proved that happy employees aren’t the product of a high-performing business. How employees feel about their company is a leading indicator of future success.
This is the Great Place To Work® Effect, the repeatable pattern that any company can use to turn workplace culture into business performance. When employees trust their leaders, have pride and purpose in their work, and a sense of community and belonging with their colleagues, they give more effort, adapt and innovate faster, and produce more revenue.
However, many human resources teams are only measuring costs: talent acquisition, attrition, etc. These metrics are important: Just ask companies like Mosaic Consulting Group, which was able to limit turnover and save $8 million over four years.
However, in the current business landscape, HR needs to expand its vision for impact. The rise of artificial intelligence, global economic uncertainty, and a cooling labor market mean that the recipe for influence in the C-suite requires different metrics: agility, innovation, productivity.
Here are five metrics that your team can use to translate employee survey results into business outcomes.
5 metrics every HR team needs
1. Revenue per employee
If you don’t measure revenue per employee (RPE), you are missing an essential tool to prove the impact of culture.
Every company has revenue and employees. However, the companies with the strongest workplace cultures — companies that make the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For List — have 8.5 times higher revenue per employee than the U.S. market rate.
When you measure RPE, you can explore employee survey results to understand which experiences drive higher results for different teams. You can provide data-informed feedback for leaders and uncover hidden barriers preventing growth.
RPE allows HR leaders to talk about more than the cost of labor and make arguments for increasing investment in the workforce to spur higher levels of productivity and performance.
2. Agility
Amid the rise of AI, HR leaders should be laser-focused on agility in the workplace. If you want employees to adopt new technology, embrace new workflows and revolutionize your industry, you need them to quickly adapt to change.
High-trust cultures have much higher levels of agility, no matter the size of the company. At Great Place To Work Certified™ companies — a rating earned by companies working to improve employee survey scores — 81% of employees say they quickly adapt to change.
Only six in 10 employees say the same at a typical U.S. workplace, per Great Place To Work’s randomized market survey of more than 5,000 workers.
3. Innovation
Workplace culture is a key ingredient for innovation, and HR leaders who embrace their role as innovation facilitators will be embraced as key strategic partners for top leaders in the organization.
Great Place To Work’s Trust Index™ can reveal how many employees in your organization have lots of meaningful opportunities to innovate. When you cross-check those scores against other key experiences, your team can identify hidden barriers to innovation as well as the leadership trends helping to disrupt old habits.
At Certified companies, there is as much as a third of the workforce that is more likely to innovate compared to a typical U.S. company.
4. Productivity
HR teams should be willing to own productivity and efficiency metrics. After all, workplace culture can be a key driver of these outcomes and employee survey results can help HR pros offer essential guidance to their leadership.
At Certified companies, nearly nine in 10 employees (85%) give extra effort at work compared to just six in 10 (60%) at a typical U.S. company. Again, employee survey data can provide key insight into how employees interact with and support their work and the work of their colleagues.
5. Market resilience
For leaders who are increasingly worried about volatile economic conditions, creating a great workplace culture can be a hedge against recession.
Great Place To Work research shows that high-trust companies rebound faster after shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic or even thrive, as 69 high-trust companies did during the 2008 Great Recession.
Employee survey scores that measure trust can offer powerful predictive metrics to understand how resilient your company might be in the face of a global market meltdown. For companies facing disruption from tariffs, AI, global war, and more, having an insurance policy against a market downturn is an invaluable tool in the toolbox.
Want to learn more about the Great Place To Work Effect and how our model helps companies like Hilton, Delta Air Lines, Accenture, and more build stronger businesses?
Turn culture insights into business wins
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