There are various calculators and emerging tools to measure everything from productivity to even how well your RTO is going. While all of these are useful, the amount of time it takes to calculate, as well as having upper management buy into these insights may prove troublesome to implement right away. However, through a bit of tinkering, we have come up with a simpler metric that’s easy to gauge and possibly pays huge dividends for leaders.

Enter the “Workplace Activity Score” (WAS). Instead of having to branch out across different teams and agencies, the WAS focuses on straightforward metrics derived from HRIS data and Slack public channels, offering an accessible and more clear view of employee engagement and potential red flags. Let’s go through the five steps of how to calculate and implement the WAS.

Step 1: Choose Simple, Impactful Metrics

In the search for the best people analytics metric, it’s much too easy to get lost in the weeds. There’s so many to choose from. Engagement most of the time is a fundamental metric that can give you insight into other areas. For example, an unengaged employee usually has roots of that same dissatisfaction in areas such as happiness, psychological safety, and signs of burnout. 

But where should you look for them? Here are two places we think yield the highest benefit.

• Slack Public Channel Activity:
  • Count the number of messages each employee sends in public Slack channels.
  • Measure the number of unique channels an employee participates in.
• HRIS Data for Leave and Attendance:
  • Track the number of days an employee was on leave (planned or unplanned).
  • Include tenure information (e.g., higher scores for new employees actively participating in Slack).

You may be thinking, well most employees barely take vacation or go on leave. Or many employees nowadays send direct messages over Slack versus posting in public settings.

Though these things are true, slack messages and attendance still hold great sway in understanding activity in the workplace.

Aware HQ points out that the average Slack user spends 10 hours on the app. Clearly, most employees are using this as their main driver of digital communication. In regards to attendance and tenure, while yes paid time off is still underutilized, the amount of time people are present in the office, physically or digitally, plays a huge part in team morale and engagement. 

Step 2: Defining the Workplace Activity Score (WAS) Formula

So now that we’ve laid out what channels and attributes to look at in what makes up the WAS, let’s start getting into the nitty gritty of breaking down the specific elements to create an actual formula. We’ll start by assigning weights to each component based on their perceived impact:

• Slack Activity Score (50% of WAS): Normalize the number of Slack messages sent and unique channels participated in. You can calculate this as:
  • Slack Activity Score = (Messages Sent / Total Messages) + (Unique Channels / Total Channels)

• Attendance Score (30% of WAS): Based on the number of days present at work.
  • Attendance Score = 1 - (Days on Leave / Total Working Days)

• Tenure Adjustment (20% of WAS): New hires get a boost to their score to account for onboarding activity and extra support needs.
  • Tenure Adjustment = (Max Tenure - Employee Tenure) / Max Tenure

As you can see the Slack Activity Score comprises at least half the formula, while Attendance Score and Tenure Adjustment round out the formula. This is less based on importance, but more on relevance.

Activity in Slack naturally holds a bit more weight due to the fact that of the three metrics, it can tell you slightly a bit more in terms of engagement. While this article points to ‘Slack Fatigue,’ an employee response to an influx of messages via Slack, what’s most telling here is feeling overwhelmed over Slack can lead to burnout. The reverse then must also be true: proper evaluation of messaging over Slack can lessen the chances of burnout and unhappiness.

Step 3: Calculating The Workplace Activity Score

Once we have weighted each component properly in place, now we can go ahead and construct a proper formula using a simple weighted sum:

• • WAS = (0.5 * Slack Activity Score) + (0.3 * Attendance Score) + (0.2 * Tenure Adjustment)

Step 4: Normalizing The Score

The ideal way to normalize and present the WAS is to scale it to a range of 0-100. This makes for an easier interpretation without having to analyze more complicated numbers that may lead to unnecessary calculations.

As you might already know, higher scores naturally indicate higher engagement, participation, and consistent attendance.

Step 5: Reporting and Insights

Here are a few actionable steps you can take when it comes to making sense of these scores and how to implement them company-wide:

• Track the WAS over time for each team or department to spot trends in engagement.
• Set benchmarks based on average scores across the company to identify outliers.
• Focus on Actionable Insights: Identify low scores and recommend leaders to check in with those employees or departments.

The Impact of The WAS Lies In Its Ease of Use

As we’ve seen from the demonstrations above, the WAS is a very simple metric and formula to implement right away. The scaling of your results makes it easy and straightforward to understand that you can track these insights regularly.

Because you really only need basic HRIS and Slack data, the main elements in figuring out your own individual WAS are right under your hands.

Instead of having to construct and map out complicated ways of figuring out whether engagement is low or high, you can intervene earlier than expected with the WAS. The formula also adjusts itself for new hires and factors in attendance, making it more holistic than just a simple number on its own.

We believe this approach offers a practical alternative to eNPS that focuses on basic engagement signals that are easier to measure and understand, while still providing the same level of valuable insights to leadership.

If you would like to unlock an even higher level of understanding employee engagement, Worksense AI can help offer the keys to doing so and be off to the races.