5 Overlooked Employee Engagement Metrics and How to Track Them

Tracking attendance and survey scores? That’s a start, but it won’t show you what truly drives connection.

The stakes for engagement are higher than ever. As global teams navigate shifting priorities and changing expectations, traditional metrics don’t tell the whole story. They’re necessary, but not enough to guide meaningful decisions about culture and growth

To lead effectively, you need a deeper view. These five overlooked metrics reveal how employees actually experience connection, purpose, and impact at work. And with the right systems in place, they’re easier to track than you might think.

1. Mentor-Mentee Match Quality

Many large companies invest in mentoring to support growth, retention, and connection. It’s a key engagement lever, but one that often breaks down early. The real challenge is knowing how to build the right relationships from the start.

When matching isn’t guided by data,  important details get missed. Goals, development areas, experience level, preferences, and even compliance considerations are often left out. As a result, some matches stall after the first meeting. Others never really take off. And even strong programs lose credibility when participants don’t feel seen or supported.

What to track

• How often mentor-mentee pairs meet.

• How long the mentorship relationship lasted.

• Whether key milestones were defined and reached.

• Feedback from both participants on alignment and overall experience.

  
  

How to track it

Mentoring software makes it easier to match the right people and understand what happens after the match. Teleskope helps enterprise teams pair mentors and mentees based on goals, preferences, and profile data so that relationships start strong and stay meaningful.

2. Program-Driven Leadership

When engagement is high, leadership tends to show up in more places. Employees take initiative, lead mentoring circles, organize ERG events, and step into visible roles across the organization. These are powerful signals of connection and ownership.However, they often go unmeasured.

Most organizations track promotions or performance ratings. But only a few look at how many employees are building leadership experience through internal programs. That gap makes it harder to understand whether engagement initiatives are actually creating growth opportunities.

How to track it

Leadership activity can be tracked by assigning roles to internal events, capturing participation in mentoring facilitation, and logging contributions to program design. These patterns offer a clearer picture of who is stepping forward and where leadership potential is growing.

3. Retention from Engagement Programs

Retention is one of the most telling indicators of engagement. And while most organizations track it at a company-wide level, few connect it  to participation in internal engagement programs. That’s a missed opportunity.

When you measure retention based on who is actively involved in internal initiatives, you start to see what’s  making a real difference. You also get an early signal of where energy is fading, even before employees leave.

What to track

• Retention rate of employees involved in internal engagement programs.

• Retention rate of non-participants, for comparison.

  
  

How to track it

Your HRIS or people analytics platform can provide overall retention data. If you use employee engagement software, like Teleskope, you can also connect participation data directly to your HRIS. This gives you a clear view of how programs are influencing retention and where efforts are having the most impact.

4. Engagement Across Teams and Locations

Employee engagement often varies across regions, departments, or teams. A program that’s thriving in one region may be barely visible in another. This imbalance is common in large, distributed organizations, especially when programs are designed or managed centrally.

Without data across locations, it’s hard to know whether your ERGs, events, and mentoring programs are reaching employees in a consistent and equitable way. One office might have active internal engagement programs and frequent touchpoints. Another might have low attendance, no local leadership, and limited visibility into what’s available. The same pattern can emerge across functions. Some departments lean in, while others quietly disengage.

What to track

• Participation in internal programs by location and department.

• Attendance trends across offices, business units, or time zones.

• Communication reach and engagement segmented by geography and team.

  
  

How to track it

Most employee engagement platforms allow you to segment participation and communication data. When connected to your HRIS, you can track program health across both departments and locations. This helps leaders identify uneven access, prioritize outreach, and scale engagement efforts where they are needed most.

5. Exit Sentiment Insights

When employees leave, they often share more candid insights than they ever did while on the job. Exit interviews are a valuable window into the employee experience.But too often, that feedback is stored, ignored, or reviewed too late to inform future strategy.

Engagement issues rarely come out of nowhere. When you consistently review sentiment in exit feedback, you can identify the reasons that push people to leave and spot missed opportunities inside your programs. This is especially important when exit data mentions culture-related experiences that may have fallen short.

What to track

• Common themes in open-ended exit feedback.

• Specific mentions of engagement programs, participation barriers, or missed expectations.

• Sentiment trends across departments, roles, or regions.

  
  

How to track it

Exit interviews and surveys should make space for honest, open-ended feedback. Reviewing this data regularly, ideally using simple sentiment or theme analysis, can help identify patterns and pressure points. When paired with data from engagement programs, exit sentiment gives you a clearer picture of what employees needed but did not receive.

How Teleskope Helps You Measure What Matters

Teleskope helps organizations measure engagement where it actually happens. Inside mentoring relationships. Across ERG leadership. Throughout internal events, communications, and feedback channels. Every signal is captured in one place so you can track both participation and progress.

More than a reporting tool, Teleskope is a complete platform for managing employee engagement programs at scale. 

When connected to your HRIS, Teleskope gives you a continuous view of how employees are engaging, which programs are gaining traction, and where support may be missing. You can track outcomes like retention, leadership development, and program health with the clarity and confidence enterprise teams need.

If you are ready to move beyond surface metrics, Teleskope gives you the structure to measure what matters and the insight to act on it. Book a demo to see how it works in practice.