The diamond in the data – driving employee engagement to unprecedented highs

Communicators, data and analytics have not always been a happy mix. Measuring the power of communications, for some, is a blind spot. RELX has changed that narrative by pioneering a new approach to employee engagement. By using data to find out what needed fixing, then data to help us identify how best to solve these issues and with whom, and using follow-up data to prove it was working, we have been central to the group’s efforts to drive already stellar employee engagement scores to unprecedented new highs for our 36,000 colleagues across the globe. After five years of continued improvement in employee engagement, employee net promoter scores and advocacy, how were we to maintain these extraordinarily high engagement scores in the run up to the October 2024 employee engagement survey? And dare we even think about how we might nudge them yet higher?

So, we agreed that we would go all-in with our efforts to drive these metrics using data as our guide at every turn with an innovative approach. Of the ten specific areas we targeted in the employee opinion survey nine improved, some way beyond what we had ever anticipated, and one remained at an all-time high score. The behaviours we wanted to change, changed faster than we could have imagined. This has been a multi-year, data-driven, strategic campaign that came to a crescendo in late 2024 and which has transformed employee engagement and advocacy at RELX forever. And, ultimately all from a single data-point.