Employee engagement can fluctuate in any company, often due to changes in company culture. But even when it dips, there are ways to re-engage your team and keep the momentum going for the long haul.
In this article we’ll look at 16 employee engagement strategies you can use as quick fixes and long term tactics to boost employee engagement.
What is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is a measure of how much an employee loves their job and their company. Employee engagement is not static and will change over time throughout an employee’s journey with the company.
Engagement levels are high in an organisation when people are happy to come to work in the morning and feel confident in the importance and contribution of their role to the company.
When employees have a clear vision of their tasks and find meaning in their jobs, they are more productive and hungry to learn more. They know where they fit in the company and how their role contributes to overall success and feel their input is valued. If they have a problem, they know their employer will listen.
4 Levels of Employee Engagement
Measuring employee engagement can be tricky but is necessary for developing an employee engagement strategy. There are 4 main categories that employees fall into
- Highly engaged
These are high performers who have positive opinions about the workplace. They come into work every day and are often the employees you would consider as higher level or your top talent.
Highly engaged employees promote customer satisfaction and company culture. Highly engaged employees can positively influence others and bring up your entire employee engagement level.
An engaged employee makes a great team leader and brand advocate. They are already likely the first to take action and get started on tough projects. Make sure to give this employee recognition and consider using them as a benchmark when measuring employee engagement.
- Moderately engaged
Engaged employees account for 15% of the workforce. Moderately engaged employees should be your target when trying to improve employee engagement levels. These employees usually have a concern or issue that prevents them from engaging fully.
Consider running an engagement survey to get these employees’ feedback. Make sure to also give employee recognition of good work to encourage them to increase their performance.
- Barely engaged
Disengaged employees account for 67% of the workforce. Barely engaged employees do the bare minimum or less to keep their job. These employees are at high risk of employee turnover and may even be actively looking for other job opportunities.
Maybe these employees aren’t a good fit for your company culture, especially if they are actively disengaged. Consider getting feedback from these employees to learn more about everyday employee experience.
- Disengaged
Actively disengaged employees account for 18% of the workforce. These employees don’t enjoy working for your company. A disengaged employee may feel disconnected from company culture and dislike their work environment.
It’s important for employers to know how to identify disengaged employees and how to take action to prevent a disengaged employee from affecting their business’s entire employee engagement level.
16 Ways to Boost Employee Engagement
If you’ve noticed a change in your team’s engagement or just getting to know how to improve employee engagement, there are steps you can take to make a positive impact in your office.
Improving employee engagement requires buy-in from your entire leadership team, and a successful employee engagement program requires thoughtful planning. We’ve put together a list of strategies to boost employee engagement in your workplace.
1. Bring Your Company’s Values and Mission to Life
Employees are more engaged when there are company goals they can get behind and a purpose to inspire them. Start by creating a mission statement and a concise list of company values, then train each employee on these values.
Doing so will ensure employees understand the importance of the company’s values, how they impact the business and what’s expected of each individual.
Lead by example and hold every member of your team accountable. Failing to do so will create a culture of mistrust that will disengage employees.
2. Collect Anonymous Feedback
Employees rate giving feedback as one of the most important skills a manager can have, right behind communication. Employees crave feedback, and it affects their level of engagement.
Start by scheduling check-ins for each employee with their manager, then encourage middle management to run regular review sessions with their team as an ongoing initiative to improve employee engagement.
While it may be tempting to implement a company-wide schedule for feedback, remember every team is different, and frequent touchpoints may feel unnatural to some. Managers should talk to their direct reports about their preferred method of receiving feedback so they can engage employees in a way that’s meaningful to them.
3. Engage Management
Manager engagement has a ripple effect on the rest of the team. Let’s look at some stats: By the end of 2023, only 33% of employees will be engaged at work.
Employees who feel supported by their manager are 3.4 times more likely to feel engaged at work. While your employee engagement strategy should account for the individual needs of every employee, focusing on middle management is a great way to improve employee engagement across the board.
4. Coordinate Volunteer Opportunities
Employees want to know they work for a company that cares about making a positive impact on society. Volunteering unites employees towards a bigger purpose and offers an opportunity to connect on a deeper level. Indeed, 79% of employees who volunteer through work-sponsored programs are more satisfied with their jobs and are more likely to feel they have opportunities to grow professionally.
Find a volunteer opportunity near your office and plan an event after work. This is an easy way to create team building activities and give back to your community. Also offer a “Volunteer Day” as an employee benefit. This should be a day outside of your PTO policy that employees can take off to donate their time to a cause they are passionate about.
5. Support Physical and Mental Health
It’s easy for individuals to engage with their work when the organisation makes an effort to enhance their overall well-being. A company-wide wellness initiative is a great way to improve employee engagement.
Sponsor workout classes as company outings and consider offering fitness subsidies to encourage healthy lifestyles beyond the office.
Offer meditation classes and encourage employees to take mental health days when they need to step away from the office and focus on themselves. Also, stock the kitchen with healthy snacks that will fuel employees during the busy work day.
6. Recognise Top Performers and Reward Achievements
Typically you can spot the most engaged employees because they are the ones with intrinsic motivation and going the extra mile in their job. You will want to acknowledge their efforts and let them know you appreciate their hard work.
Since feedback is top priority among employees, encourage managers to make positive recognition part of their day-to-day. Use your communication channel to share acknowledgments, positive feedback and work anniversaries to the whole company. Also engage your HR department to implement an incentive program.
7. Run Employee Engagement Surveys
Regular employee surveys will not only help you understand what’s working in your organisation but also make your employees feel valued. Giving each individual the opportunity to have their say encourages open and honest communication. Employee feedback is key to successfully engaging your workforce.
Look to other companies for inspiration, but at the end of the day, your team is unique and will respond to certain employee engagement strategies. Quick pulse employee engagement survey questions give you the data to do just that.
8. Organise Company Events
Chemistry and trust between employees help to improve employee engagement overall. To build these bonds, set up opportunities for them to connect outside of work and form personal relationships. This can be as simple as a virtual game night or a lunch outing. Make sure to mix up your events to promote inclusivity.
9. Create Employee Resource Groups and an ERG Program
Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are a powerful tool to help employees feel seen in the workplace and are a great way to highlight cultural differences and diversity throughout the organisation.
ERGs typically represent marginalised or underrepresented groups, are employee-led and are voluntary to join. These groups can have a big impact across your whole organisation and allow employees to take the lead in creating a sense of community, amplifying voices and driving the change they want to see in order to create a more equitable workplace.
Organisations will also feel the impact of their employees creating ERGs, which may lead to increased employee engagement and productivity.
10. Encourage innovation Through Passion Projects
Employees who feel they can contribute to company goals and mission and use their own skills and expertise to do so, will not only feel more engaged at work, they will feel more passionate about their job as well.
And with Pew Research reporting only about half of Americans are satisfied with their jobs, helping bring passion into the workplace is an area of improvement when it comes to employee motivation.
Bonusly tackles lack of passion by allowing employees to innovate in the workplace, reserving a week out of every quarter to let teams work on something outside of their day-to-day projects. This allows teams across the organisation to work together and support each other — even leading to new products and streamlined processes being developed.
11. Improve Your Onboarding Process
You’ll disengage an employee faster than in their first few weeks on the job. By onboarding new employees effectively you’re telling them they have a place in your company and its culture. Take the time to explain the team, company goals and values and their role’s purpose. This sets them up for success in the role and conveys their value to the organisation’s mission.
12. Provide Professional Development Opportunities and Career Paths
One of the top reasons employees leave their jobs is due to a lack of career development and advancement. Outlining a path for growth will help with engagement and retention.
Not only that, but contributing — financially or otherwise — to your employees’ individual growth shows you value them, not just their work. Knowing their talents are appreciated by the company is a motivator for employees. Moreover, regardless of which industry you’re in, the market will evolve, and professional development is key to staying relevant.
13. Encourage and Fund Training
Career growth has become a priority for many workers, with 74% of employees wanting to develop new skills or retrain completely to stay on top of their careers. Incorporating opportunities for employees to upskill, learn from their peers and go through structured training programs will not only make them more productive and engaged at work, it might even stop them from looking elsewhere.
Building structure around an employee training program can be as simple as providing all employees with a stipend to use towards job-related training courses or scheduling meeting times for senior team members to teach junior employees new skills that will help them on their career paths.
Sometimes, bringing in outside consultants to host workshops or present new insights can be the best way to train entire teams.
Regardless of how an organisation structures its training programs they can be sure that the more engaged they are in providing direct opportunities for employees to develop new skills the more likely it will be that their employees will stay engaged in their daily work.
14. Review Processes and Fix Inefficiencies
Unnecessary tasks slow down processes and cost your business revenue. More than that, though, it’s frustrating for employees. Extra steps prompt employees to switch to cruise control, which means they’re not engaging with their work.
For example, if a writer has to log every minor change made to a piece of sales collateral themselves, they’ll spend twice as long on the project and be half as invested. Automating the process — in this case, a simple switch to Google Docs to use the Track Changes functionality — allows the writer to focus on writing.
While some tasks can’t be eliminated, you should operate with the mindset of optimising processes and implementing resources that enable employees to be successful in their roles.
The impact goes beyond the employee experience in an office setting as well — contractors need to provide their employees with tools to do the job safely and on time, and service employees need to have the right tools to deliver the level of service expected of them and their employer.
From hardware to software to a simple desk chair, corporate employees need to be provided with top-tier tools to meet the needs of their employer, and those tools need to be reviewed regularly.
15. Give Employees Flexibility
Flexible working and remote work are almost a guarantee of increased employee engagement. This kind of flexibility caters to the elusive work-life balance employees crave.
Ninety-three per cent of talent consider work-life balance as important, or more important, than career ambition. Give employees the opportunity to be remote workers and the ability to adjust their hours to fit in after-school pick-up schedules, a fitness class they enjoy or passion projects to show you value your team members as individuals.
That kind of respect and consideration will improve employee engagement.
16. Train Managers in Employee Engagement Best Practices
Seventy per cent of the variance in team engagement is determined by the manage,r according to Gallup. In addition to making sure management is engaged give your senior and middle managers the tools to connect with and empower their direct reports.
Offer training programs and leadership development seminars to equip managers for their roles. In addition to their individual responsibilities a manager should act as a coach for their reports, offering encouragement, constructive feedback and career paths.
Proper training ensures managers know how to engage their team but it doesn’t replace the vital step of talking to employees. Having a conversation about how they like to receive feedback and be recognised will help managers improve the employee experience.
Benefits of Employee Engagement
According to Gallup, simply measuring job satisfaction isn’t enough. Approaching employee engagement as a business strategy gets more organic results. Highly engaged organisations share common practices and experience the following benefits:
- Increased employee productivity: One of the key characteristics of the engaged employee is their positive behaviour towards the organisation, as they are often the ones who believe strongly in the company’s mission and vision. This attitude makes people work harder and proactively to achieve their goals which leads to a 17% increase in productivity.
- Lower employee turnover: Depending on the overall turnover rate of an organisation, business units with high employee engagement can see up to 59% increased employee retention. This is why improving employee engagement should be one of the top priorities for leaders and HR teams.
- Higher customer satisfaction: When employees are engaged, this shows in their attitude and how they deal with customers. Creating a positive customer experience, making the customer feel valued, and a smile goes a long way in building a strong customer relationship. This equation also works between the company and its employees.
- Lower absenteeism: Improving employee engagement alone can bring up to a 41% reduction in absenteeism.
- Better employee health: Companies with high-stress levels spend almost 50% more on employee health care than their chill counterparts. Work stress costs the US economy over $550 million, according to the American Psychological Association. It’s also linked to 60-80% of workplace accidents and 80% of doctor visits. Team employee engagement can help with this, as workplace stress is connected to serious health conditions like metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease.
- Fewer workplace injuries: Working in a stable and predictable workplace, engaged employees are more proactive, which means 70% fewer safety incidents. So, employers should make sure that health and safety regulations are followed and up to date. This applies to factory workers as much as office workers.
- More trust in leadership: Leaders who want to get their employees to do more must connect with them first. They need to make time to engage with team members and get to know employees. In return, employees will listen to company leaders more since they know leaders care about what’s important to them. Company morale goes up, workers are excited about their jobs and employee engagement increases.
- Stronger employer brand: Engaged employees not only attract customers but also are a powerful recruitment tool that opens in a new tab. Happy employees share positive messages about their company within their networks, influencing job seekers with high engagement levels to form a positive employer brand.
Employee Engagement Examples
Below, we go over some real-life examples of employee engagement. Hopefully, this will inspire you to take a page out of the experts’ books and implement some employee engagement initiatives of your own.
- Tesla – Tesla has a great example of employee engagement that improvedthe overall safety and wellbeing of the organisation. Before 2019, Tesla had a lot of injuries at its Fremont car assembly plant. CEO Elon Musk went down to the production lines where the injuries were happening and got to work alongside the production workers. Huge safety improvements were made. As a result, injuries were down by over 50% in one year.
- Google – Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google allows and encourages their employees to try out their ideas through their 20% creative, 80% work time program.So for 20% of the employees’ time, they were allowed to work on their innovative ideas. One of the most successful innovations to come out of this program was Google AdSense. This made up 20% of Google’s total revenue in 2014.
Measuring Success Through Employee Engagement Metrics
Measuring employee engagement can be a tricky task. But by using the right metrics and employee engagement software, companies can gauge the sentiment of their workforce and pinpoint areas that need improvement. Employee engagement metrics are quantifiable indicators that translate employee satisfaction into numbers, providing a benchmark for making changes in the workplace.
Employee engagement metrics like workload balance, benchmarks and goals, personal productivity insights, and employee absenteeism rate allow HR professionals to measure the organisation’s engagement levels. By looking at various characteristics and data points, the company can see the current state of employee engagement, identify areas to intervene and improve across the organisation.
FAQs
What is an employee engagement model?
Employee engagement models go beyond just pay or the usual perks (although that doesn’t make those any less important). They set the tone for company culture and inform practices for leadership and management on everything from time off to 1:1 meetings, training, celebrating success, and communication.
What are the drivers of employee engagement?
Key drivers of engagement are leadership quality, communication, recognition, opportunities for growth, and a generally positive work culture.
Who drives employee engagement?
Employee engagement starts at the top of an organisation. Highly engaged workplaces have executive leaders who buy into, communicate and model engagement, creating the conditions for managers and employees to adopt an engagement mindset. Once executives are on board, managers are key to engagement.
