How to improve employee engagement
What is employee engagement?
Employee engagement refers to an employee’s level of enthusiasm and commitment to their work.
As a metric, employee engagement monitors an employee’s morale, the outward signs of how much that employee participates in an organisation, and what proportion of their personal resources (mental, physical, social) they contribute. High engagement results in better professional performance – and vice versa.
At the foundation of employee engagement lies another quality that’s arguably more fundamental: employee belonging. This is the connection and community and camaraderie that employees have with their colleagues. It’s a matter of whether an employee sees themselves as part of your organisation, or whether they see themselves as a person who just happens to be working with you for now.
Employee engagement is a by-product of belonging but employee belonging has no feasible substitute. In a word: it’s essential.
Engaged workers who feel a sense of belonging are going to feel an extra sense of composure and contentment in their workplace. It’s that little bit of salt in the salad mix, the spice in their latte. It’s the moment they walk through the door on day one, a la Annie, and say, “I think I’m gonna like it here.”
But we’re not going to spend too much time litigating the term engagement or questioning why employee engagement is more widely talked about than employee belonging. For now, let’s get into the impact of it all.
Why is employee engagement important?
One way or another, having engaged employees is still absolutely vital, and it’s still a metric by which employers can benchmark and measure success.
1. Employee engagement leads to better performance
92% of business executives believe engaged employees outperform their peers, boost the success of their teams, and benefit their organisations. Engaged employees are reportedly 17% more productive than their peers and are more likely to come up with creative solutions to the problems they face at work.
2. Employee engagement leads to better employee wellbeing
When workers actually feel they fit in, you’ll find that they have a reduction in stress, anxiety, and depression. They’ll have a sense of accomplishment in the work they complete and feel valued when they do.
3. Employee engagement leads to a better employer brand
When your employees are engaged and feel they belong, they’ll stick around, because (get this): they’ll want to. These employees who are willing to advocate for your company to potential recruits, or who can sell your company well because they believe in it will give you an employer brand edge that other companies might not have.
4. Engaged employees make for more effective teams
Employees who value their colleagues don’t just use them to chat about the weather at the water fountain. They can use each other as sounding boards and bounce ideas off each other. When it comes to group projects, they’ll have a spark for teamwork that translates into results.
5. Employee engagement has major implications for a company’s finances
Research from BetterUp, published in the Harvard Business Review shows that high belonging is related to a 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days. In bottom line impact alone, that amounts to a $52M saving in a 10,000-person company.
Why are employee engagement programmes ineffective?
- More than half of employees who left their job in a six month window lacked a sense of belonging (51%) – McKinsey’s Great Attrition survey
- Only 49% of organisations believe their workers are satisfied or very satisfied with their job design – Deliotte
- Only three in every 10 employees in the US agree that their opinions count – GallUp
Tackling employee engagement is vital. But too many employers ask what they need to do to improve employee engagement and they don’t ask the underlying questions. But focusing on engagement without looking at what lies beneath is like hiring a cleaner to solve your rodent problem. Yeah – they may be able to fix some of the symptoms here but you might want to start with catching the mouse.
The mouse, in this instance, is a lack of employee belonging. Remove the lack of belonging, the infestation will stop, and engagement goes up. But engagement and belonging are not the same thing. Engagement is essentially an en-masse version of self-actualisation, whereas belonging is a more foundational – as outlined in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Businesses can’t help employees reach self-actualisation without building on a foundation of belonging.
Employee belonging is created when three primary attributes are at play:
- A place of comfort
- A sense of connection
- A meaningful contribution
These three elements have a huge impact on an organisation’s employee experience and, according to MIT research, companies with the best employee experience achieve twice the innovation, double customer satisfaction and 25% higher profits. Despite this, Deloitte found that only 9% of organisations believed they were very ready to deal with this issue.
Measuring employee engagement alone is no longer adequate. It’s just too symptomatic. Even if employees are engaged on a surface level, it doesn’t guarantee that employees won’t be at risk of burnout, or want to leave the organisation, or feel like they don’t belong.
Annual engagement surveys are good but, without addressing belonging, you’re just measuring employee enthusiasm – and that might die off when the going gets tough.
Employees get tired eventually and at that point personal drive is no longer enough. When employees feel a sense of belonging in an organisation though, they’re more likely to stick with you whatever the economic climate, and they’ll find it easier to recover when their personal capacity gets low.
The only way to stay competitive in business in today’s working world is to accept a shifting landscape. If you’re going to stay robust in that context, you need to measure more than basic employee engagement, more often, and comprehensively.
Wider strategies for employee engagement
Both belonging and employee engagement are affected by many factors, such as whether your employees feel valued, respected and trusted. It’s also affected by whether your organisation’s values, purposes and practices align with those of your people.
Employee engagement isn’t about throwing a bunch of programmes at your employees and hoping they stick. It’s about having an overall strategy that builds and preserves a sense of belonging in your organisation. Approaches can vary but here are some key ways to ensure you don’t miss:
1. Prioritise social connection between employees
Employees who connect as individuals are more likely to feel a shared sense of purpose within a workplace. It’s harder to feel engaged when you feel alone, and it’s easier to feel alone if a workplace does little to encourage social connections, or prioritises heads-down efficiency over the collaborative innovation that springs easily from a highly-connected team.
2. Create opportunities for shared experiences between employees
This follows naturally from the above but it’s worth its own point. Employees are working out of the office more than ever, so encouraging connections won’t be easy.
But you can’t boost employee engagement by “suggesting” employees form connections. Make opportunities for them to do so. Provide the space for them to share their interests, and open up room for collaboration and cross-departmental learning.
3. Build employee engagement on a foundation of diversity and inclusion
Nobody wants to feel like the token minority in a team. And having inclusivity initiatives won’t do much if those employees don’t feel particularly included.
Training programmes to recognise and address bias and discrimination are good. So is the promotion of diversity in hiring and recruitment. As is providing opportunities for advancement and career development.
4. Ensure every employee’s work feels meaningful in its own right
We’ve spoken before about how younger generations want to feel that they’re contributing to the bigger picture. Employees are no longer willing to clock in, clock out, and wait for the weekend. If the company vision doesn’t align with their own, they’re less likely to care. Employees will become despondent, and then they’ll quit.
5. Involve everyone in employee engagement strategies
Employee engagement is sometimes seen as an activity to address the employees on the front lines but your strategy needs to extend beyond that. The voices at the front provide information about what is and isn’t working but the changes need to reach beyond. Managers and company figureheads need to be ready to take their feedback and lead by example.
Steps to increase employee engagement
Now that you have the wider picture, it’s time to fill in the details. Broad strategies for employee engagement are a great start. Let’s increase engagement with careful brushstrokes too.
1. Celebrate your employees, and their differences
Let’s revisit diversity and inclusion in the office. Every employee needs full clarity on the policies and guidelines that communicate the importance of both. There’s a very good reason for this.
But workplace inclusivity isn’t just transparent hiring practices or a list of problematic behaviours to avoid. Give space for employees to share aspects of their identity that are important to them. Or provide a platform for individuals from under-represented backgrounds. When done with care, delicacy, and input, this can have a huge impact.
Doing this shows employees that they are valued and respected for who they are. It reminds them that they belong there – that you’re not just tolerating diversity; you’re celebrating it.
2. Encourage employees to take ownership of their work
Giving employees clear and achievable objectives always sounds reasonable to the ears of business decision-makers. The step beyond that is to give employees autonomy and flexibility in how they complete their work
Allowing employees to take initiative contributes to an organisation’s success. If you give them the freedom to navigate a project, they’ll start to invest more of themselves in it, and you’ll see the results.
3. Recognise and celebrate employees
Nobody wants to be the unsung hero. If an employee spends a significant amount of time on a project – either through their initiative or under direction – then it’s nonsensical not to give credit where credit is due.
This can be done through avenues of formal recognition, such as employee reward platforms or the specific mention of project successes in company newsletters and reports. If a deadline lands on an employee’s desk with a one-day turnaround, and the next day they turn up, bleary-eyed and caffeine-fuelled, give them recognition. And a gift card to Starbucks.
4. Measure employee engagement
Measuring employee engagement is important to ensure employees are actively engaged in their work, rather than just putting in their time. You can use surveys, interviews, or even analyse workplace metrics. The choice is yours.
Remember why you’re doing this though: employee engagement is a symptom of a healthy workplace but its presence doesn’t guarantee it. Don’t lose the woods for the trees.
There are lots of potential areas to consider when gauging employee engagement. Here are a few:
- Work-life balance
- Management satisfaction
- The sharing of innovation and ideas
- Self-organisation within teams
- Career development
- Intent to stay
- Company pride
How to measure employee engagement
1. Interviews
Interviews are a good way to gain data from employees. These can feel a bit high-pressure because they lack anonymity, so make sure employees feel comfortable. If the one-on-one setting seems intense (and it can be), try focus groups.
2. Company metrics
Metrics are a fast way to look at hard data. There’s no need to decipher an opinion here. You’re already looking at numbers. Turnover rates, referral rates, and absenteeism are all measured in digits. Combine these with other approaches to see the big picture.
3. Surveys
There are three main types of surveys: a census survey (use these for a comprehensive deep dive), a pulse survey (use these to gather real-time feedback), or a life-cycle survey (use these at different points of an employee’s tenure – e.g. onboarding, after a promotion, or upon exiting).
Surveys are like beef jerky. Hard to get right and tough to get your teeth into. Surveys are also really good at getting thorough, detailed knowledge of the vitality of your company (which jerky never does), so we’ve included thorough details on the whole process here.
How to make an employee engagement survey
Regardless of the type of survey you’re making, there are several measures to take into consideration.
If you’re looking to prove the real impact of your engagement initiatives and get everyone on board, keep the survey simple and brief. Avoid designing by committee and determine who needs to give input. You won’t need to ask marketing for opinions on the legal team. You won’t need finance to set the questions.
Set clear deadlines from the outset and allow enough time for employees to respond. Two to three weeks is ample here. Oh, and guarantee anonymity. It keeps people honest.
What should you ask in an employee engagement survey?
Once you know who is setting the questions, and who’s answering them, a smart move is to identify “must have” questions and differentiate them from “nice to have”. 30-50 questions is ideal; added fluff will only bog employees down.
You’ll want to use clear language and avoid jargon. Open-ended questions are great for getting employees to express themselves freely but so is a 5-point Likert scale to turn some of those opinions into easily accessible data.
How often should you do an employee engagement survey?
Remember that this isn’t a one-off project. Surveys aren’t a quick solution to convince your people that you listen to them. Employers can use surveys to check the life signs of a company but if the life signs are more of a giant wail than a healthy heartbeat, the response can’t be a series of half measures.
A survey that measures employee engagement is a means to judge employees’ sense of belonging at work. Focusing on the overall employee experience means this has to be part of a continuous strategy – not a one-off project. You have to prove that you’re taking this seriously and guarantee that you can change…
What should you do with your employee engagement survey results?
No business is perfect, and that includes yours. There will be good things in your results, and that’s going to be encouraging. But there will be bad things too. Look for common themes and patterns. Find opportunities. Highlight trends in the data. Crucially, edit your data to just the useful bits.
Spreadsheets and data analysis tools are great ways to look at responses in this area – identifying themes means you can organise responses by them, or you can look at responses by individual questions.
If you tell a story with the data, it will stay in the heads of decision-makers in a digestible way, and that’ll be the first step towards creating needed change.
Also, don’t keep the results of the survey to the HR department. It pays to go public within your organisation.
Have you ever sat in a room, heard a mysterious ticking noise that no one acknowledges, and thought, “Am I going mad? Is this just me?” That’s how your employees feel when there’s a complaint that they’ve been too afraid to bring up.
Tell your employees that you’ve heard them, you’re working on it, and you’re committed to change – even if the survey results are dire and the changes needed are drastic. That’s the kind of transparency that leads to trust. And trust is an essential ingredient in making a culture where people feel they belong.
How do you create an action plan for employee engagement?
1. Keep listening to your people
Creating an action plan isn’t a task for HR alone, or even the senior management alone. Your people have played a part in surfacing the problems (and successes), so don’t stop there. Get some of your employees involved in workshopping solutions, and then draw on those ideas when you’re building a plan.
Management training may seem ideal to you but not if the resolution asked for is policy change. Employees will appreciate being involved here, and their input will mean your action plan is less likely to fall flat on its face. The last thing you want after an employee engagement survey is to make people feel less heard.
2. Focus on what will create the most impact for employees
Employee engagement action plans are a matter of prioritisation. Some employees will have minor quibbles that require major solutions. Other employees will have major issues that are easily fixed.
Avoid tackling everything at once and fixing very little. Instead, consider what’s going to make the biggest impact. If 5% of employees have a concern that drains the entire budget, and 90% have a concern that takes it down to half, the choice won’t be difficult.
You don’t have to solve everything in one fell swoop. If every complaint every employee had at every company could be immediately resolved with no financial cost or admin, we’d all be very happy. You’d be running the perfect business, they would never have to worry, world peace might be on the horizon.
3. Experiment and adapt your employee engagement plan over time
The next steps might involve experimentation before you commit to a single course of action.
This isn’t a betrayal of trust. If the changes made turn out to be subpar, or have unintended consequences, you can just be honest about that and try something else. So long as you keep consulting your people for alternative approaches.
By continuously evaluating and adjusting for the course, you can ensure the survey results and subsequent changes don’t just fall into a ‘tried it and didn’t work’ situation. And you can show your people that you’re committed to delivering on what they care about – even if you don’t first succeed.
There’s no one solution. Improving employee engagement is a process of constantly evaluating what is best for everyone in the midst of shifting expectations, and a shifting professional landscape. But listening to employees – learning about their values, complaints, and needs – and taking committed action is non-negotiable if you’re going to create an environment where people feel they belong.
At Lumina, we’ve designed an employee perk platform made with your people’s values in mind. To see how it can deliver on what they care about, book a demo.
