Employee Engagement - The Complete Guide
Employee engagement is one of the most important drivers of an organization’s success. Employees are an organization’s most important asset, and when employees are engaged, they’re able to perform at their best, and collaborate effectively.
Read this guide to learn what makes employees engaged, why it matters, and what you can do to improve engagement among your workforce.
What is Employee Engagement?
Employee Engagement Definition: Employee engagement is the level of commitment, motivation, and connection employees demonstrate toward their work and their organization.
Engagement is reflected in employees’ attitudes and job performance. Highly engaged employees experience higher levels of job satisfaction, exhibit strong work ethic, and make meaningful contributions to their teams.
However, employee engagement is not merely a measure of happiness or a positive attitude. Rather, it is a set of behaviors that reflect a persistent state of motivation and commitment, not exclusively tied to feelings of pleasure or contentment. Engagement is the result of intentional strategies designed to create work environments and cultures where employees become and remain motivated and invested in their work.
→ Read more: 20 easy ways to motivate employees.
What are the Types of Employee Engagement?
Here are the types of employee engagement and examples of each kind of behavior:
Actively Engaged - Actively engaged employees care about what they do, and bring extra efforts to work every day. They take initiative when solving problems, and actively participate in helping their organization reach its goals. They are optimistic about organizational outcomes, and forge connections with their team members.
Non-Engaged - Non-engaged employees do what is required of them, but rarely go beyond that. They are motivated by necessity rather than a connection to their work. They are indifferent about the future of their organization.
Disengaged - Disengaged employees display a negative attitude about their job or the company they work for. These employees are frequently isolated from their colleagues. They put forth minimal effort, and are at highest risk for absenteeism or attrition.
Over the years, surveys by Gallup and others have estimated the amount of engaged employees worldwide to be as low as 13%. While engaged employees are an asset to their organizations, disengagement or non-engagement among employees can hurt an organization and its goals. Measuring and working to drive employee engagement is one of the best ways to boost overall organizational success.
What are the Drivers of Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is driven by a number of factors:
- Recognition - When employees feel that their contributions are noticed and appreciated, they are more likely to put forth their best effort. Recognizing employees’ talents and accomplishments is a form of positive reinforcement that drives engagement.
- Purpose - Engaged employees find meaning in their work, and can see how their role contributes to a bigger picture.
- Learning and Development - Employees who feel stuck in their roles without room to grow will easily become disengaged. Even the most talented workers will lose motivation if they do not feel challenged and stimulated by their work. One of the top reasons employees leave their organizations for other opportunities is a lack of room for growth. Investing in your employees’ professional development can help keep them engaged.
- Connection - Engagement is driven not only by a connection to one’s work but also by connection to one’s colleagues, managers, and the organization as a whole. Building relationships among teams and between managers and their supervisees can increase employee engagement.
- Communication - Employees can remain engaged when they have a clear understanding of their role, and have access to the information they need to be successful. Communication is also the lifeblood of connection between colleagues and among teams, and employees who feel connected to their coworkers are more likely to remain engaged.
- Autonomy - Employees crave autonomy and flexibility. When your people can work smarter, not harder, they can get more done. And, allowing for autonomy and flexibility establishes a culture of trust and mutual respect and better relationships between management and employees.
- Agency - When employees feel they have a voice at their company and can exert influence over its future and their own, they become more invested in their jobs.
Employee Engagement - A Strategy for Performance & Retention
Read this white paper to learn why engagement is the foundation behind committed workforces, and how to implement a strategy.
Why is Employee Engagement Important?
Employee engagement is a company-wide factor, and is the input that impacts the organizational output of employee experience. Improving employee engagement can improve metrics across all areas of your organization. From turnover rates to customer experience to profitability, business outcomes improve as employee engagement increases. The benefits of employee engagement listed below are well documented, their impact will only increase following COVID-19 and the great work-from-home experiment.
Productivity and Profitability
An engaged workforce is crucial to the success of your organization. Engaged employees are high performers; they are more likely to work diligently and go above and beyond what is asked of them. Their investment in the mission of their organization motivates them to help the company reach its goals. According to Gallup, high employee engagement leads to an 18% increase in productivity and a 23% increase in profitability.
Retention & Recruitment
Organizations with higher rates of employee engagement experience lower rates of absenteeism and turnover, and higher employee retention. Absenteeism and employee turnover are expensive. Engaged employees experience greater job satisfaction and are much less likely than their disengaged peers to actively seek opportunities at other companies. According to LumApps and CMSWire research presented in Employee Retention Strategies for the Digital Workplace, 59% of employees would rather stay at their current employers under the right conditions.
An engaged workforce is not only helpful for retaining the employees you have, it can also help you to attract the best talent to your organization. Your employees’ level of engagement affects your company’s reputation; engaged workers not only make your organization more attractive to potential hires, but they can also help to refer or recruit new additions to your team. According to LumApps and CMSWire research presented in The New Era of Employee Recruiting, 87% of employees consider employee experience, engagement and empowerment an important factor when evaluating a new employer.
Improved Employee Experience
A positive employee experience helps to boost employee engagement, and the reverse is also true. Being engaged in one’s work contributes to a positive employee experience. It becomes a virtuous cycle where engaged employees lead the charge to create and perpetuate a strong employee experience - from the onboarding process to the exit interview.
Employee Advocacy
Your employees are your brand’s foremost ambassadors, and highly engaged employees serve as powerful social advocates for your company.
Innovation
Disengaged employees are unlikely to produce consistent innovation or creative thinking. Engaged employees are likely to find new solutions because they are motivated and inspired. Engaged employees are connected to their colleagues, and that connection is necessary for the type of collaboration that leads to creative solutions.
Builds Morale and Positivity
Engaged employees take ownership of company culture and help create a more positive work environment. Engagement results in improved morale as employees feel valued, believe their contributions matter, and understand the purpose driving their work.
Better Customer Experiences
Engaged employees deliver better customer experiences and relationships. They are genuinely enthusiastic about their organization, display a positive attitude, and are solution-oriented. They have the knowledge to serve clients and customers effectively, and can connect the customer with the appropriate resources when necessary.
Employee Health and Well Being
High employee engagement is also associated with improved mental health. Engaged employees are connected to their colleagues, supported by their managers, and find meaning in their work - all of which can help reduce work-related stress. Stress, burnout, and work-related mental health issues are expensive problems. Work-related stress comes with a hefty healthcare cost to the tune of $190 billion annually, according to the American Institute of Stress. What’s more, work-related stress is responsible for an estimated $300 billion in losses due to absenteeism, diminished productivity, and accidents.
→ Read more: Why is employee engagement important? Here are 20 benefits of an engaged workforce.
How To Build Employee Engagement?
1. Build A Strong Company Culture
Engagement is not a trait or a skill that some employees have while others lack. Rather, engagement is a state of being. Even the most talented, satisfied employees can become disengaged in an environment that is dysfunctional or fails to meet the needs of its workforce. Create an environment where employee engagement can flourish. Strong company culture is based on effective communication, relationships between managers and supervisees, and a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.
2. Develop Employee Engagement Activities
Engaged employees feel a sense of connection to their employer and their colleagues. Give your employees opportunities to connect with one another with employee engagement activities and events. This might be a team retreat, community service days, company-wide contests between departments, or other events taking place in or out of the office. Additionally, provide digital ways to connect using internal platforms that offer communities and knowledge sharing opportunities.
3. Use an Employee Engagement Software
LumApps serves as a digital employee engagement platform. As remote and hybrid work continues to become more prevalent, engagement software fosters digital communities to keep employees engaged with their work and one another. These types of tools improve internal communication and give employees the information and resources they need to be productive. Furthermore, these platforms capture analytics to provide insights on engagement and usage.
→ Learn about the best features of employee engagement software.
LumApps, the Employee Experience Platform:
Strategies to Improve Employee Engagement
Employee engagement strategies and employee engagement best practices include:
Perks & Recognition
Recognize your employees’ contributions and reward their achievements. Highlight an individual or a team in the company newsletter, offer a bonus, incentives or gifts, or routinely express appreciation for a specific contribution during the next team meeting. A key part of successful recognition is highlighting how individuals contribute to the overall mission of the company - this helps employees find purpose in their work. Employees remain engaged when they feel valued, and see clearly how their efforts affect the success of their organization. Create spaces where employees can recognize their peers or nominate a coworker for an award or a shout-out.
Consider Work-Life Balance
Demonstrating a respect for your employees’ work-life balance nurtures a healthy work culture. Grade employees on their work, instead of what times they’re online or in the office. This allows employees to stay on top of their responsibilities outside of work and enables them to devote the necessary time and energy to their jobs.
Support In-Office, Hybrid and Remote Employees
As the modern workforce has become more widely dispersed, the possibility for disconnection and isolation can threaten employee engagement. Employees who work from home or away from a desk can disengage if they don’t have access to the information they need, or are left out of critical conversations. Whether you’re planning an employee appreciation event, a town-hall meeting, or sharing company news - messaging and opportunities should be equitably distributed. Conversely, in-office employees should be afforded the same flexibility and autonomy that their remote counterparts enjoy. Wherever your employees work, managers should play an active role in ensuring that they have the support they need to be successful in their jobs.
Empower a Committee and Ambassadors
Some employers make the mistake of relegating employee engagement activities to the human resources department. In reality, measuring and improving employee engagement is a collaborative effort that must involve HR professionals, internal communications teams, IT departments, and especially managers. In addition, employers can more directly involve their employees in nurturing engagement by empowering an engagement committee and ambassadors from various departments.
Give Employees a Voice (Digital and In-Person)
Employees participate more actively in the pursuit of company goals when they have a voice among decision makers. Giving employees a voice is not only good for morale and engagement, but it can also help leadership and human resources teams to uncover important insights about employee happiness and daily operations. Be sure that your plan to give voice to your employees includes both in-person and virtual solutions to meet your workforce wherever they are.
For example, you might enable a virtual suggestion box and open question and answers opportunities through an employee experience platform. Or, hold town hall style meetings both virtually and in person, and hold space for a question and answer forum. Whichever methods you choose, it is important that employees have a voice and are heard by company leadership.
→ Read more: Strategies and ideas for boosting employee engagement.
Internal Communications – Measurement to Mastery
Enhance your internal communication strategy and learn the impact of communication done right.
How to Measure Employee Engagement?
While you might already have a general idea of who the top and bottom performers are, the majority of your workforce will probably fall somewhere in the middle - this is where the opportunity lies. Gather a range of different metrics to effectively measure employee engagement. Using multiple data sources, like those listed below, will help you build a more holistic and comprehensive picture of when, why, and to what extent your workforce is engaged.
Annual Employee Engagement Surveys
An annual employee engagement survey can help your organization measure big-picture trends and observe year-over-year changes. Survey questions should address engagement from multiple perspectives and consider the multi-faceted drivers of engagement.
Sample employee engagement survey questions:
- Are you happy with your work?
- What makes you happy/unhappy?
- Do you understand the company mission?
- Do you understand your role and where it fits within the company?
- Do you feel part of a team?
- Do you feel proud to work for this company?
- Do you think the company intranet helps you to do your job better?
- Do/would you use the company intranet?
- How often do you use the company intranet?
- Do you see yourself working here in 5 years?
- Do you feel you have a clear career path?
- Do you feel you have the necessary support to do your job effectively?
- Do you feel sufficiently challenged to do your best work?
- How likely are you to look for another job in the next year?
- Do you feel your contributions make a difference to the company and or the community?
- Do you feel valued among your colleagues?
- What are the biggest obstacles you face in achieving your objectives at work?
A five-point Likert scale can help you quickly and easily gauge employee sentiment, but consider including some open-ended questions as well.
Employee Pulse-Surveys
While annual surveys can be helpful for getting big-picture feedback, pulse surveys can provide more granular, actionable insights. Pulse surveys should be shorter, more frequent, and more specific than annual questionnaires. It may be useful to design pulse surveys about specific moments in the employee journey, and gather feedback after an onboarding or training session, after an annual performance review, after introducing a new internal software, and other significant moments.
Focus Groups
While surveys can yield large volumes of quantitative data relatively quickly, focus groups can provide deeper insights through more qualitative data. You may wish to follow up an employee survey with a focus group on the same topic to learn more about the initial insights and get some more context to accompany the results. With the right design and structure, focus groups can lead to meaningful discussions that illuminate hidden problems and even possible solutions.
To make sure your focus group is productive (and not merely a venting session), begin by establishing the scope of what you hope to discuss and the outcome you wish to achieve. Keep groups to a manageable size so that all participants will have an opportunity to contribute. Seek participation from all levels and departments in your organization. Limit the number of questions you pose to the group, and make them as specific as possible. Appoint a neutral facilitator to encourage participants to speak honestly and candidly. Be sure to take detailed notes about the conversations, questions, and topics that come up. While the meeting is still fresh in your mind, write a summary report. Finally, present your findings to the appropriate stakeholders and use the insights to drive your strategy going forward.
Exit Interviews
The exit interview can yield some surprising insights about company culture and employee experience. While the exit interview may seem like a moot point (after all, the employee is already on their way out), don’t skip it. This is an opportunity to better understand your employees’ motivations and experiences, and make improvements for existing employees and new hires. Keep a record of the exit interview and use this data to track trends and changes over time.
Net Promoter Score
What is the Net Promoter Score? The Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is rooted in consumer research. It is based on the idea that customer experience can be measured with the single question: “How likely are you to recommend (x) to a friend or colleague?” Human resources professionals have adapted this model to gauge employee engagement by asking if their staff would recommend working at their company. The answer to this question (or a similar single question) can serve as a quick indicator of employee engagement levels. But, in order to obtain actionable insights, a single question is not sufficient on its own.
Retention Rate
Retention is one of the top 10 Kpis to measure employee engagement. High turnover is a sure sign of employee disengagement. Amid the Great Resignation, employee retention has emerged as a major concern for organizations all over the world. While retention is not the only metric that matters, tracking rates of retention and turnover among different types of employees can yield important insights about how engaged your workforce is.
Online Reputation
Your online reputation can hint at the level of engagement among your workforce. Two of the biggest factors in your online reputation are your customers’ satisfaction and your employees’ advocacy for your organization. Engaged employees not only deliver superior customer service and results, but also act as brand ambassadors for your organization.
Employee Engagement FAQ
Employee engagement refers to an employee’s commitment and connection to their employer. The workers’ level of engagement drives a company’s success. High levels of engagement improve performance at all levels of the organization. They encourage long-term employee relationships as well as customer loyalty. Why Are Employee Engagement Surveys Important?
- Reduction in Absenteeism
- Increase Productivity
- Better Employee Safety
- Lower Turnover
- Higher Growth
The benefits of employee engagement are numerous – from higher productivity to increased profit.
- Reduction in Absenteeism
- Better Employee Safety
- Defines company values
- Boosts company success
- Enhances company reputation
- Reduces employee turnover
- Improve job satisfaction
- Build a strong company culture
- Initiate employee engagement activities
- Encourage networking
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