5 Ways To Improve Employee Engagement

Improve Employee Retention and Your Bottom Line

In the post-pandemic world, we have settled into a slowing economy. After two years of a white-hot labor market, hiring has begun to see some cooling. In fact, Vistage research has recorded a steady decrease in the number of companies planning to increase headcount over the next year.

While hiring may be softening, businesses should pivot and prioritize retention , both to slow the high pace of turnover we are seeing these days and to proactively prepare for the next growth cycle.

Enter Employee Engagement

A decade ago we called this dimension of work culture that dealt with employee happiness and satisfaction “morale”. Likely because the workplace was full of Baby Boomers who had served in the military which used the term.

Today the label has changed as have the factors that go into retaining talent. That’s got a lot to do with the fact that talent is fast becoming dominated by Millennials and Gen Z.

Leaders who are concerned about turnover must understand the generational differences to determine the best ways to retain staff. Today workers are looking for things that are different than what the previous generations did.

That’s why smart leaders have embraced the discipline of employee engagement — the degree to which employees are invested in, connected with, and committed to their work, colleagues, and the company’s growth.

There are many reasons why engagement and not pay or potential for promotion is the key to employee satisfaction and retention. The biggest reason is the changing workforce and how the new generation of workers sees value in the workplace.

Here are five effective ways leaders can improve employee engagement levels at their organization:

1. Share the Mission Early and Often

To increase employee engagement, it’s important to first dig a little deeper into the evolving desires of today's employees.

Workers today want to feel their work is valued internally and by the world at large. Today’s employees want to feel they’re a part of something bigger than themselves.

To do that, they’ll need to know and understand your company’s vision and feel connected with its overarching mission. The rising numbers of Gen-Z employees, which will soon make up the majority of the workplace, are particularly motivated by purpose-driven work.

As a result, employers need to ensure every employee, from senior executives to interns, understands and can see how their work aligns with and contributes to the organization’s goals.

Employees who understand how their daily output is making an impact have a deeper connection to their work and generally report greater satisfaction with their jobs.

This should start from the first day a new employee walks through the door. New hires should be given the broadest possible vision of the company, its history, and its accomplishments. They should also be exposed to senior leadership, if possible the CEO.

Make it a pageant for new hires on their first few days and roll out the red carpet. Make people feel welcome and that they are valued and part of a winning team. Take them around to other departments and create fun ways they can see the various elements of the organization.

I once worked at a company that used a scavenger hunt model that required new hires to find certain people or things that tied back to telling the story of the company. Your new hire orientation was finished when you completed all the tasks on the scavenger hunt and found a small collection of company swag as a prize.

It may sound extravagant or even unnecessary to put this much effort into new employee orientation. But there’s an opportunity to make a big impression on people when they first come on board. People want to be excited about a new job and the opportunity never gets better to do that than when they are brand new. It sets the foundation for positive engagement ongoing.

2. Measure It

As a leader, you’ll need to determine how you are doing with engagement. What is working and what isn’t so you can find the things that truly move the needle.

To do this you’ll need to develop metrics that quantify and capture employee engagement levels, i.e., regular sentiment surveys, feedback sessions, or productivity metrics.

I have even seen companies with machines stationed around the office that simply ask “How is it going today” with a series of buttons with faces from smile to frown. Employees push the button for how they feel in that moment and the machine keeps a tally.

People actually will engage with these and you can draw some reasonably good data this way.

No matter how you do it engagement with employees should be measured on a regular basis to ensure you have a real-time understanding of individual employee concerns, feedback, interests, and commitment levels.

A word of caution, however, about surveying too often as you can easily create fatigue which reduces accuracy over time, and the surveying itself can become a detractor to workplace happiness.

Another way to take the pulse of staff is more qualitative and simply invite a random, revolving group of employees to a regular meeting. Maybe with lunch served and perhaps offsite.

Find someone to lead these who is good at making others feel comfortable candidly expressing their feelings about their work and the company generally. The decision about who facilitates these is critical. You should try to find someone who others see as genuinely concerned about employee's well-being.

The key to this more personal approach to measuring employee engagement is using open-ended questions that allow employees to provide genuine, honest feedback without fear of repercussions.

3. Take Action

Once you have a system in place for measuring feedback, it’s crucial to act. The data should inform you on how to shape and evolve the employee experience.

Be committed to removing roadblocks, and frustrations and implementing new ways of getting things done. You must be committed to using employee feedback you gather or the whole effort will become worthless if your team see's it is just window dressing.

If that happens you may never be able to restart it again in the future.

Employees want to see that they have been heard and that changes are taking place. This plays a crucial role in growing engagement.

It doesn’t mean you have to provide three-day weekends or free lunches if that doesn’t work for you. It does mean looking at everything that emerges from feedback and being open to making changes. If you don’t act on some important piece of employee feedback close the loop and let them know why.

All of this means looking at the company’s culture and its working environment, including the physical office space, the technology and tools employees have access to. It means being genuinley open to new ideas.

Maybe the things you ask your team to do are not adding value anymore. Maybe they are lacking the tools needed to do the job better. If employees don’t have the resources they need to be successful at work, or are being told to do things that don’t support the mission they will quickly lose their motivation.

Again, people want to know that what they are doing is making a difference.

4. Manager Training

While the rise of remote and hybrid work hasn’t created quiet quitting or bare-minimum Mondays , it has made it more difficult for your frontline managers to identify who is and who is not engaged and work to improve the situation.

Engagement issues can spread like wildfire, as under-engaged and perhaps underperforming employees often pose an even more difficult challenge to managers when they are not physically present.

Unhappy employees can impact their colleagues, creating a continuum of burnout across the organization.

Managers need tools that give them a clear understanding of how to recognize engagement. Companies and their managers using hybrid or remote models require an entirely new set of competencies.

Providing consistent training to managers on engagement will help prepare them for these new work models.

We should all know by now that one of the most important drivers of the employee experience is their relationship to their direct supervisor. As the saying goes; people don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses.

So investing in management’s learning is critical to ensuring maximum engagement by your whole workforce.

5. Stay Interviews

I recently learned about this new strategy for growing engagement called stay interviews. Basically, instead of waiting for someone to leave when it is too late to improve engagement, leaders can be proactive and implement quarterly or biannual stay interviews.

Stay interviews are discussions in which employees and their managers have interview-style conversations, aiming to identify if they would choose to work together again, as well as to determine what they would like to improve about their working relationship.

It takes some humility and confidence on the part of the manager as it invites the employee to candidly share how that manager can do better in terms of communication, support, and the relationship overall.

However, if this is done well it might be one of the best ways to improve engagement of any current strategy I can think of. Establishing honest and open dialog between employees and their direct supervisors is the gold standard for employee engagement. That’s because the direct supervisor relationship is often at the crux of employee satisfaction.

What’s The Point?

Even in hiring lulls, leaders should work to improve employee engagement. In doing so you can increase productivity, improve retention, mitigate burnout, and prepare your organization for the next growth cycle.

Listen to employee feedback and be sure to act upon it. Invest in training for your front-line managers on how to identify and enhance employee engagement.

These are efforts where you will get the biggest bang for your buck.

Regardless of the economic landscape or where your business is at in terms of it's growth, employee engagement is always a worthwhile investment, as organizations with high levels of engagement simply perform better .