How to Kick Off an Employee Engagement Program

Employee engagement - programs and benefits that are focused on keeping employees growing, learning, and happy - is critical.  It’s an employees market. Companies are popping up at lightning speed - branding agencies, digital shops, direct-to-consumer products - and the career options have never been more plentiful.  Employees feel more than ever that they are entitled to having their work life how, when and where they want it.

They’re not wrong.

So what’s do you do? Ratchet up your employee engagement efforts and make them part of your culture, something to be expected and synonymous with your employer branding that compels outsiders to want to work for you.

Management can often be short-sighted about employee engagement programs, focusing on the time away from work or incremental costs. The ugly reality is that if employees aren’t happy, the company will not perform at optimal level, there will be high turnover, and the environment can grow increasingly toxic.

While it may seem daunting, it’s empowering to mine feedback from teams and solutions are often straightforward and can be cost effective.

Get started by administering a survey with only two asks:

1. Name 3 things that work about working here.
2. Name 3 things that do not work about working here.

When positioned this way, the questions remain objective and the answers are based in fact. Alternatively, a subjective question like, “What do you like/don’t like?” yields opinions and can open the door to complaints, which are not productive. Also, by limiting it to three things, employees will prioritize what’s important enough for them to bring to your attention.  

From there, identify the most common themes among both categories and use them to drive ideas for programs to put into place right away.

Example:

If a common theme is that employees feel they can’t talk to their managers, consider bringing in a communication coach that can facilitate quarterly trainings to open the door between managers and direct reports.

You don’t have to do it all at once. Address only one or two of the highest priorities immediately, run the programming 3-6 months, then re-survey your employees and ask the same questions to see what’s changed.

The most important thing to know is that engagement requires continuous effort.  Doing a 1-day offsite (think Starbucks’ one-day bias training) is a tiny bandage that often does a bad job of momentarily covering a systemic problem.  So when you start, be prepared to keep going.