Engaged employees understand their role and how it fits into their organization’s mission and vision. They are passionate about their jobs and put effort into their work. However, employee engagement is something that a lot of organizations struggle with.
A recent Gallup study found that employee engagement continues to fall from its peak levels recorded in 2020. In 2023, 34% of employees were actively engaged, down from 36% in 2020. Gallup also found that 50% of employees were not engaged at work (quiet quitting) in 2023. This is a common and growing issue in the workplace.
So, what can be done to engage employees while also keeping them satisfied at work? You must understand what employee engagement is and why you want it. Training on employee engagement has a lot of moving parts, but we’re here to break them all down with you.
Defining Employee Engagement, Its Importance, and How It Ties to
Satisfaction
It’s important to know that improving employee engagement is
a multifaceted issue that requires a variety of strategies and initiatives. The
mistake is seeking to fix employee engagement with a single solution, or even
more common, to see engagement as the same thing as satisfaction, and invest
money into a solution for a separate issue.
For many years, employers have tried to address engagement by bringing in snack bars or foosball tables, but what they don’t realize is that they’ve targeted employee satisfaction and not engagement.
It’s perfectly reasonable for employees to be satisfied in
their day-to-day work, but not be engaged in it. Employees can enjoy what they
do, but not actively try to engage themselves through opportunities for growth
and promotions.
There’s a spectrum of engagement for employees – engaged, disengaged, and actively disengaged. Engaged employees have a passion for what they’re doing and are connected to the company. Disengaged employees are what many would call “checked out” because they simply go through the motions of their everyday tasks. Actively disengaged employees are vocal about their unhappiness and work to undermine what others have accomplished.
The BizLibrary Collection has a wide variety of training videos on employee engagement topics
View previews from our content library Browse Library Why Employees Are Disengaged in the First Place
While new hires are still gung-ho about their career, over time,
some employees start to become less and less engaged in their jobs and the
company. There are any number of internal and external factors that can affect an
employee this way.
Poor leadership, management, and communication
Tying into that, lack of recognition, training, collaboration,
And then there is the elephant in the room. Pay. Not paying
enough or not having a clear hierarchy and career trajectory can cause loss of
interest in the organization.
The Business Benefits of Improving Employee Engagement
High employee engagement should matter to your organization because a Harvard Business Review article found that disengaged employees cost businesses up to $550 billion a year while only investing $100 billion. That investment is paying off.
According to Gallup, organizations with higher employee engagement achieve earnings-per-share growth that is more than four times that of their competitors. The same article compares top businesses with the bottom 25% and found that the more highly engaged businesses have better customer engagement, productivity, employee retention , and see a 21% higher profitability.
Gallup investigates further and shows that organizations with higher engagement have:
24% less turnover in high-turnover organizations 59% less turnover in low-turnover organizations 10% increases in customer ratings 17% higher productivity 41% lower absenteeism How to Increase Employee Engagement and Where to Start
First, it’s important to gauge your employee engagement. You won’t know how far you have to go until you actually ask the people working for you. To do this, you’ll need to look at your eNPS, or employee net promoter score. This is much like the NPS score you use to gauge how customers feel, but it’s turned inward and looks at whether an employee would recommend your workplace to someone else or not.
While this process does not fix issues present in an organization, it is a valuable stepping stone to improving your workplace.
Once you have that measurement, it is important to look at
what drives employee engagement.
A 2017 SHRM report on employee satisfaction and engagement broke down data into three areas that help build strong employee engagement. The survey asked respondents to reply on a scale of 1 (least engaged) to 5 (very engaged) on a set of 38 different factors.
Conditions for Engagement
Conditions for engagement included any factors that had to do
with the workplace environment and the work being done. Out of 5, respondents
averaged a 3.9 on their working conditions and tasks themselves.
Engagement Opinions
Engagement opinions included solely the employee’s
connection with their work and how they felt about it. Out of 5, the average
response was a 4.0.
Engagement Behaviors
Engagement behaviors included colleagues’ connection with other
employees’ work. Out of 5, the average was a 3.7. Employees tend to rate their
own engagement level to be higher than their colleagues’ levels.
A Model That Works
Organizations can influence engagement levels by
demonstrating that equity and candidness are important. On top of that, equality
and transparency must be evident to thrive and inspire continuous success.
Rusty Lindquist has identified 16 elements that are present in engaging organizations:
He organized the chart into four sections.
First there are the inputs, or what is needed to get work done. An engaged employee:
Has a clear objective and cares about it Does work that aligns with that vision
and their own skill sets Knows what the plan is and how to move
forward toward success Has a great workspace , in person or
virtually Next there is the action phase, or getting the work done. An
engaged employee should:
Feel like they are making contributions that
make a difference Keep “score” by measuring progress to be
accountable Feel the momentum of moving forward Be invested in the work and tied to its
success Then there are the outputs that measure what an employee
takes away from the work. An engaging company should help employees:
See personal or professional growth by gaining
mastery of skills Find meaning and purpose in the work that
they complete Feel like a person of value and
appreciated for their work Discover their identity and what they’re
capable of, and help build confidence Lastly, there are the influencers that fuel the work. Leaders
bear responsibility for helping employees stay engaged by:
Developing leadership skills that help them believe in, challenge, and guide employees Caring about employees enough to develop genuine relationships and connections Establishing a healthy culture and environment with open access to crowd-sourced information Finding restoration and renewal through balance and moderation How to Motivate Employees
Telling someone they have to do something is the quickest
way to make them not want to do it, but that’s how a lot of organizations work.
Making demands without motivation will just push employees to look elsewhere
for employment.
There seems to be a common perception that employee
motivation is tied to salary – but the truth is that motivation is less
financial, and more emotional (although being paid fairly is absolutely a
factor).
Motivating employees is a key factor in driving up engagement. A model you can use to motivate employees who are feeling disengaged is effectance motivation. This involves removing mental, emotional, and physical obstacles to success.
The effectance model is built upon the idea that after basic
needs are met, we find a new drive to influence our environment. When that
environment is our workplace, that drive becomes our motivation, and it
manifests in three distinct forms.
The types of effectance motivation include:
People effectance – our ability to have a
positive impact on those around us Object effectance – our ability to repair,
build, and create things Self effectance – the feeling we have when we
believe we are in control of our lives or careers Optimizing these factors will have a powerful impact on the level of motivation in your workplace. When you know engagement is an issue in your organization, but your efforts to improve it aren’t showing any change, then it’s time to enact some real strategies .
Best Practices for Implementing Employee Engagement Initiatives
Now that you have some ideas about how to engage your employees, it’s time to put those employee engagement training plans into action. Here’s a five-step plan to get your ideas implemented.
1. Define Your Company
You need to answer the question “Why does this company exist?” For example, Tesla says it is here “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” Developing your mission statement can help guide the rest of this process. It should be easy to believe in, emotionally compelling, and give a greater sense of purpose to the work being done by employees in your organization.
2. Develop Your Leadership Team
Do your leaders and managers have the coaching skills
3. Create an Experience
This step is all about evaluating what you’re offering
employees in terms of your workplace, your culture, and the work you ask them
to accomplish. You’ll need to examine your culture because your values drive
your organization’s performance. You should also evaluate what you’re asking of
your workers. An engaged employee will understand that even mundane work helps
further an organization and needs to be done.
4. Provide Ongoing Development
Employees will thrive in an organization that invests in them. By focusing on employee training and development, employees will begin to feel valued and in turn motivated and engaged. Using an on-demand library full of microlearning content
5. Report and Audit
At this point, in essence, you’ve built an environment where
the best employees are allowed to shine. At this stage, you can further refine
your engaged workforce by examining who you’re hiring and how your employees
are behaving. Some things to measure or observe are:
The frequency with which your employees are finding new ways to contribute ideas that further your business goals The level at which your employees understand when they’ve done well, and willingly improve their skills that need work The overall buy-in your employees have for your organization’s mission and goals Employee engagement is a multifaceted subject to tackle, and the interconnectivity of influences on engagement can make it difficult to decide where to start improving your employee engagement efforts.