HR’s complete guide to employee engagement

Many organizations prioritize employee engagement as a key success metric without fully understanding why it’s so important. Employee engagement shows you how committed and connected your employees are. It directly reflects the actions exhibited by your organization and its leaders, and provides valuable information that can drive future decision-making.

In this guide, we’ll explore why employee engagement matters, how to measure engagement, and what you can do with engagement data.

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is a metric that represents the levels of enthusiasm employees feel toward their organization. It captures more than just job satisfaction or feeling happy at work – it's a measure of how motivated people are to put in extra effort for their organization, and a sign of how committed they are to staying there.

At Culture Amp, we consider employee engagement a measure of the following five factors:

1. Pride
2. Recommendation
3. Present commitment
4. Future commitment
5. Motivation

Companies with high employee engagement have a workforce that embodies these five factors, whereas companies with low employee engagement usually struggle in one or more of these areas. Strong engagement also indicates a strong workplace culture – if your company’s cultural practices resonate with employees, that’ll contribute to better engagement.

For many employees, whether or not they feel engaged is reflected by whether or not leadership, managers, and people teams listen to their voices and value their unique perspectives. Accordingly, employee engagement is a key metric that all HR professionals should keep a close eye on.

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How is employee engagement different from employee satisfaction?

While there is a tendency to use “employee engagement” and “employee satisfaction” interchangeably, they are two distinct concepts with key differences.

Employee satisfaction is generally defined as “the degree to which employees are satisfied with their jobs and their workplace experience.” It’s different from engagement in the following ways:

• Satisfaction is more one-dimensional, primarily measuring an employee’s contentedness with their job, working conditions, and workplace environment.
• Engagement is multi-dimensional and more complex. It digs deeper into the emotional connection that employees have with their work, focusing on the factors that drive employees to go above and beyond.

It’s easiest to think of satisfaction as a key component and indicator of engagement. For an employee to be engaged, they must also be satisfied.

Why is employee engagement important?

People who are highly engaged at work provide greater value to the organization and experience a better quality of life at work. Compared to companies in the bottom quartile of employee engagement, Gallup found that companies in the top quartile of employee engagement experience:

When an organization prioritizes employee engagement, employees feel more motivated by, prideful of, and connected to both leaders and the company. Even small efforts to boost engagement can help reduce turnover, improve employee retention, and motivate employees to go above and beyond – allowing your workforce to stay innovative and agile, even in times of change.

Employee engagement is just one facet of the employee experience, but it plays a major role in shaping this experience. The key to building a responsive and positive employee experience lies in understanding what’s driving engagement.

What drives employee engagement?

In 2024, Culture Amp's data indicated that the top drivers of employee engagement across industries were leadership, learning & development (L&D), and company performance. While these drivers can vary from company to company, we’ve seen certain trends across our customer data over the years.

At Culture Amp, we collect millions of responses worldwide to help understand organizational culture and performance. Each year, we publish insights by industry and region, benchmarking how thousands of companies are keeping employees engaged.

There’s an intrinsic link between leadership and engagement. Employees look to the actions of their leaders when making their own decisions, and engagement takes a hit if employees lose confidence in leadership. Trust is crucial to a healthy employee/leader relationship, and when engagement drops due to leadership, it can take a long time for those numbers to bounce back.

The same goes for employee development. Culture Amp’s research shows that companies prioritizing development opportunities as part of the employee experience see 46% higher engagement. Employees can hone skills that align with personal interests and feel they’re contributing to a larger purpose, while managers can better align the company’s vision with the goals of individual contributors.

Meanwhile, company performance affects how employees feel about the company’s future, influencing how committed they are to staying with their companies and how motivated they are to go above and beyond in their roles. In 2024, we found that employee engagement was strongly influenced by employees’ perceptions of whether their company effectively directs resources toward company goals. Given the recent string of layoffs in recent years, this finding should come as no surprise.

Comparing the behaviors of engaged employees and disengaged employees

Another factor to consider in the context of engagement is the behaviors your employees exhibit when engaged vs. disengaged. These contrasting behaviors highlight engagement's vital role in strengthening your culture and maintaining a productive workplace.

When an employee is engaged, they:

• Maintain positive mental health, even when working overtime
• Do more good deeds to help their coworkers, even when it’s not part of their job description
• Work more productively and in a better state of flow
• Perform to a higher standard
• Speak more positively about their organization

Meanwhile, employee disengagement looks like:

• Stressed employees who become easily frustrated with leaders and colleagues
• A lack of willingness to go above and beyond, working to the bare minimum
• Underperformance or slower output
• Negative discourse surrounding the organization/leaders

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What is the relationship between employee engagement and burnout?

Some view burnout as the opposite of employee engagement, with one study finding that the core dimensions of burnout (emotional exhaustion and cynicism) are the polar opposite of engagement (vigor and dedication). However, the relationship between burnout and engagement is not always so clear-cut.

Chloe Hammon, Director of People Science, Product, at Culture Amp, explains, “The connection between engagement and burnout is not straightforward because highly stressed individuals can present as very engaged.”

It’s important for HR professionals to remember that high engagement does not equate high levels of wellbeing. Somebody can be both engaged and overwhelmed at work – even if the signs aren’t clear cut, there’s always the chance that they’re burning out. Ignoring burnout risks may push your best-performing employees beyond their limits, leading to turnover.

Defining employee burnout

What is employee burnout exactly? The World Health Organization (WHO) defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” To put it simply, burnout is a symptom of an overwhelmed worker.

It’s important that your leaders, HR teams, and employees are able to identify signs of burnout. Knowing the signs means leaders can effectively tend to individuals suffering burnout, and employees can self-evaluate and raise the issue if needed.

• Energy depletion or exhaustion
• Loss of productivity
• Headaches
• Shortness of breath
• Loss of appetite or change in eating habits
• Lack of sleep
• Constant worry and anxiety
• Inability to focus
• Increased mental distance or apathy
• Negativity or cynicism
• Irritability
• Emotional fragility or heightened sensitivity
• An increased tendency to start arguments or make harsh comments

Burnout is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, both for the organization and the employee’s health. But improving burnout is not just a matter of improving poor employee engagement rates. Organizations must take an ongoing holistic approach to address burnout and build wellbeing into their employee engagement strategy.

Below, we’ve compiled a few resources to help you mitigate burnout among your employees:

• How companies are dealing with employee burnout
• Managing burnout: 3 ways to support employee wellbeing
• How to help your team with burnout as a manager

What is the relationship between employee engagement and workplace morale?

Workplace morale describes the satisfaction, outlook, and feelings of wellbeing that your employees have at their job. Think of morale as another piece of the employee engagement puzzle.

When employees show low morale – no enthusiasm or confidence – there’s no incentive for them to excel. Even an employee who shows up energetic and ready to work might feel disconnected and directionless beneath the surface.

How an employee feels will influence the quality of their output, i.e., how engaged they are when actioning tasks. Employees need to feel motivated to stay engaged and committed to the work they do. Employees might view their company and team positively, but they may not be fully engaged if they are dissatisfied with some aspect of their role. The more you know about your employees’ morale, the easier it is to ensure the right tools and resources are available to them. Many of the times, it’s likely that the cause is rooted somewhere in the employee experience.

• How to improve employee morale
• How we think about employee wellbeing

Who is responsible for employee engagement?

We’ve seen a tremendous shift in the world of work in recent years as people have moved from siloed environments to team-oriented environments. While this shift has allowed organizations to work with more agility, the lines are blurrier when it comes to workplace accountability.

To achieve a high-performance workplace, employees must be held accountable for their work and leaders must be accountable for making strategic people & business decisions.

But who is responsible for improving things like employee engagement? Managers? Organizational leaders? Or the employees themselve?

There are two main approaches, each with their own pros and cons.

• Managers and organizations are responsible
  • Pros: Ensures that action is actually taken, keeps company culture at the center of decision-making
  • Cons: Takes all the responsibility off the individual, puts pressure on managers, disengaged employees may feel they have no input
• Individual employees are responsible
  • Pros: Encourages individuals to own their engagement, allows for a collective voice when action planning, helps attract top talent
  • Cons: Takes the responsibility off leaders, can be weaponized against the employee as the reason for poor engagement

How to measure employee engagement: Employee engagement surveys

The simplest and most accurate way to understand and measure workplace engagement is by using an employee engagement survey. Because employee engagement is an outcome, you can use employee surveys to ask questions about different factors that affect employee engagement to see which ones are hurting and helping the most at your organization.

While the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) was long regarded as the go-to metric for measuring employee engagement, we don't find it holistic enough. The eNPS typically consists of a single question about whether someone would recommend their company as a great place to work. While this is valuable information, asking whether an employee would recommend a company doesn’t capture the entirety of engagement.

Engagement surveys can tell you far more than the eNPS about what’s driving employee engagement in your unique organization. That's because when organizations use surveys to understand the drivers of employee engagement, they can take more effective action on what’s important.

​​Here are three things to know before measuring employee engagement:

1. It takes more than one question to accurately measure employee engagement
2. It’s important to strategically choose survey questions that will give you an accurate view of engagement in your company
3. Employee engagement driver analysis gives you insight on which parts of the employee experience need action

Below, we dive into each of these in more detail.

1. Ask a variety of questions to accurately measure employee engagement

Because of its complexity, engagement is best understood through a series of questions in a survey rather than a single question. Culture Amp’s Founding People Scientist, Dr. Jason McPherson, says, “In general, statisticians agree that well-constructed, multiple-item indicators are more reliable and tend to provide better external validity than single-question metrics.”

In other words, asking a handful of questions on a specific topic will give you a more reliable and clear picture of what’s going on than asking, “How satisfied are you at work?”

2. Strategically choose survey questions that give you an accurate view of engagement in your company

Since engagement encompasses connection, motivation, and commitment, an engagement survey should ask questions that provide data on these factors.

For this reason, Culture Amp’s surveys use five main questions, which we refer to as the “Engagement index,” to measure employee engagement:

1. “I am proud to work for [Company]”
2. “I would recommend [Company] as a great place to work”
3. “I rarely think about looking for a job at another company”
4. “I see myself still working at [Company] in two years’ time”
5. “[Company] motivates me to go beyond what I would in a similar role elsewhere”

In general, we recommend using more than five questions in your engagement survey, which will help you more accurately capture employee sentiment at your company. However, the "right" employee engagement survey questions will differ depending on your organization's specific needs and culture. If you want to more holistically measure engagement, you can incorporate employee engagement metrics that cover the entire employee experience.

Best practices for designing employee engagement surveys

On top of picking the right questions, there are a few other important best practices to keep in mind when designing your employee engagement survey. We’ve summarized them below:

• Be cognizant of survey length. Surveys should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete. If they take any longer, employees may rush to complete the survey, resulting in inaccurate or incomplete answers.
• Only ask questions you feel prepared to take action on. If you want your employees to share candid feedback about the employee experience, you need to be prepared to take action on that feedback. People expect their feedback to lead to tangible changes – otherwise, what’s the point of sharing the feedback in the first place?
• Run your survey multiple times. A one-time survey won’t offer insight into how your people strategy is or isn’t working. In order to see how your company’s actions impact your employees’ experience, you should run surveys more than once to establish a baseline, thereby allowing you to see how employee perceptions change over time.
  
  Generally, we recommend running a full engagement survey once or twice a year, and pulse surveys in between. Keep in mind, however, that you should only run surveys as often as you’re able to take action on them.

3. Use driver analysis to help you understand engagement trends at your company

Companies that use surveys like Culture Amp’s surveys can see what’s influencing engagement using a technique called driver analysis.

Driver analysis shows you which factors are most related to employee engagement. Dr. Jason McPherson explains how this works in our platform: “If the top driver of engagement is a learning and development question, this means that people who respond most positively to that question are also likely to be the most engaged. If you act to improve responses to that question then you have an improved chance of making your employees more engaged overall.”

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How to improve employee engagement

Improving employee engagement is an ongoing, fluid process for many organizations. There’s no quick fix to boost engagement. This is particularly true when rebuilding employee engagement during or after times of uncertainty or significant disruption.

While some tips and tricks may help patch a temporary issue, engagement is best viewed through a strategic lens.

Implement an “employee feedback loop”

The first step to improving engagement is to address issues identified in your employee engagement survey. Step two (and the ultimate goal) is to sustain those changes to maintain consistently high levels of engagement. Accomplishing this requires organizations to regularly collect feedback and take action to improve engagement.

We suggest implementing an employee feedback loop model to ensure that your changes lead to long-term, continuous improvements:

1. Collect: Design a survey with the right questions and use that survey to collect answers (or data)
2. Understand: Analyze results from your survey and pinpoint your top drivers of employee engagement
3. Act: Share the data, build an action plan, and then implement changes. This step is critical, as employees need to know that their feedback leads to actual changes. As our CEO Didier Elzinga wrote, “people don’t get survey fatigue, they get lack-of-action fatigue.

By committing to a long-term approach to employee engagement, you can easily track trends and identify whether or not your changes are leading to measurable improvements.

Use benchmarks to add context to your surveys

How do you know whether the data you’ve collected warrants taking action? ? By tapping into the power of benchmarking.

Employee engagement benchmarks offer critical context into the data you’ve gathered. While a score may seem low in absolute terms, comparing it to the benchmark score for your industry may reveal that it’s actually standard. In this way, benchmarks allow you to take a step back and evaluate whether a particular area of your organization truly needs action, helping to ensure that time and resources are being allocated to the initiatives that will drive the most impact.

It’s important to note that your goal isn’t to hit the benchmark score. Instead, use benchmarks to gain a competitive edge by evaluating the data (and the relationships in this data) to determine which aspects of the employee experience matter most to your people. Benchmarks should act as a check on your strategy, not dictate reactive and potentially distracting targets.

Prioritize taking strategic, data-informed actions

Once you’ve collected your survey results, checked them against the benchmark, and determined the most important initiatives for your organization, it’s time to take action. At this stage, you want to understand how to pull actionable takeaways from your data, and use those takeaways to identify the top drivers of engagement at your company. As explored earlier, driver analysis can be a helpful tool for achieving this.

You can maximize the impact of your engagement initiatives by first focusing on one or two key drivers to address now. If you’re selecting more, it’ll be harder to ensure you’re actually improving upon any one focus area. Start small, be specific, and build an action plan one driver at a time.

While building an action plan requires time and investment, avoid lingering in the planning stage. Increasing employee engagement requires pushing through and bringing the planning to life. Don’t be afraid to test ideas immediately. Once you get started, you can communicate progress on your action plan, gather feedback along the way, and adjust as needed. In general, it's crucial to communicate the results of any employee engagement surveys you conduct.

Tap into managers to drive engagement

Another significant way to improve employee engagement is through managers, as they arguably have the biggest impact on an employee's day-to-day engagement. For this reason, teaching your managers critical soft skills can significantly improve your organization's overall engagement and employee experience.

In particular, managers can learn to conduct more effective 1-on-1 meetings. When done right, these regular check-ins allow employees to communicate their wins and worries, get the direction they need to progress in their projects, and build the connection they need to meet and exceed the company's expectations. A well-executed meeting incorporates the right balance of coaching, guidance, and camaraderie.

1-on-1 conversations that incorporate the following topics generally drive greater engagement:

1. Professional development - Talking about professional development shows employees that their manager is invested in their goals and is committed to helping them move forward in their careers.
2. Personhood - Addressing and showing genuine interest in a direct report's personal life shows empathy and builds trust. Personal connections matter and increase not only engagement but a direct report's sense of belonging.
3. Performance - Weekly or bi-weekly check-ins make it easy for employees to ask for help and for managers to understand their employees' struggles. They're also a good opportunity for employees to know how they are performing and how well they are tracking toward their personal, team, and organizational goals.
4. Roadblocks - 1-on-1's allow managers to address issues as they arise, so progress isn’t stalled on significant projects, and employees don't feel alone in their struggles.

3 employee engagement strategies to try at your company

These basic strategies will help you start increasing employee engagement at your organization.

1. Communicate openly and honestly
   Communication significantly impacts employee engagement, with survey questions about communication often appearing among the top ten engagement drivers for many organizations. This makes sense, as open and honest communication builds trust, creates a stronger sense of belonging, and fosters confidence in the organization’s future – all of which lead to higher levels of engagement.
2. Focus on learning & development
   Culture Amp’s people scientists have found that learning & development is the #2 top driver of employee engagement, with companies that focus on L&D have employees exhibiting an engagement score that is 14.6 percentage points higher than those who don’t.
3. Prioritize diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB)
   Now more than ever, companies recognize the importance of DEIB in fostering engaging, safe, and inclusive workplaces where every employee feels equipped to thrive. In fact, our 2024 DEI report found that employees who strongly believe their companies value diversity are 86% engaged, while those who strongly disagree are only 20% engaged. In other words, by demonstrating to your employees that you care about DEIB, you can build a more engaging workplace.

Employee engagement begins with understanding your employees

For many organizations looking to make a change, understanding what’s driving employee engagement is a helpful starting point. When you understand your employees – their motivators, emotions, feelings, and more – you put yourself in a better position to enact true change. You also set up the organization to experience higher levels of employee retention, motivation, innovation, and decision-making.

Remember, engagement will always ebb and flow, but with the right approach and mindset, you can use this key success metric to guide your organization’s path forward.For many organizations looking to make a change, understanding what’s driving employee engagement is a helpful starting point. When you understand your employees – their motivators, emotions, feelings, and more – you put yourself in a better position to enact true change. Remember, engagement will always ebb and flow, but with the right approach and mindset, you can use this key success metric to guide your organization’s path forward.

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This piece was originally published on April 4, 2023, and has been updated on November 20, 2024.