5 employee engagement strategies to drive company growth

Employee engagement is the level of enthusiasm and connection employees have with your organization. It’s a measure of how motivated people are to put extra effort into their roles and a sign of how committed they are to staying with your company.

Employee engagement is strongly correlated with increased productivity, higher profitability, and better employee retention. So, understandably, it’s a metric most organizations are eager to improve.

While most companies see the value in focusing on engagement, how to do so is less obvious. This guide shares practical employee engagement strategies you can use to build an organization and a culture your employees are excited about.

Why employee engagement strategies need a fresh approach

The desire for engaged employees isn’t new – it’s long been a focus for organizations. But, while the goal hasn’t changed, the world of work certainly has.

According to research from Gallup, 53% of remote-capable employees work using a hybrid model. Another 27% exclusively work remotely. This means that the in-office perks – like on-site gyms, catered lunches, and ping-pong tables – that used to be cornerstones of the employee experience no longer hold the appeal they once did.

Work arrangements are changing rapidly, and workers’ expectations are, too. A career used to be primarily a means of earning a paycheck, but today’s workers are increasingly interested in continuous learning, career progression, and achieving a sense of purpose and fulfillment in their jobs.

However, that doesn’t mean they intend to make their careers the centers of their lives. Today’s employees push back against unreasonable expectations and exploitative work cultures to pursue employer relationships that are more accommodating and mutually beneficial (hence why “quiet quitting” became such a buzzword). They expect their employers to not only acknowledge that employees have lives and responsibilities outside of work but to support that fact.

Employee engagement is more nuanced and complex than ever – and it’s high time that employers adopted a fresh and more relevant approach to engaging employees.

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Understanding the fundamentals of employee engagement

When organizations set out to improve employee engagement, they often overlook a basic fact: Engagement isn’t something you can act on directly. Instead, it’s an outcome of your actions and overall employee experience.

So, when you say you want to improve engagement, you’re actually saying that you want to take action on different aspects of your employees’ experience with your organization – with the end goal of increasing their engagement.

There are several different levers you can pull here. According to Culture Amp research, the main drivers of employee engagement are:

• Learning and development: Do employees feel like they’re able to make contributions to their development?
• Leadership: Do the company’s leaders demonstrate that people are important to the company’s success?
• Company performance: Does the company effectively direct resources, funding, people, and effort toward company goals?

Clear and honest communication underscores all of these elements. There’s a growing call for more transparency in organizations. This makes sense intutiively – after all, your efforts to engage employees won’t accomplish much if people aren’t in the loop about what you’re changing, why you’re doing so, and how it benefits them.

5 employee engagement strategies that deliver results

Understanding the best way to increase the number of engaged employees is fairly simple. All you have to do is ask your workers how you can improve their experience with your organization.

Regular employee surveys will provide valuable insights that you can use to make targeted improvements to your training and development programs, team-building activities, and other engagement initiatives.

Your organization is unique, which means your approach will be too. However, to help you get started, we’re sharing five employee engagement best practices that can benefit any organization.

1. Foster a feedback-driven culture

Learning and development are some of the top drivers of engagement, but for employees to grow and advance, they need feedback about how they’re doing.

Providing regular and helpful feedback improves employee performance, so consider switching to a continuous feedback model. With this approach, employee feedback isn’t reserved for annual performance reviews. Instead, it’s ingrained into employees’ daily work and offered consistently during 1 on1 meetings, team meetings, retrospectives, and more.

In addition to these regular conversations, implementing a real-time feedback tool can help employees stay informed about their progress and performance without needing to approach their manager directly for insights.

According to Gallup, 80% of employees who say they’ve received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged. Compare that to Gallup’s average of only 32% of employees who are fully engaged, and it’s easy to see that a culture of clear and consistent feedback can lead to more engaged employees.

Of course, a feedback-driven culture isn’t just about doling out constructive criticism to employees. It also means giving employees opportunities to regularly provide feedback to managers (also called upward feedback) and feedback about the organization and its leaders.

Soliciting this information through employee surveys or informal conversations can provide insights into how to improve your organization and further boost employee engagement.

2. Prioritize professional development

Consistent and clear employee feedback is a springboard for learning and growth, but it’s only the first step. Back that information up with opportunities, resources, and support for employee career development.

Unfortunately, many organizations fall short in this area. According to a recent Gartner survey, only 46% of employees are satisfied with the support they receive from their employers when growing in their careers.

You can show your commitment to employee training and development by:

• Designing clear and personalized career paths
• Providing hands-on opportunities for experiential learning (like job shadows and stretch projects)
• Hosting relevant workshops and employee training sessions
• Emphasizing knowledge sharing and a collaborative work environment
• Offering self-paced learning resources or training and development programs
• Creating mentorship programs that partner employees with experts and coaches

These employee development strategies will only be effective if employees have the time and encouragement to pursue them. Lack of time is a common barrier for employees who want to invest in their development, so ensure that workers have dedicated time for employee training and learning.

Employees don’t just need space for career development – they need support. Fostering psychological safety on your team shows employees that they should feel empowered toexpand their horizons, take risks, and make mistakes. They’re more likely to take advantage of training and development programs when they know they’re in an environment where they can safely try (and potentially fail at) new challenges.

3. Recognize and reward contributions

Improving employee engagement may seem complex, but don’t overlook the impact of a simple and genuine “Good job!”

According to Gallup, only one in three workers in the U.S. strongly agree that they’ve received recognition or praise for doing good work in the past seven days. Yet, adequate employee recognition is crucial for engagement (not to mention employee retention).

Much like employee feedback, recognition works best when it’s delivered frequently (and not just saved for annual performance reviews). To deliver meaningful recognition:

• Understand individual employee preferences: Do they like to be praised in front of a group, or would they rather have a private conversation? Do they prefer written feedback , or do they want feedback to be delivered in person? Understanding each employee’s preferred communication style (whether you learn this through employee surveys or informal conversations) will help you deliver praise that resonates with them.
• Offer creative rewards: Employee recognition is already meaningful, but adding an occasional reward – whether it’s a gift card or an unexpected day off – can make it even more meaningful.
• Encourage peer recognition: While you likely won’t find peer-to-peer recognition on most lists of team-building activities, it’s one of the best ways to help your team members forge deeper relationships with each other. Start a dedicated space (it can be a Slack channel or even a few minutes at the start of each team meeting) where people can easily share kudos and shoutouts.

4. Champion flexibility and work-life balance

It might sound strange that more time away from the demands of their roles could increase your employees’ commitment to your organization. Shouldn’t you try to get them to spend more time engaging with you and your team?

Research shows a positive correlation between flexible work arrangements and employee engagement. Yet, even among companies that offer flextime, these perks are often poorly defined or kept under wraps. In Harvard Business Review research, 64% of companies that offer flextime say their arrangements are informal.

If you decide to offer employees flexible schedules and work arrangements, document your policies so employees understand exactly what benefits are available to them – and what approvals (if any) they need to secure.

And while written procedures are helpful, nothing is more powerful than leading by example. Encourage your company’s leaders to take advantage of flextime and be vocal about it when they do. Seeing a VP openly state that they’re taking the afternoon off to attend their daughter’s piano recital is one of the best ways to show workers that they’re allowed and encouraged to do the same.

5. Strengthen leadership engagement

Leaders are one of the top drivers of employee engagement. Workers generally have a positive view of their bosses, though research also shows that employees feel increasingly detached from their work and their organizations.

Leaders can be the bridge here. According to a recent Gartner survey, 77% of employees place increased importance on manager support.

But, for managers to adequately support employees, they need adequate support from your organization. This can mean:

• Offering relevant training for managers, such as how to have difficult conversations with direct reports or how to lead hybrid teams (which is something that 70% of managers report they’ve had no training about)
• Equipping managers with the tools and resources they need to connect with their teams
• Providing more transparency around company decisions and strategies so managers can clearly communicate with their teams
• Offering mentorship programs (either traditional or reverse mentorship) specifically for managers who want to improve their leadership skills

All of these are positive steps. However, today’s managers already feel overwhelmed. Culture Amp data reveals that they’re spread thin, with most of their stressors relating to unmanageable workloads.

Additional expectations and training (even if helpful) add more to their plates. So, if you want managers to invest in their own development and relationships with their teams, you may have to adjust priorities and rebalance workloads.

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What to avoid when focusing on employee engagement

There are plenty of things you can do to improve your employee engagement – but there are also steps that can push you in the wrong direction. Here are three common mistakes to avoid when focusing on employee engagement.

Overloading employees with frequent surveys

Survey fatigue is common, particularly when workers feel pressured to participate in seemingly endless employee surveys on top of their regular job responsibilities.

While these surveys are invaluable for soliciting employee feedback and insights, it’s critical to space them out. Here at Culture Amp, we recommend the following survey cadence using a one-year structure with one survey per quarter:

• Quarter one: Baseline survey that provides the broad baseline for your culture or engagement levels
• Quarter two: Pulse survey that tracks progress on a specific activity resulting from your baseline survey, as well as core engagement questions
• Quarter three: Deep-dive survey that helps you identify and diagnose a specific topic that’s too difficult or complex to dig into in a baseline survey
• Quarter four: Pulse survey that tracks progress on a specific activity, as well as core engagement questions and follow-up questions based on results from your deep-dive survey

It’s also helpful to have an employee feedback and survey tool that streamlines the survey process for your employees and makes it easy for you to collect data and compare it against your company’s key performance indicators.

Ignoring feedback or delaying visible action

Here’s the thing about survey fatigue: People don’t get tired of sharing their opinions – they get tired of seeing their feedback go nowhere. Employees need to see meaningful changes in your company based on the input they share.

Unfortunately, only 6% of employees say their organization always acts on good suggestions or valid complaints. That frustrates employees and makes them less likely to engage in future surveys or attempts to collect feedback. Why should they take the time to share their opinions if leaders aren’t taking the time to consider or implement their suggestions?

At the end of the day, improving employee engagement isn’t just about collecting insights – it’s about taking action on feedback.

Offering generic perks

Many organizations roll out all sorts of perks, programs, and initiatives as they attempt to increase employee commitment and motivation. It’s a noble effort, but it can also be a wasted one. It’s not about the quantity of benefits you offer – it’s about the quality.

An effective employee engagement initiative satisfies your employees’ needs and desires. And the only way to offer that is to build a deep understanding (through employee surveys and other feedback sources) of what your employees truly want. That’s the information you’ll use to roll out the offerings that are most relevant and resonant.

Measuring success: How to track employee engagement outcomes

Investing in improving employee engagement is just that: an investment. And if you’re going to dedicate time, money, and resources to this effort, then you understandably want to know if it’s paying off.

That’s why you’ll closely measure your employee engagement initiatives (and outcomes) to monitor your progress and make adjustments when needed. Here’s how.

1. Define your key performance indicators

Start by establishing exactly what you’re trying to improve. Employee engagement is broad, so drill down to the specific metrics you want to change. Here are a few employee engagement metrics you could focus on:

• Voluntary and involuntary turnover rate
• Early turnover rate
• Retention rate
• Employee performance
• Employee productivity
• Internal promotions
• Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, decide on your key performance indicators to make it quantifiable. For example, you might set the following goal: Reduce voluntary turnover rate to below 10% annually.

Once you have a specific goal, you can focus on developing employee engagement strategies that push you toward that goal. You’ll also have a defined benchmark to help you evaluate your progress as you move forward.

2. Find the right tool

Engagement is fluid, and you need to be able to identify trends, proactively spot problem areas, and adapt quickly. That’s why finding the right tool – one that offers instant access to real-time engagement data – is so important.

Culture Amp provides dynamic dashboards and actionable insights from surveys, pulse checks, and feedback tools in one platform. With easy access to engagement metrics, you can fine-tune your engagement initiatives in real-time and ensure they’re as relevant and impactful as possible. Managers can access this information, too, which fosters a culture of knowledge sharing and empowers them to make changes on their own teams.

Additionally, you can use Culture Amp’s benchmarks to compare your performance against industry standards and better understand where your organization could improve.

3. Dig deeper than the data

Metrics are helpful, but they don’t tell the whole story. Our people scientists at Culture Amp can help you interpret your data, connect the dots, and develop relevant action plans.

When something in your data stands out to you, it’s worth taking extra steps to fill in the gaps and add more context to what you’re seeing in your numbers. You can do this by:

• Reviewing feedback from exit interviews and stay interviews
• Chatting directly with employees about their feedback and experiences
• Connecting with managers to hear about what they’re seeing on their teams

This helps you go beyond the digits and better understand your employee experience and how your initiatives are landing. You can also leverage tools like Storyboards, a people analytics tool that empowers HR teams to share their people data as tailored narratives, delivering the right insights to decision-makers in the context that matters most to them.

Engage (and retain) your employees

Every organization wants to improve employee engagement, but there’s no default formula for doing so. It’s less about following a specific mold and more about listening, adapting, and taking meaningful action.

If you’re not sure what to do, the above employee engagement strategies can help you get started. Put them into practice, commit to improving and monitoring for the long haul, and you’ll be well on your way to engaging (and retaining) your employees.

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