I’m a big fan of Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, which is an excellent resource for learning about employee engagement. In this year’s report, they found that only 31% of U.S. employees are engaged at work — that’s a record low since Gallup started measuring it back in 2015.
That’s pretty shocking. I’ve written before about how disengaged workers can hurt company performance even during difficult economic times:
During a recession, when companies need their best and brightest to keep things going, disengaged workers tend to be more likely to leave than their engaged counterparts. Jim Harter, who has studied employee engagement extensively, writes:
In other words, disengaged employees are “just waiting around to see what happens” during downturns.
And as you might expect, there’s a lot of research showing that disengaged employees are much more likely to leave. A recent meta-analysis looked at data from 68 different studies, and found that disengaged employees reported being part of workforces with disengagement rates ranging from 50% to 87%. This means that in most organizations, a majority of employees are not fully committed to their jobs.
There are plenty of reasons to care about employee engagement. Engaged employees are more productive, have lower absenteeism, collaborate better with colleagues, retain customers better, and are less likely to voluntarily quit. And while engagement isn’t the sole factor behind these outcomes, it’s clearly a major one.
But there are also competitive advantages to having an engaged workforce. High engagement leads to higher retention, which is good for your bottom line. It also helps you attract top talent, because people want to work somewhere where they’ll feel like they’re being treated fairly and given opportunities to grow. And it makes your employees more loyal to your company, and more likely to refer their friends to apply for jobs.
So if you care about your company’s success, you should definitely care about employee engagement. But figuring out how to improve engagement is tricky. There’s no single strategy that will work everywhere. Some strategies that work great for one company won’t do so well for another. You need to choose engagement tactics that match your organization’s needs.
Why engagement is a shared responsibility
Gallup explains why engagement is everyone’s problem:
Engagement is shared responsibility across leaders, managers, and employees…Leaders set the tone by buying into engagement, communicating it, and modeling it. Managers make engagement real through consistent behaviors and practices. Employees communicate their own engagement needs and help each other move toward engagement…
In highly engaged workplaces, executive leaders buy into engagement, communicate it, and model it. Qualitative case study research explored the strategies communication business leaders use to engage employees and increase profits.
So every leader, manager, and employee has some role to play in creating an engaged workplace. The first step is understanding what engagement really means and why it matters.
If you think about all the different ways to approach engagement, it’s easy to assume that there’s one right way for every situation. After all, it’s possible that there’s a universal solution that works perfectly for every company, just like there’s a universal solution to everything else in life.
But that’s not true. No single engagement strategy works everywhere. Every organization has unique factors that shape its needs, and those factors must inform your choice of engagement strategy. For example, whether you’re a small startup or a huge multinational conglomerate will determine how many resources you have available to invest in employee engagement. Your geographic location will affect which types of engagement programs are most popular with your employees. Your core values and long-term goals will influence what kind of culture you want to create. And your employees’ preferences will determine what kinds of recognition and career development programs are most effective.
So you need to take a careful look at your organization’s specific characteristics before choosing an engagement strategy. If you pick a strategy without considering your company’s size, geography, values, and other factors, you’re probably going to end up with something that doesn’t work very well.
High-impact strategies that tend to work
One strategy that seems to work especially well in many situations is investing in your employees’ careers. According to Gallup, 94% of employees would stay with their company longer if it invested in their career development:
Career mentoring is a powerful tool for improving employee engagement. Here are a few examples of different mentoring formats:
Reverse mentoring: Younger employees mentor older employees, bridging generations and encouraging knowledge sharing
Flash mentoring: Employees learn from experts in numerous subject areas
Mentoring circles: Peer-to-peer learning and development as a group
Jim Harter recommends prioritizing growth and development in order to build a culture of trust and communication:
Recognition is also an important part of employee engagement. But it’s not enough to simply give people rewards; you also need to recognize their contributions in non-reward-based ways. Here’s what best-in-class recognition programs look like:
Peer-to-peer recognition
Manager recognition
Long-service awards
Milestone celebrations
The key is to regularly acknowledge your employees’ efforts and achievements. Regularly appreciating your employees’ efforts significantly boosts morale and engagement.
Another crucial engagement tactic is frequent and transparent communication. Building trust between employees and management is essential to creating a sense of belonging among employees. When employees understand what their role is in contributing to the company’s mission, they’re more likely to speak up, engage, and fuel the culture. Frequent communication improves understanding, creates a sense of value, and encourages active participation.
Here’s what regular communication looks like:
Builds trust
Improves understanding
Creates a sense of value and belonging
Employees connected to their organization’s vision and understanding of their role’s contribution are more likely to speak up, engage, and fuel the culture.
Managers can use measurement tools and surveys to drive real engagement improvement rather than just collect data. Best measurement involves structures coaching conversations and performance reviews, tracks clarity, resources, recognition, individual strengths, drives follow-up action. Gallup’s 12 employee engagement questions structure manager-employee interactions. Surveys surface what managers and leadership cannot see from their position. Surveys including workload and wellbeing questions help HR identify where gap between policy and practice is widest.
Hybrid teams and tracking results
Are the same engagement strategies applicable to hybrid and remote teams? Many of the core drivers of engagement apply regardless of whether your team is co-located or working remotely. Clarity of expectations, recognition, career development, and quality of management are all important for both hybrid and remote teams.
However, certain tactics become more critical when your team is working remotely. Without the benefit of co-location, regular video check-ins are particularly important for maintaining relationships. Asynchronous recognition tools such as Slack messages and email are also helpful for recognizing employees’ efforts. Setting explicit goals for each employee becomes more important when you’re not meeting them in person.
Finally, virtual mentoring is recommended for hybrid environments.
The outcome of any engagement strategy is directly tied to retention. Engagement and retention are directly linked; reduced voluntary turnover is listed among the direct benefits of an engaged workforce. Patterns across several engagement indicators reveal whether engagement is improving, holding, or declining.
Therefore, tracking your engagement data over time is the best way to know whether your efforts are working.