‘Drive employee engagement’ sounds like a great goal. We know that employees who are engaged at work are more productive, more innovative, and are likely to stay with their employer longer.
But what does employee engagement look like in practice? Beyond fun team-building activities, what practical ways can organizations help employees feel motivated, inspired, and connected to their work?
From the experts at 15Five, here are some concrete steps and employee engagement examples that can help you in your efforts to create a highly engaged workforce.
Clarify responsibilities and objectives.
‘Role clarity’ sounds very basic. Doesn’t everyone know what their job is?
And yet many people You don’t have clear goals to work on – or even certainty about what is expected of them, day by day. Without clarity, too many talented people are simply doing the things they think are most important.
This can lead to employees feeling unappreciated, or even reprimanded, because their work was not aligned with organizational priorities or managers’ expectations. That is a demoralizing situation for anyone, and makes it impossible to build psychological safety. It also tends to lead to lower job satisfaction.
Role clarity means an accurate and constantly updated job description. But it also means ensuring that people always have goals/OKRs to work towards and a clear vision of how those goals are helping to deliver overall business impact.
Hold regular 1-1 meetings
The best way to provide clarity and improve employee engagement is through regular and ongoing communication. 1-1 meetings make it an integral part of your organization’s workflow.
1-1 meetings they are the perfect time to clarify expectations, share goals, and discuss progress. But there is also room for much more.
Employees can share their long-term career goals and aspirations so they can work with their manager to envision a future in the organization. Employers can also share what concrete actions are being taken to keep people engaged and create a better experience for everyone.
Lead with shared values
Shared values are a major driver of employee engagement. Shared values not only help people connect with their employer, but also help them connect with each other. This creates friendship and camaraderie, which, in turn, drives employee engagement.
But nurturing the company values that your people truly care about is not an easy task, and it is not something that can be forced. One strategy is to leverage a strong company vision, focused on high and ambitious values. For example, the vision of outdoor clothing company Patagonia is “we are in business to save our home planet.”
Strong statements like this have the effect of attracting employees who are already aligned with what you stand for. In these values-driven organizations, mentoring, team building, and even job shadowing programs can help employees connect with one another through these shared values.
Get leadership on board
If leadership sees engagement as “just a HR project,” you’ll never see meaningful change.
He is It’s a good idea to have an ‘engagement owner’, usually within the HR department, who oversees the initiative. But to make a real impact, engagement needs participation and action from the highest levels of your organization. Company-level executives must truly believe that employee engagement is important to driving business results.
When planning your engagement strategy, make sure you have at least one senior leadership ally and that the C-suite approves and buys into your strategy. It’s not enough to simply collect engagement data – those findings need to be treated as a key business metric, just like customer acquisition or gross sales.
Create a survey strategy that really works
Employee surveys are the most common way to collect such engagement data. But sadly, ill-conceived and ineffective surveys are rampant in all industries and organizations of all sizes.
Too many surveys pester employees with too-frequent questions or are logged only once a year, which means they never have an up-to-date picture of what’s going on with their people. It’s also common to rely on subjective and vague employee engagement survey questions created by the survey manager themselves, or simplistic metrics like Net Promoter Score.
Instead, effective surveys should use statistically valid questions with clear benchmarks, surveying employees at a regular cadence that aligns with their own performance cycles.
Realistically, working with an experienced third party (like 15Five) is the best way to set up a survey strategy that works, not only with creating a useful survey, but also with interpreting findings that can be surprising and challenging, and Turn that knowledge into action. .
Translate findings into action
Listening is nothing unless you act on what employees share. In fact, if employees give genuine and thoughtful responses to the survey, and feel like they’re screaming into the void, that could actively hurt engagement.
When you get leadership buy-in, make sure executives understand that you’re not just collecting data, but translating it into action. Based on the findings that emerged from employee feedback, propose potential new policies, team discussion topics, and clear, time-bound actions for leaders and managers.
For example, if your people are exhausted, set up paid “relax and recharge” days company-wide. If employees are worried about the future, emphasize professional mentoring and coaching. Communicate regularly to hold leaders accountable, ensure plans are implemented, and assess how they are affecting your people.
Pledge in Action: Woodard Cleanup and Restoration
Woodard’s Cleaning & Restoration is a Missouri business run by the same family for 75 years. Creating positive experiences has always been a top priority – within their community, they are a beloved legend among customers and employees.
But with 250 employees, Woodard’s was ready to scale even further. They wanted to make sure their survey and engagement strategy could keep up.
Prior to working with 15Five, Woodward worked with another company participating in standard employee surveys once a year. But the leaders did not feel that the strategy was helping them achieve their goals.
“We’d retrieve the results, do an hour with the management team, and then it would just disappear,” explained John Gagnepain, Director of Training and Leadership Development.
Instead, Woodard decided to partner with 15Five for a more integrated continuous performance management strategy. The new surveys have a more regular cadence and the findings always translate to key organizational priorities.
“[15Five’s] quarterly surveys allow us to focus on something specific for three to four months, and then get timely feedback on the next survey to see if what we’re doing is making a difference,” Gagnepain said.
15Five’s coaching services also help Woodard managers improve based on feedback, while maintaining strong team bonds and psychological safety. “It’s good to talk to someone you know has no ulterior motives,” says Gagnepain. “You can say what you need to say to someone whose only responsibility is to help you succeed.”
Woodard’s results speak for themselves.
Today, 95% of employees are participating in the new surveys, a 27% increase over its previous model. Since partnering with 15Five, Woodard’s engagement score has increased by approximately 2% each year, and employee turnover has decreased by an incredible 75%.
Take your engagement strategy into the 21st century
In our competitive business landscape, HR leaders don’t have the luxury of second guessing how their employees are doing. They need hard data to be sure, which is why measuring employee engagement is so important.
With 15Five, you keep the pulse of your organization, staying on top of how you can best meet the needs of your employees and continue to deliver a positive employee experience. It’s a complete, all-in-one platform for collecting feedback, facilitating conversations, and improving performance across your organization.
Learn more about 15Five’s engagement assessment tools today.