Jan 20, 2025 | HR, Employee Engagement
To increase employee engagement levels, employers should give careful thought to the design of engagement initiatives.
How to Develop and Sustain Employee Engagement
There are four areas to focus on when looking to improve employee engagement:
- General Practices
- HR Practices
- Communication
- Metrics
However, before you go and start looking at how to improve employee engagement, ensure you understand what is employee engagement.
General Practices for Employee Engagement
As HR professionals consider adopting or modifying practices or initiatives to increase employee engagement, they should:
Make Sound Investments
The organization should consider the strategic implications of various HR practices and determine which are more important and merit greater investment to enhance engagement levels.
Develop a Compelling Business Case
HR professionals should be able to demonstrate how these investments have led to positive, measurable business outcomes for the organization or other businesses.
Consider Unintended Consequences
When evaluating alternatives for redesigning HR practices to foster employee engagement, think about the likely impact of the revised policies. Are there potentially unintended, unfavorable consequences that may occur based on the impact of that change on employees in different circumstances and life situations?
Base Investment Decisions on Sound Data
Employee engagement should be measured annually. Survey items should be linked to the organization's key performance measures, such as profitability, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Outcomes of employee engagement research should include the identification of the highest-impact engagement levers and survey items that differentiate top-performing business units from less successful units.
Create an Engagement Culture
This can be done by communicating the value of engagement in the mission statement and executive communications, ensuring that business units implement their engagement action plans, monitoring progress, adjusting strategies and plans as needed, and recognizing and celebrating progress and results.
HR Practices for Employee Engagement
HR practices have a significant impact on employee engagement. In fact, the roles of HR and management in employee engagement are huge.
The following practices can increase employee engagement:
Job Enrichment
Incorporate meaning, variety, autonomy and co-worker respect into jobs and tasks so that employees view their role more broadly and become more willing to take on duties beyond their job description.
Recruiting
Target applicants who are likely to view their work as interesting and challenging. Encourage those who are not suited for particular work to opt out of the process.
Selection
Choose candidates who are most likely to perform job duties well, make voluntary contributions and avoid improper conduct.
Training and Development
Provide orientation to create understanding about how the job contributes to the organization. Offer skill development training to increase job performance, satisfaction and self-efficacy.
Strategic Compensation
Use pay-for-performance programs to focus employees' attention on incentivized behaviors. Adopt competency-based pay to encourage the acquisition of knowledge and skills and enhance employee performance.
Performance Management
Set challenging goals that align with the organization's strategic objectives, provide feedback, and recognize accomplishments and extra voluntary contributions.
Communication Strategies for Employee Engagement
Targeted communication initiatives can enable managers and HR professionals to stay on top of employee engagement issues, get ongoing feedback from employees, and anticipate the changing needs of workgroups.
Managers and HR professionals should take advantage of opportunities to engage employees and should use varied communication methods to do so.
Communication Opportunities
Employers have numerous opportunities for "engageable moments," when they can motivate and provide direction for employees.
Formal opportunities include:
- Recruitment
- Onboarding
- Performance reviews
- Goal setting
- Training
- Communications by senior leaders
- Employee surveys
Informal opportunities include:
- Coaching
- Mentoring
- Career development discussions
- Ongoing performance feedback
- Recognition programs
- Company social events
- Personal crises
Communication Methods
These two communication methods can go a long way to enhance employee engagement.
Keeping in Touch
Ongoing communications with workgroups can occur through regular weekly or biweekly meetings, ideally with 10-15 employees in each meeting. In this forum, issues can be aired or ideas can be discussed to gain immediate feedback. Another component of keeping in touch is one-on-one meetings with an employee who is targeted for superior performance, identified for performance improvement or randomly chosen from the workgroup.
Remote Communication
Different technologies allow managers and HR professionals to maintain contact, including:
- Employee listening platforms where HR can survey workers, gather comments and suggestions, conduct exit interviews, etc.
- Social media and mobile app resources to discuss issues, share ideas, conduct surveys and vote on issues
- Blogs that routinely inform and update employees on new initiatives and allow employee responses to be recorded and openly available
- Videoconferencing and teleconferencing
- E-mailed newsletters
Metrics Used for Employee Engagement
Many organizations conduct workforce surveys to measure levels of employee engagement within the organization and to analyze the relationships between employee engagement and key business outcomes.
The results of such surveys can identify which engagement initiatives are achieving desired goals. Surveys can be helpful in gauging levels of employee engagement, but employers need to realize that employee engagement surveys differ from other employee surveys.
For the best results, employers should create an overall engagement strategy that goes beyond simply measuring engagement scores. Ideally, an employee engagement strategy should be created before an engagement survey is administered.
An effective plan will detail these five components:
- How the strategy will be communicated
- How action areas will be identified
- What measurable outcomes will be used to evaluate progress
- What specific actions will be taken to address the survey results
- How the engagement strategy will be sustained over time
Get Help With Employee Engagement
Businesses that are struggling with employee engagement may want to check out this guide to employee engagement and retention.
Contact us today to learn more about how we are already helping countless businesses with employee engagement.