What Is Employee Engagement and Best Practices for HR

If you are a human resource professional, you’re more than likely concerned with having a successful employee engagement strategy. This is especially important today as we’re currently living in one of the tightest labor markets in modern history. With unemployment low and retention problems popping up across most of the business world, many have come to terms with the fact that they’ve ignored employee engagement for far too long.

On top of this, employee engagement can be difficult to understand, no matter how many books on the subject you read. Employees–and their goals, ideals, and backgrounds–can vary widely, making it difficult to create policies and programs that work for everyone on an organizational level.

So what is employee engagement exactly, and what makes a good strategy with employee engagement activities that will actually help you attract and retain quality talent? In this article, we will explore what employee engagement means, and how to improve it at your organization.

Employee engagement is how well an employee is actively engaged with their role in an organization. It is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals. Fully engaged employees care about the organization’s mission and future success, and have a real stake in how that success comes about. They don’t work only for a paycheck or the next promotion, but for the achievement of the organization’s goals.

Employee engagement is also the means by which the organization engages its employees to encourage this through various activities, programs, and policies. This involves efforts in career development, leadership, performance, culture, and other related areas of human resources.

The value of employee engagement cannot be overstated. A workforce that shows up and does their jobs well is only half the battle. Having actively engaged employees is essential to ensuring that your organization runs efficiently and productively as a whole.

However, employee engagement isn’t something that can be forced into existence. Sure, HR and management in general can do specific things that make workplaces as a whole more engaging, but those initiatives are only going to be engaging for those who want to be engaged in the first place. By using employee engagement activities and tools that force cooperation, organizations can actually create an environment of even further disengagement.

As we said, you may have employees who show up consistently or even do their jobs well, but they may not be actively engaged. In fact, the majority of workers likely fall into the disengaged category. This means that they show up to work and collect their paycheck, but they aren’t emotionally connected to their work.

Then there is another–albeit less common–level of employee disengagement where they are actively disengaged. This is where the problems come. Active disengagement is when a person becomes toxic and doesn’t care at all about their job or their company. They are unhappy at work and don’t want to be there.

This means the majority of the workforce is some level of disengaged. They may come to work and perform well, but they aren’t personally or emotionally connected to their role, and they may even be actively disengaged, feeling no emotional connection to their work. Your workforce will likely reflect this. You’ll have a few workers who are superstars, a good number of typical workers who show up and do their jobs well, and those few low performers who don’t seem to care at all (and could even become toxic).

So how do you improve your employee engagement? Is there a way to actually move people from one group to another? At Careerminds, our career and leadership development programs are designed to help you to address these organizational needs, empowering and engaging employees at every level to enhance skills, boost productivity, and elevate effectiveness for themselves and their teams. Click below to speak with our experts and learn more.

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Employee engagement can be a tricky thing to pin down because it is so personal and unique to each individual employee. There are a few key elements that you must understand if you hope to make a notable improvement in your employee engagement. These employee engagement activities and best practices involve a holistic approach across multiple HR functions.

Here are the best practices and activities that can help improve your employee engagement:

1. Start with employee engagement surveys
2. Understand employee engagement vs. satisfaction
3. Create individual employee development plans
4. Provide flexibility to all employees
5. Inspire and motivate your employees
6. Offer benefits that align with your company’s values
7. Hire employees who are most likely to be engaged
8. Foster diversity of people and thought
9. Create a culture of honesty and trust
10. Set this culture from the top down

Let’s break down each of these key employee engagement activities, step by step, and explain them as simply as possible.

When you first start looking into ways to increase employee engagement, you need to understand how to gain insights into your employees’ motivations and goals if you want to fully engage them on a deeper level. Employee engagement surveys are a great way to do this. The goal of the survey is to understand what motivates each individual employee, what their work and life goals are, and what roles they truly want.

You can utilize helpful employee engagement survey questions such as:

• Are you happy in your overall job?
• Do you enjoy the day-to-day experience of working here?
• What is your average stress level at work?
• Do you feel that your skills have improved in the last year?
• Are you getting the growth you need from this organization?
• Do you feel that your skills and knowledge are in alignment with others in your position throughout your field?
• What skills would you like to develop?
• What role would you want at this organization if you could switch?
• What is your dream job?

Engagement starts with understanding as much as possible about your employees, and surveys are a great way to accomplish this. All of these survey questions are trying to paint a picture of the employee’s satisfaction, motivations, and developmental needs. You may also want to add extra layers to this process, such as having managers interview their direct reports. Interviewing, especially when done by someone who is already close to the employee, can lead to greater insights that you can use to fully understand what you can do to make each of your employees more engaged.

One of the key elements these surveys will help identify is employee satisfaction. It’s important to understand that employee engagement and employee satisfaction are not the same thing. Just because someone is happy at work doesn’t mean they are engaged, and vice versa.

For example, imagine an employee who loves coming to work because they get to sit next to their best friend and chat all day. They may be very satisfied at work, but aren’t necessarily engaged. Or imagine an employee who works really hard every day to help the company meet its goals and is so stressed from this pressure that they aren’t happy, even though they are very engaged.

When you are thinking about employee engagement, make sure that you understand the distinction with employee satisfaction, and focus on both in your employee engagement surveys and activities. The goal is to have employees who are both engaged and satisfied, in a way that each reinforces the other.

Once you have all of this survey data, you’ll have insights into what every employee wants out of work and what will make them engaged. Now you can start to see what impactful changes you can make, and create a personalized plan for each employee to improve this for both the individual people and the organization as a whole.

One of the most important employee engagement best practices is talent development, not only for your leaders, but for every level of employee. While this can be costly and time consuming, it can also lead to greater productivity and profit for your organization. So if your HR team doesn’t have time to assess the right training and programs for each employee’s development plan, there are ways you can outsource this step.

One method is to empower the employees themselves to drive their own development. Budget a small development allowance for each employee, and let them come to their managers with ideas for their own development. If you allow the employee to choose what they are learning, they will be more invested in it, thereby increasing their engagement. You can also bring in outside experts to help design and drive your employee development, such as the highly qualified and experienced coaches who can customize our Careerminds career and leadership development programs to meet your needs.

As you create these individual development plans based on the employee engagement survey insights, make sure you allow for flexibility in how employees can show up and reach their goals. If you want them to be fully engaged, you need to understand and embrace that they have lives outside of work, and sometimes those lives will disrupt their work life. No one wants to work at a company where they can’t go pick up their sick kid from school, or have to miss a family member’s funeral because of a big presentation due the next day.

The solution is to allow workers more flexibility to get their work done on their own time and, when possible, in their own location. If they are able to complete their tasks and reach their goals by working from home when their child is home sick from school, or before they need to leave early from work for a doctor’s appointment, they should be able to. Treating employees like the adults they are and not micromanaging their work time allows them to work better in the long run and helps minimize disengagement. Not allowing employees to have this flexibility implies how little the company cares about its employees’ personal lives, which is a strong signal that they are not valued.

So make sure to build a certain level of flexibility into your company culture, perhaps with flexible work hours or the option to work remotely. Your employees will feel more comfortable having lives outside of work, which will help them feel more valued and motivated to do their work well, and be engaged when they are at work. Of course, there should always be guardrails to this flexibility. But if you focus on keeping employees engaged as a whole, you’ll be surprised at how little you need to use those guardrails.

Once you’ve finalized these flexible, data-backed development plans to engage your employees, it’s time to get them excited about the plan and goals for their work. One of the best ways to do this is with intrinsic motivation. This means when someone is motivated because they like or care about something. The opposite is extrinsic motivation, when someone is motivated by something external to them such as money or fame.

You can inspire this intrinsic motivation by reminding employees that they are part of something bigger. Your company’s mission, vision, and values will be integral to this, so make sure they are incorporated into your employees’ goals and tasks so they can see the impact of their work on the larger picture. You can also achieve this intrinsic motivation by allowing them to carve out work time for something they really enjoy, such as an interesting side project or new skills development. These strategies help ensure that employees are intrinsically motivated by the work itself.

Another very powerful way to motivate employees is to offer great benefits that align with the company’s mission and values. This will help you create an employee culture that is ideal for your unique organization. Understand what you want out of your company and employees, and then provide them with the benefits to fulfill that.

For example, if your company believes in appreciating the great outdoors, it makes sense to allow your employees time off to go do outdoor activities. Or if your company values being the best and brightest, you’ll want to place more emphasis on educational and developmental support for employees. The key is to give your employees the benefits they need to support your company’s values, allowing them to feel like they are a part of the greater mission.

In the same vein, another valuable benefit you can offer employees is regular appreciation and recognition for their work achievements. This will highlight how well their work is contributing to the company’s goals, values, and mission, giving them greater satisfaction and motivation in their work, all of which are crucial factors for employee engagement.

Besides implementing cultural improvements with your existing employees, you can also boost employee engagement by focusing on this during the hiring process for new employees. One of the strongest employee engagement best practices is to hire employees who are already likely to be engaged.

There are a number of ways you can do this. One method is to incorporate a personality assessment into the hiring process to determine whether a candidate aligns with your company’s culture. You can also develop interview questions to determine how excited and motivated this potential new employee will be. Look for candidates who have traits that indicate they are more likely to be motivated by your company’s mission and values.

It can also help to implement an employee referral program. If an engaged employee recommends a peer, they are also likely to be engaged. Lastly, collect references and check out a candidate’s previous work experience. Were they a high-performing employee at their last company? Do they have a lot of accomplishments listed on their LinkedIn? These are great signs of potential engagement.

Employee engagement also benefits from fostering a diverse workforce, both in terms of the people themselves and their perspectives and experience. When people talk about building diversity at their company, they generally think about race. But building a diverse company culture is so much more than that. It encompasses race, gender, age, financial background, education, skills, experience, and personalities.

To focus on diversity, you need to make sure that it is addressed in every step of your human resources strategy. This means developing diversity and inclusion strategies for your hiring, mentoring, performance management, and work-life programs at your company. A more diverse workforce is a stronger and more resilient one, both on an individual and organizational level, leading to stronger employee engagement and motivation, as well as improved company productivity, culture, and brand.

One of the biggest drivers of employee engagement is trust in leadership. If employees do not trust that upper and middle management will do the right thing, it can be hard for them to fully engage with their work. To improve this, allow employees to add their own input into the decisions being made. Give them a seat at the table and allow them to feel heard. Just because someone isn’t in a senior management role, doesn’t mean that they don’t care about what’s happening or have valuable ideas.

This open communication with leadership goes both ways. Set the tone by ensuring that your leaders exemplify honesty and transparency in their communication wherever possible. When employees experience dishonesty or secrecy, it can cause negative feelings about their work environment to bubble up, resulting in decreased employee engagement. So make sure you foster a company-wide culture where honesty and transparency are practiced.

Honesty and trust also apply on the peer-to-peer level among employees. Your company can have the best benefits and culture in the world, but the relationships your employees have with others at work is what really retains them. So make sure you facilitate and measure the strength of the relationships within teams, across departments, and between managers and their direct reports. This is another opportunity for those employee engagement surveys. You can ask employees to rate the strength of their relationships, if they have a close friend at work, and if they feel they’re getting the management support they need to be successful. You can then compile this data to identify trends, areas for improvement, and valuable next steps.

Culture and relationships are vital for employee engagement, and honesty and trust are crucial to building those. So all of this is interconnected and important. By being open, honest, and caring, you help employees understand their value at the company and connect with both the organization and one another, ultimately driving better employee engagement across the board.

All of the above employee engagement activities and best practices are great, but they can only have as much impact as the executive team allows them to. As hard as your employee engagement team may try, the main influence on an employee’s work life won’t be HR initiatives, but rather their management. If the leadership at the very top of the management structure focuses on creating an engaging environment for their direct reports, that will trickle down to people at every level of the reporting structure.

This means providing your senior leadership, as well as every level of management, with training about what is employee engagement and specific examples of how to implement this into their leadership style. Accompany this with data about why engagement is important. Show statistics about how employee engagement can save the company money, improve productivity, increase morale, and any other business metrics that would be impactful. You can also share summarized insights from your employee engagement surveys–taking care not to reveal individual employee results of course–in order to relate this to your specific teams and their leaders.

The truth about employee engagement is that there is no silver bullet solution. Every employee is different and engaged by different things. Using surveys, interviews, and other means of data collecting will help you hone in on this to understand each employee’s level of engagement and satisfaction, and create individual plans that foster what they need to feel fulfilled in their role. You need to customize each experience based on what the employee wants if you want them to be satisfied and engaged. Then you can make sure every employee is empowered to execute their plan with flexibility, intrinsic motivation, value-based benefits, meaningful relationships, and a strong company culture of diversity, honesty, trust, and aligned leadership.

The answer to improving employee engagement is a simple one. If you treat people well, get them invested in their own development, and allow them to work on teams and projects that align their personal goals with the organization’s, you’ll see that engagement doesn’t have to be a mystery.

A fully engaged worker believes in the company’s mission, feels a strong sense of accomplishment at work, and will go above and beyond to make sure everything is running smoothly. In other words, they are the very best employees to have because they personally care for the success of the business as a whole. If you implement these employee engagement activities and best practices, you’ll be well on your way to giving your whole organization a boost.

At Careerminds, our career and leadership coaching programs can help elevate your engagement and efficiency, both individually and organizationally, to ensure everyone in your company can achieve their goals. Click below to speak with one of our experts and see if we are the right partner for your organization.

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Rebecca Ahn

Rebecca is a writer, editor, and business consultant with over 10 years of experience launching, managing, and coaching small to midsize companies on their business, marketing, and HR operations. She is a passionate people advocate who believes in building strong people, teams, and companies with empowering culture, content, and communication that facilitates meaningful results at every level and touchpoint. In her spare time, Rebecca is an avid traveler and nomad who also enjoys writing about travel safety and savvy. Learn more on her LinkedIn page.