How to Engage Employees - The Full Guide

To master employee engagement is no easy feat, especially when every workplace is different. Team engagement can be influenced by a variety of factors, which makes it difficult to motivate employees as a manager or executive.

A report by Gallup shows that only 20 percent of employees feel engaged at work which shows the magnitude of the challenge. 

Despite this, there are methods that can keep employees motivated and engaged in the office, and we can learn a great deal from the successes of other noteworthy organizations. Read on to discover how eight leaders from across the country engage their employees in the workplace.  

Also read: 6 Employee Engagement Strategies

How to engage employees

It is important to remember that your team is composed of unique individuals who often respond better to certain employee engagement ideas than others.

The key to meaningfully engaging employees and keeping them motivated is to talk to them. Understand how they enjoy receiving feedback, how they want to be recognized and what they value most about the office environment. Your long term aim needs to be to develop an employee engagement strategy that’s carefully tailored to your team and its unique needs. 

Here is a shortlist of ideas to engage your employees: 

• Create a welcoming environment for all employees

• Include employees within your strategy development, market growth and setbacks so they know the impact of their efforts

• Offer positive reinforcement by recognizing employees

• Host social events to connect employees with each other

• Allow employees to take ownership of projects, activities and events

Remember that engagement levels will shift as you onboard new team members, launch in new markets and expand your business. Enforce an employee engagement survey to track your progress and keep a pulse on your team’s engagement levels. If you start to see a dip in a certain sector of your strategy, it may be because you need to increase your efforts.

Or it could be that your team’s values may have evolved and they’re now responding better to a different approach. Either way, you need to ask your employees to find out the answer.

Additionally,it is always helpful to get suggestions from teams who have a highly engaged workforce. 

Also read: Improving Business Productivity

What does employee engagement look like?

Employee engagement is the degree to which employees are passionate and invested in the work and the company. There is a strong link between workforce engagement and job satisfaction, but one does not guarantee the other. Employees can be incredibly satisfied in their role without being fully engaged. 

Individuals that are highly engaged not only want to do well in their roles, but they want to help the company achieve its goals. These employees will believe that their work positively contributes to their team’s and the organization’s success. Employee engagement is a complex idea that showcases the emotional connection employees have to their job. 

Also read: What Are 8 Ways To Increase Employee Loyalty?

Why is employee engagement important?

Why should you care about employee engagement? To summarize, highly engaged business units are far less productive, profitable and less likely to retain top talent if the company has low levels of employee engagement. To further showcase the importance of employee engagement within your business, take a look at this statistic below. 

Employees who are actively disengaged cost the global economy $8.1 trillion dollars in lost productivity every year, according to the Gallup report. 

Disengaged employees are those who don’t care about being at work. These will be the individuals that will undermine your top performers and your company’s success. Not only that, low employee engagement will cost you money.

Now that you fully understand the benefits of a highly engaged workforce, you can work to engage your employees with these 8 tips below.

Also read: Ways In Which You Can Show Employees You Are Thankful

Prioritize, Diversity and inclusion

If you are thinking about prioritizing employee engagement, this means investing in your team members, which will help you improve retention and attendance.

Having a company culture that welcomes all individuals is crucial to engaging your employees. By celebrating diversity and making inclusivity a central part of your office environment, you send a great supportive message to your employees.

Promote transparency across all levels

Showing confidence in the leadership team plays a large role in engaging employees. In fact, almost two-thirds of employees report having trust in senior management as key to their satisfaction. People need leaders that they can count on to guide the company forward and they want to know the positive impact of their efforts. Ensure you include employees in conversations about strategy development, market growth and any setbacks the team may experience. 

Also read: Employee Motivation Strategies

Organize social outings

If employees feel that they have more of a connection to the people around them, they are more likely to engage with their jobs. 

Putting on social events, such as happy hours, sponsored lunches and team dinners all foster personal relationships and improved communication between colleagues. Improved communication between colleagues opens the door to new ideas and breakthroughs. 

Plan volunteer opportunities

Implementing volunteering has been shown to strengthen employee relationships and encourage individuals to engage more passionately with their work. To add to this, 89 percent of U.S workers believe companies that offer volunteer opportunities boast better work environments. Social events let employees form personal relationships, however volunteerism helps establish deeper connections founded on shared interest and passions. 

Encourage employees to take ownership 

Employees will engage with their work more if they feel they have skin in the game. Giving them the responsibility to spearhead a project will help them connect with their work on a different level. This method can be the difference between job satisfaction and true engagement. 

Give every employer a seat at the table

Within a business, you never know where the next big idea will come from. Similarly to encouraging an owner mentality across your organization, giving employees a voice makes them feel valued and fosters an important emotional investment in the company’ success. Open up the conversation to all employees and tell everyone that their ideas are always welcome. 

Recognize and reward employees

If you are wondering how to motivate employees, you’ve probably considered some type of monetary reward. Despite this, there are easy ways to engage and motivate employees in the workplace - without money, To simply summarise, employees want to know that their contributions to the company and culture don’t go unnoticed. 

Employee recognition is a tool of positive reinforcement. If you acknowledge the great effort that individuals put in, you encourage them to repeat the behaviour, which also prompts their colleagues to do the same. Organizations that make a point to recognize employees based on values see a 90 percent positive impact on employee engagement.

Lead by example

If the C-suite and managers aren’t engaged, employees certainly won’t be. To motivate employees to achieve great results, the leaders themselves need to believe it’s possible.

Final thoughts

If you have previously struggled to engage your employees within your business, then hopefully this list will have dramatically changed the way you motivate your employees.

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