Employee Engagement – Everything You Need To Know

Paul Lopushinsky (Law-puh-shin-ski)1 CommentEmployee Experience

Employee Engagement Can Make Or Break An Organization.

An organization can have a great product that meets the needs of its customers, but if it’s constantly dealing with low engagement, they’re not reaching their full potential. By focusing on employee engagement strategies, your organization will be able to reach its full potential. You don’t want your employee engagement strategies to smell like dookie.

We’ve created a YouTube Video on the subject which you can watch below!

 

This Guide On Employee Engagement Will Tackle The Following: 

(click on the links below to jump to that section)

  1. What Is Employee Engagement, And Why It Is Important?
  2. The Differences In Engaged, Unengaged, And Disengaged Employees.
  3. The Reasons For Low Employee Engagement.
  4. What Organizations Get Wrong About Most Employee Engagement Strategies.
  5. Why Employee Engagement Matters Less Than You Think
  6. Seven Employee Engagement Strategies To Boost Your Organization.
  7. Conclusion And Next Steps.

1. What Is Employee Engagement, And Why It Is Important?

Let’s start off by defining Employee Engagement, and the best way to do so is to look at what wikipedia has to say about it:

Employee engagement is a fundamental concept in the effort to understand and describe, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the relationship between an organization and its employees. An “engaged employee” is defined as one who is fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work and so takes positive action to further the organization’s reputation and interests. An engaged employee has a positive attitude towards the organization and its values.[1] In contrast, a disengaged employee may range from someone doing the bare minimum at work (aka ‘coasting’), up to an employee who is actively damaging the company’s work output and reputation.

 

To see the importance that employee engagement has on an organization, let’s look at what happens when employee engagement is low.

Here are some select stats from the following article – Show Me the Money: The ROI of Employee Engagement

  • Companies with low employee engagement earn an operating income 32.7 percent lower than companies with more engaged employees.
  • A disengaged employee costs an organization approximately $3,400 for every $10,000 in annual salary.
  • Low employee engagement cost the American economy up to $350 billion per year due to lost productivity.

Three Hundred and Fifty BILLION dollars! Nothing to shake a stick at.

Note that $350 billion is just for the North American economy, where engagement rates are higher than internationally. Worldwide, engagement rates sit around 10%, while North America is at 30%.

That’s a lot of currency being tossed away due to a strong lack of employee engagement strategies.

Now let’s take a look at some stats & figures for when you have high employee engagement (from The ROI of Employee Engagement: Show Me the Money!):

  • Companies with highly engaged employees have earnings-per-share levels 2.6 x higher than companies with low engagement scores.
  • Companies with highly engaged employees experience 2x higher net income than companies with poor engagement scores
  • Organizations with highly engaged employees experience a 7x-greater 5-year total annual shareholder return than organizations with less-engaged employees
  • Engaged companies grow profits as much as 3X faster than their competitors.

2. The Differences In Engaged, Unengaged, And Disengaged Employees.

Before discussing reasons why there is low employee engagement and why most employee engagement strategies don’t help, it’s important to distinguish the difference between engaged, unengaged, and disengaged employees.

When doing research on this difference, I came across the following quote::

“A CEO was asked how many people work in his company: ‘About half of them,’ he responded.”
Xoxoday – All About Employee Engagement

The Engaged employee: 

They’re the go-getters. They are committed to the company and enjoy their work.

They don’t twiddle their thumbs and wait around to do what they are told – they make things happen.

It’s a huge blow if you have engaged employees leave.

And no, employees who are acting like robots and always towing the company line to appease their bosses isn’t an engaged employee (that sounds more like someone who feel for the corporate cult). They’re just someone who wants to ensure they still have a job so they can pay off the mortgage.

The Unengaged Employee: 

Sleepwalking through their role. In and out for the paycheque.

That said, if the right conditions pop up, they can become engaged.

Think of them like lightbulbs that just need to be switched on. With some tweaking of your employee engagement strategies, you can bump them into the engaged employee category.

The unengaged should convince you of the need for employee engagement strategies.

The Disengaged Employee:

They undermine others, and the organization. They don’t care how the organization is doing. The classic example here that we’re likely as familiar with is Peter Gibbons, the main character of Office Space.

Employee Engagement Strategies

I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob! Source: Reading in Bed

3. The Reasons For Low Employee Engagement.

You’re likely making a list of people at your organization that fall under either engaged, disengaged, or unengaged. You’re probably asking yourself: 

“Why are people are not engaged at work? Why aren’t our employee engagement strategies working?”

Back to the stats! Here is a great article that collects a number of reasons employees are not engaged:

Why Your Employees Are Just Not That Into You

  • Only 37% of employees understand what their employers are trying to achieve and why.
  • Only 20% of employees see how their contribution adds to their employer’s goals.
  • Employees aren’t given a reason to care about contributing.
  • Management doesn’t know how to connect with employees.
  • Employees don’t receive recognition, or even a simple thanks from their bosses or management.

None of these should come as a surprise to you. It’s obvious why there is low employee engagement if the above are common. Again, it’s further proof for the need of employee engagement strategies. Yet, they’re not really invested in.

4. What Companies Get Wrong In Regards To Their Employee Engagement Strategies.

Now that we’ve asked the question, “why is employee engagement important?”, the impacts of low employee engagement,  and the reasons why it occurs, we can look at ways that some organizations try to address employee engagement, and why their approach is flawed.

These are part of many organization’s employee engagement strategies, but fail to drive engagement. They see the need for employee engagement, but unfortunately miss the target.

1. Benefits And Perks.

One of the most common employee engagement strategies is that organizations think offering the best perks and benefits will take care of their employee engagement woes. No more low employee engagement if we have ping-pong tables in the office right?

Can this help with employee engagement? Absolutely. However, it’s not the golden ticket that many organizations think it is. It’s a band-aid solution to a wound. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but it’s not going to heal that wound. You need to call the Doctor for that one.

That said, I would make an exception for remote work, as it’s a fantastic benefit that if used correctly, can greatly benefit your organization. I say used correctly, because it’s still a challenge to keep people engaged.

You can read our post on creating a remote work culture here.

Many organizations will try to create a more engaging workplace by throwing things like ping-pong tables into the office in order to boost engagement. This doesn’t work long-term.

While this can be a step in the right direction, organizations miss the fact that it isn’t a silver-bullet solution to raising engagement rates. I’m all for adding more play in the workplace, but you’re greatly limiting yourself if you’re just throwing in things like ping-pong tables, or even worse, ending up with forced fun in the office.
employee engagement

2. Employee Engagement Surveys And A Lack Of Action

When was the last time you did an engagement survey? Did you feel that your feedback was taken into consideration? No?

You’re not alone. It plays a large part in low employe engagement.

Plenty of organizations will collect engagement surveys, and that’s it. What about the feedback? Who gives a hoot! We’ve shown that we care, and taken action to collect the feedback! It’t the thought that counts.

And people are surprised when employee engagement surveys don’t work.

It’s not the methodology behind them, it’s mainly due to the fact that most organizations will do nothing with them.

Sadly, this happens all too often. I’ve done surveys and never heard anything about collective feedback afterwards. I’m sure you’ve done a survey that seemed to disappear into the void.

low employee engagement

The Void – Where Employee Surveys Can End Up

Or even worse, you’re one of those who collected the feedback, washed your hands clean of it, and did nothing with it. Shame on you!

If you struggle with low employee engagement, you only have yourself to blame.

Think of these surveys like going to the Doctor. It’s great to get a regular checkup, and a recommendation on what to do. Maybe you cut back on cholesterol, or do more exercise.

You can’t just go, “Well, I’ve been to the Doctor, that’s good enough! Forget the feedback and advice they had for me to improve my health.”

That would be silly, right? Why even bother going to the Doctor in the first place if you’re not going to do anything with it?

Sadly, that’s what most organizations do. They simply don’t bother. So why not employees?

Hence, you end up with low employee engagement and another one of the many ineffective employee engagement strategies as a result of employees not feeling like their feedback is being taken into consideration.

Employee Engagement Strategies

Employee Engagement Surveys are Doctor’s visits. Be sure to follow through! Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash.

5. Why Employee Engagement Matters Less Than You Think.

Before we get into six employee engagement strategies you can use at your organization, we need to talk about how employee engagement matters less than you think.

Right now, you might be asking yourself, “Why are you telling this now Paul?”

Well, employee engagement is still important. However, what gets overlooked in regards to employee engagement is personality.

Let’s dive into this:

This comes from the excellent study by Young, HR, Glerum, DR, Wang, W, Joseph, DL. Who are the most engaged at work? A meta‐analysis of personality and employee engagement. J Organ Behav. 2018.

Harvard Business Review broke down this paper here – Is Employee Engagement Just a Reflection of Personality?

A recent meta-analysis provides some much needed data-driven answers. In this impressive study which synthesized data from 114 independent surveys of employees, comprising almost 45,000 participants from a wide range of countries — and mostly published academic studies, which met the standards for publication in peer-reviewed journals — the researchers set out to estimate the degree to which people differed in engagement because of their character traits.

 

Although the authors examined only the impact of personality on engagement — without considering the known contextual influences on it — their results were rather staggering: almost 50% of the variability in engagement could be predicted by people’s personality.

 

So 50% of variability in employee engagement depends on the personality of the individual.

How come this tends to get overlooked? That’s a really good question. Let’s continue…

In particular four traits: positive affect, proactivity, conscientiousness, and extroversion.

Put another way, those who are positive, optimistic, hard-working, and outgoing tend to show more engagement at work.

 
So that’s all you need to do, right? Hire people that have these kind of personality traits, and you’ll never have any issues with employee engagement again right? Not so fast there slugger…

For starters, being more resilient to bad or incompetent management may be helpful for individual employee well-being, but it can be damaging for the wider performance of the organization.

Frustrated employees are often a warning sign of broader managerial and leadership issues which need to be addressed. If leaders turn employee optimism and resilience into a key hiring criterion, then it becomes much harder to spot and fix leadership or cultural issues using employee feedback signals.

It is a bit like a restaurant owner saying: “Instead of serving better food, or improving the service, I will boost my reviews by ensuring that my diners have lower standards!”

 
I love the restaurant analogy that they use here. It’s easy to just hire people who will kiss the bosses bottom and be agreeable with everything right? That way, employee engagement will never be an issue. Ever! What could possibly go wrong?

(Please note I am being sarcastic above)

Second, as data from the study clearly show, at least half of engagement still comes from contextual factors about the employees’ work — issues or experiences that are common across employees in an organization.

 
It’s great to clarify here that even though personality plays a much larger role when it comes to employee engagement, the organizational factor still plays a large role. So don’t take this as an excuse to slack off when it comes to employee engagement.

Third, the most creative people in your organization are probably more cynical, skeptical, and harder to please than the rest.

Many innovators also have problems with authority and a predisposition to challenge the status quo. This makes them more likely to complain about bad management and inefficiency issues, and makes them potentially more likely to disengage.

Marginalizing or screening out these people might seem like a quick win for engagement, but in most organizations these people are a significant source of creative energy and entrepreneurship, which is more difficult to get from people who are naturally happy with how things are.

 
This is one of key things that I want you to take away from this research.

If you’re super focused on trying to have a staff that is always fully engaged, you’re going to look over other types of personalities, like the creative, who are an essential part of any organization.

Sure, they can be “harder to deal with” and harder to reach out to, but that’s their personality at play there. So if you’re wondering why you try so many different things on the engagement front and can’t seem to reach out to them, you need to recognize that there personality is playing a major role, and you need to change things accordingly.

Don’t get mad about it, it’s human nature.

Last, anything of value is typically the result of team rather than individual performance, and great teams are not made of people who are identical to each other, but of individuals who complement each other. If you want cognitive diversity — variety in thinking, feeling, and acting — then you will need people with different personalities.

 
In the race for organizations to show off on social media how diverse they are, many tend to overlook this area of cognitive diversity – the one in which you have a wide variety of personalities.

Check out the podcast I did with SnackWalls where I discuss this aspect in along with other insights.

6. Seven Ways Organizations Can Boost Their Employee Engagement Strategies.

So far, we’ve taken a look at the impact of low employee engagement, understanding why is employee engagement important, why employees can be unengaged, how organizations try to boost engagement and why their approach to these employee engagement strategies are not effective.

It should be abundantly clear the need for employee engagement, and finding the right employee engagement strategies to tackle them.

Let’s look at some things you can do to help boost employee engagement, and produce results that last.

1. Improve Your Employee Engagement Strategies By Actually Doing Something With Engagement Surveys.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s all too common to collect engagement surveys, and do nothing with them. No wonder why low employee engagement is so rampant. You’re not even listening to what your employees are telling you!

I know someone who runs a software company for engagement surveys, and likes to say that most data just sits on the shelf.

In that case, get up, walk over to that shelf, and start looking through the data.
You implemented this as one of your employee engagement strategies, you might as well see the results. You may be shocked, saddened, and surprised with what you see.

Feedback hurts.

Feedback sucks, but instructs.

employee engagement

It’s going to improve your organization if you address it.

Do try to do them more often, instead of once every solar eclipse. Show employees that you understand concerns, and work towards addressing them.

Do you not have access to them? Find someone who is, and see if they can give you access.

Now, you don’t have to implement every single little bit of feedback right away, but do make steps to implementing what has been suggested.

Watch as time passes on, and low employee engagement will begin to be a thing of the past.

2. Be Crystal Clear On The Whys Of Your Organization. 

As mentioned earlier in the article, many employees don’t understand the goals of the organization.

I understand it can be tough when you’re 30 000 people spanning the globe, but you’d be surprised at how even an organization as small as 10 people can have many different ideas of what the goals are. Again, no wonder why low employee engagement is so widespread.

I worked at an organization before, that at around 60 people, definitely had many ideas of what the goals of the organization were. That said, there was a BHAG in place that made it easier, and everyone could agree on that.

So, one of your employee engagement strategies should be to work with teams to make sure that the whys of your organization are 100% crystal clear.

I’m not saying that you should repeat it on loop until it’s ingrained in employees heads. That’s not exactly going to cure low employee engagement.

By embodying the whys, and the values, especially from the top down, it will become more clear to employees what your organization stands for.

Go around and ask people what they think the goals of the company are, values, mission statements, etc.

If you’re getting significantly different answers, then something needs to change.

Now this, of course, can be a big team effort, especially if you’re an organization with offices around the globe, different time zones, different cultures, but it’s absolutely essential to work on if you want to deal with low employee engagement.

3. Drive Employee Engagement From Day One With A Strong Employee Onboarding Process.

Employees tend to be the most engaged during the first six months of their time at a position. That said, most organizations to a lackluster job when it comes to their employee onboarding experience.

Taking the time to build out a quality employee onboarding process can do wonders for driving up and keeping engagement high.

I’ve written about the employee onboarding experience in great length in the past (it’s also one of our services that we offer to clients), which you can find here:

4. Make Use Of The Stay Interview.

This point is an extension of point #1, which is showing that you actually do something with the engagement surveys.

When it comes to interviews, organizations tend to just do the exit interview, if at all. One of the best ways to boost engagement is to make use of the stay interview.

What is the stay interview?

It’s an interview to figure out what’s been keeping the employee at your organization. It will give you insight into what’s working, and what areas need to be improved.

These can (ideally) be face to face interviews, or if your organization lacks trust (and that’s something that you need to work on), you can send out anonymous surveys to collect that feedback.

Some examples of questions that you can ask…

      What have you been enjoying at your job?
      What are barriers getting in the way of enjoying what you do?
      If you could have a magic wand and change anything about your job, what would you do?

5. Create A Workplace Culture With More Autonomy, Creativity, and Playfulness.

Giving employees interesting problems to tackle, and allowing them to tackle said problems in any way they see fit (without over-bearing micromanagers) is one of the best ways of driving employee engagement through the roof.

Creating a more playful work culture can do wonders in getting the creativity juices flowing. I’ve written about how to create a more playful culture here.

A word of caution: Thanks to the large tech organizations, we’ve seen a large rise in organizations that think in order to be playful, they need a beanbag chair, and a ping-pong table.

They look to the large tech organizations and try to just copy what they do, in which I call the FAANG effect. Don’t do that.
employee engagement
As well, don’t create a “forced fun” culture, which I’ve written about here.There are fewer ways of being a buzzkill on fun by forcing fun upon everyone. Let it pop about organically.

6. Use Tried & True Tools To Identify Employee Engagement Shortcomings.

If you recognize that your employee engagement is lacking and you want to work on it, you have a number of tools at your disposal.

Which ones should you use? That’s up to you.

Three powerful tools that you can make use of are the following (which I’ve written about in length):

  1. Employee Experience Design – A Guide For Your Organization
  2. Design Sprints For Employees – Creating A Better Employee Experience
  3. A Guide To Employee Journey Mapping

  4. How To Write A 30 60 90 Day Plan For Your Org’s Onboarding

A combination of these tools can be used to identify the shortcomings of your employee experience, and how to build and quickly test prototypes to see what works in boosting your employee engagement.

7. Show Employees That Their Works Matters.

I can recall some times in the past where good bosses said “thanks, this is great work”, and even something as simple as that made such a difference in how I felt about my work and the organization.

You’d be surprised how many managers don’t do something like that. Then they continue to scratch their heads and wonder why there is such low employe engagement. They blame the employee, and not themselves.

You don’t need to go overboard, throw them a party, and get them cake (although I’m sure most people wouldn’t be against cake). Even something as simple as an email, a pat on the back, can go a long way.

When writing this point, I thought of this scene from The Wire (the greatest show ever made…after The Sopranos…I think…). It makes a good point on making it about the work, and as a manager, how that rolls down. Note that there is some NSFW language, but it’s an HBO show, so that shouldn’t come as a shock.

Conclusion And Next Steps.

We’ve discussed the following (click to jump back to section)

  1. What Is Employee Engagement, And Why It Is Important?
  2. The Differences In Engaged, Unengaged, And Disengaged Employees.
  3. The Reasons For Low Employee Engagement.
  4. What Organizations Get Wrong About Most Employee Engagement Strategies.
  5. Why Employee Engagement Matters Less Than You Think
  6. Six Employee Engagement Strategies To Boost Your Organization.

So, how do you ensure that you follow through with what was discussed here, and make clear, actionable steps to boost employee engagement strategies?

  1. Go through engagement surveys, if you even collect them. Take a look at the feedback. Sit down, shut off your phone and email, and really go through it. These things are important. It can very likely be painful in the moment, but there is so much you can start to take away, and use moving forward from these. Want to find many of the core reasons to low employee engagement? Your answers will lie within.
  2. Go around your organization and ask others what they think the organization’s goals, values, mission statements etc. are. If you’re getting a wide variety of answers that have no overlap, something is obviously wrong and people are having different ideas of what they are. That’s not a good sign, and plays a part in low employee engagement.
  3. Take a good hard look at your employee onboarding process and see where its shortcomings are. If you have low employee engagement, improving your employee onboarding experience will do wonders. Here is a post I did on everything you need to know about the employee onboarding experience, and here’s a list of over ten ideas you can implement into your employee onboarding experience.
  4. Take a look around your office and see how playful of a culture you have. Giving some autonomy and giving employees more chances for fun in the office to blow off some steam can do wonders for your organization.
  5. Look at some methodologies that you can use to take a deep dive into your employee engagement to figure out its shortcomings. You can make use of design thinking, design sprints, or journey mapping for the employee experience.
  6. Showing that the work of others actually matters. If you’re a manager, melt your cold heart for just a moment and give praise to your employees. Look at what they do, and actually give them something of value on that note of praise. It will go a long way.

We’ve only just touched the surface for employee engagement strategies, but this will give you something to think about moving forward.

If you’re interested in finding ways to help with employee engagement strategies, you can always work with us. Whether you want to address low employee engagement through working on:

Please reach out to us and we’ll see what you can do about your low employee engagement woes.

What kind of employee engagement strategies have you used? Leave a comment below.