Employee engagement affects just about every important aspect of your business, including:
Employees who feel connected to their organization work harder, stay longer, and motivate others to do the same. Plus, research shows that 92% of business executives believe engaged employees perform better, boosting the success of their teams and the outcomes of their organizations. It's clear that understanding what drives employee engagement is key to success.
There's a lot of information out there about how to improve employee engagement—some credible, some not. Quantum Workplace has been in the business of employee success for more than 20 years. Through our employee engagement research, we keep a constant pulse on what's changing.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll create a clear understanding of what employee engagement is, while making the business case for its value in your company—and discuss tangible ways to improve your employee engagement strategy.
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Employee engagement is a key indicator of a healthy and thriving workplace, where employees feel valued, involved, and connected to their roles and the company at large.
Employee engagement is the strength of the mental and emotional connection employees feel toward the organization that they work for, their team, and their work.
It's about how emotionally invested employees are in their work and the organization's goals. Engaged employees typically display a high degree of commitment, are more productive, and contribute positively to the company culture. They're not just working for a paycheck or the next promotion, but are genuinely interested in their work and motivated to contribute to the organization's success.
When doing research on employee listening, we found that employee engagement hinges on three factor and three corresponding questions:
When looking at these three pillars of engagement holistically, you’ll have a better understanding of engagement levels in your organization.
Employee engagement measures how employees feel about their organization. Based on their perceptions of their workplace, employees are categorized into four main groups:
Highly engaged employees hold very favorable opinions of their place of work. These "brand advocates" speak highly of their company to family and friends. They encourage other employees around them to do their best. When Quantum Workplace worked with Harvard Business Review to survey 984 business executives, 81% of them strongly agreed that highly engaged employees perform better and are more productive than employees with average or low engagement.
Moderately engaged employees see their organization in a moderately favorable light. They like their company, but something about the organization, their team, or their job that holds them back from full engagement. These employees are less likely to ask for more responsibilities and may underperform.
Barely engaged employees feel indifferent toward their place of employment. They usually lack motivation for their position and will only do as much as they can to get by—sometimes less. Barely engaged employees may be researching other jobs and are a high turnover risk.
Disengaged employees have a negative opinion of their place of work. They are disconnected from the mission, goals, and future of the organization. They lack commitment to their position and responsibilities. It’s important to understand how to handle disengaged employees so that their negative perceptions don’t impact the productivity of employees around them.
Employee engagement is often used interchangeably with similar concepts like happiness, satisfaction, or wellbeing––but there are some clear differences among these concepts that are important to understand:
Some leaders may wonder how to keep employees happy. While important, happiness is not the same as engagement. It says nothing about how invested employees are in the company, nor how hard they’re working on behalf of the organization’s mission. Happiness is a short-term, rapidly changing measurement. For example, an employee may feel temporary happiness from a raise and then sink back into disengagement. Employee engagement is a deep, long-term connection to the organization.
Employee satisfaction can only be measured at surface level. An employee who is satisfied may not be engaged. Generally speaking, satisfied employees will not take steps to go above and beyond. They usually stick around, but they aren’t driven to go the extra mile. Engaged employees are productive, while satisfied employees tend to coast through their work and experience.
Employee wellbeing evaluates many areas of an employee’s life, such as how well they cope with stress or if they’re fulfilling their potential. Providing resources to increase employee wellbeing can increase employee engagement. Employee engagement focuses on an employee’s connection with their company—not on their own wellbeing.
Recognizing the importance of their workforce, the most successful companies understand that their people are their greatest asset. Why is employee engagement important? Because when employees are motivated and engaged, it unlocks their potential, increases productivity, and fuels sustainable business growth.
In recent years, there's been a growing emphasis on employee engagement. While the majority of executives acknowledge that engaged employees perform better, only about half report seeing a positive return on investment from their engagement initiatives and just 37% of executives say employee engagement is a high priority for their organization.
To bridge this gap, it’s crucial for organizations to grasp the core principles of employee engagement. Understanding what drives engagement and how to effectively measure it is essential. This knowledge is key to cultivating a work environment where engagement not only exists but also significantly contributes to the company’s success.
Talent-minded organizations know that their people are their greatest lever for business success. And 92% of executives believe that engaged employees perform better. This is just one of many employee engagement statistics that prove the value of employee engagement in an organization.
When employees are engaged, discretionary effort goes up. Employees want to go above and beyond the basic requirements of their job. When leaders and managers channel that energy and effort in the right direction, employee engagement impacts a host of business outcomes. Win-win.
Let’s understand the above a bit better by diving further into each of the key benefits of employee engagement.
Research shows engaged employees are 17% more productive than their peers. They’re more likely to work diligently and expend discretionary effort in their jobs.
Engaged employees don’t have a reason to look elsewhere for work. They turn over less often because they know they will be recognized for their contributions, see opportunities for professional growth and career development, and understand when organizational change happens and why. These three pillars enable employees to connect to the present and the future.
72% of executives strongly agree that organizations with highly engaged employees have happy customers. Engaged employees care deeply about their jobs, and thus, customers.
When employees are committed to your mission, they’re going to show up. Highly engaged workplaces see 41% lower absenteeism.
Engaged employees are less likely to be obese, less likely to suffer from chronic disease, and more likely to eat healthier and exercise. Having healthier employees positively impacts your bottom line because employees can show up to work fully present.
Employees are more aware of their surroundings and can focus on the task at hand. Research has shown that 70% fewer safety incidents occur in highly engaged workplaces.
Engaged employees believe that senior leaders of their organization demonstrate integrity and are doing their best to drive future success. They also feel valued and like their opinions matter.
Employee engagement is crucial for a productive workplace, but it's not a standalone solution for all organizational challenges. A comprehensive approach that includes employee experience, performance management, and a solid talent strategy is essential. Here’s why:
Overall, while employee engagement is incredibly important, it should be part of a broader employee success strategy.
Employee engagement drivers are items that have a large impact on employee engagement outcomes. They are the items you should take action on when driving employee engagement.
All drivers will impact engagement—the key is to identify and act on the drivers that will make the biggest difference in your organization. And implement strategic employee engagement activities that support those drivers.
From this list, there are a few key themes that are powerful indicators of employee engagement. They describe what is core to connection and engagement in your workplace.
Employees want their jobs to be challenging. They want to own tasks that use their strengths and have access to opportunities to develop in their roles and career. It’s important for organizational leaders and HR teams to match talent to roles that supply these aspects of an engaging job.
Leadership and team relationships are extremely important for engagement. Employees want to work for leaders and teams that put people first, value employee contributions, and show integrity.
Employees want to work for organizations that have a strategy built for success. They want to believe that they can contribute to that success in their role. Individuals want to successfully contribute to winning teams and organizations.
It's not only imperative to observe employee engagement trends, but to use that data to design employee success strategies that work for your specific organization. The top employee engagement trends for 2024 include:
1. Magnetic culture: the "big stay" is here
2. Magnetic culture: you can't get by with mediocre culture
3. Employee experience: employees expect post-survey action
4. Employee experience: engagement is key to employee retention and performance
5. Performance & impact: employees want to drive organizational success
6. Performance & impact: managers matter but don't feel supported
7. Emerging intelligence: organizations still aren't ready for AI
8. Emerging intelligence: change isn't the problem - how you manage it is
The truth is, everyone owns employee engagement.
Every person in your organization has an impact on the quality of relationships they build, their approach to teamwork, and general attitudes they bring to the workplace. Here is a breakdown of employee engagement roles.
| SENIOR LEADERS |
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| HR |
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| MANAGERS |
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| EMPLOYEES |
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Organizational leaders are employee engagement advocates. They are the influential campaigners and top promoters of an engaged culture. Leadership buy-in is critical when it comes to employee engagement. Depend on leaders to:
HR teams play a critical role in the organization by aligning leaders, managers, and employees on a path forward with employee engagement. Strategy is turned into action and they own the “how” behind the employee engagement strategy. To do this, it’s crucial that HR professionals:
Managers interact with employees more than anyone else. They must create an environment where every individual can thrive and truly be engaged, while also championing the organization’s success. A manager's role in employee engagement includes:
When we said everyone had a role to play, we meant all employees. Employees are the organization’s voices on the front lines and your main line of sight into the employee experience. Rely on employees to:
Employee engagement initiatives often fail due to three primary reasons:
Many organizations struggle with engagement efforts because they don't use a credible or scientifically-backed model to uncover what truly drives engagement. Understanding the deeper meaning behind employee behaviors and sentiments is crucial, and will uncover obstacles and opportunities that are helping or hindering employee success overall.
By working off of a proven model that goes beyond surface-level metrics to unravel the genuine factors influencing employee engagement, you’ll gain deeper insights that will help tailor your organization’s strategies to your unique employee-base.
Another common pitfall is the complexity and difficulty of translating engagement insights into tangible actions. Many companies utilize surveys to uncover what the employee experience looks like at their organization, and find straightforward ways to act on the information. However, just 35% of employees say their organization is effective at post-survey action. I
f you act on engagement survey results, you’ll build trust with employees and show them that you’re listening––but we understand that this takes actionable insights. Finding a software partner that can uncover those for you through action-oriented surveying is vital.
A significant aspect of successful engagement efforts is choosing the right software partner. The ideal partner should offer reliable, robust, user-friendly, and collaborative software that makes HR professionals’ lives easier while also providing valuable insights that drive employee engagement and retention.
An employee engagement model offers a stable and systematic method to assess and enhance engagement levels. This framework assists in clearly identifying the elements that both promote and impede engagement within an organization. It enables businesses to pinpoint and understand the various factors currently impacting employee engagement.
A good employee engagement model helps you measure how engaged your employees are, guiding you in understanding, analyzing, and improving engagement. Using a proven, science-backed model means you can focus on what really matters from your employee feedback, separating signals for action from employee feedback noise. This helps you make your workplace better without wasting time or money on initiatives that don’t work.
A few exemplary employee engagement models from other organizations include:
Aon Hewitt’s model focuses on four key dimensions of engagement:
Gallup’s Q12 model consists of 12 survey questions that assess different aspects of employee engagement. The questions cover topics such as clear expectations, recognition, development opportunities, and the presence of a best friend at work.
Deloitte’s model leverages five engagement-driving elements, including:
Quantum Workplace has helped organizations design, build, and scale employee engagement strategies and surveys by using our e9 employee engagement model. This scientifically-backed model is well-researched and highly effective at helping organizations drive employee engagement using actionable insights. This model ties back to our pyramid noted in the beginning of this blog that measures: work engagement, organizational engagement, and team engagement.
In the modern workplace, employee engagement is so much more than a survey. Here are a few employee engagement best practices to help you maximize your efforts. These employee engagement ideas will make all the difference in the employee experience.
Yes, there is always room to improve. But don’t be afraid to highlight your strengths as well. Celebrate engagement wins and socialize successes with current and prospective employees. When employees see meaningful action and improvement, they’re more likely to be engaged.
If you want to move the needle on engagement, it must be a continuous strategy—not a one-off project you set and forget. When engagement is only addressed every once and awhile, employees don’t feel heard or supported, and managers don’t take it seriously. If you listen to your employee and prioritize engagement throughout the year, you’ll see greater engagement and a better return on the investment of your time, energy, and dollars.
Before you can improve employee engagement, you have to know where you stand. How do you measure employee engagement? One of the most accurate and efficient ways to gain understanding is with employee surveys.
As you grow your understanding of the employee lifecycle, you’ll also want to uncover group and demographic dynamics that are impacting employee engagement. You'll want to measure employee engagement:
After having a better understanding of who the survey will reach, you must identify an end goal. Decide on the impact you want the survey to have, and then work backward from there. Ask yourself:
Engaging your talent is key to employee, team, and business success. Help your leaders focus on what matters, your managers become better coaches, and your employees do their best work with the right employee engagement tools.
Employee engagement surveys play a crucial role in understanding and enhancing the workplace environment. Here's how they help:
The design of an employee engagement survey plays a crucial role in understanding and improving workplace dynamics. A well-designed survey does more than gather data; it provides actionable insights and fosters a culture of continuous improvement. Here are the key elements that make for an effective survey design:
The strength of any survey lies in its questions. Using research-backed questions ensures that each query is purposeful and actionable. This approach helps organizations understand the specific drivers of engagement within their workforce and what steps can be taken to enhance it.
A standard measurement or agreement scale is a vital tool for improving the quality of survey data. See why we recommend a 6-point Likert scale for most surveys.
While structured questions are essential, open-ended questions bring a different dimension to the survey. They allow employees to provide more detailed feedback and share specific examples. This qualitative data can be invaluable in understanding the nuances of employee sentiment and identifying areas for actionable improvement.
A comprehensive employee engagement survey helps leaders understand engagement at the organizational level. These surveys should include questions that are scientifically proven to measure employee engagement.
Pulse surveys are designed to help organizations gather real-time feedback on any topic at any time. This is especially important during times of transition—such as acquisitions and mergers, mission or focus changes, and executive or management changes.
Employee lifecycle surveys allow you to collect feedback from employees during key moments in their tenure at your organization. Examples include:
When designing employee engagement surveys, it's important to target different levels within the organization. Here's how you can approach each audience:
Organization-wide
Within Groups and Teams
Among Individuals
Effectively utilizing survey results is crucial but often challenging due to common barriers. To overcome these, you need straightforward strategies for responding to employee feedback. This means having a plan for communication and action.
Your employee engagement communication strategy helps your organization continually evaluate, discuss, and adjust how you are approaching the employee experience. When you make engagement a topic of ongoing discussion, it becomes a sustainable, business-driving part of your culture.
Action planning shouldn't be overwhelming or limited to HR––it's about fostering a culture of active listening and meaningful response across the organization. Key challenges of action planning include:
Address these by scheduling time for analysis, discussion, and planning, ensuring leaders and managers are invested in the process, and maintaining clear communication throughout.
To simplify and take action on your survey results, we encourage you to:
Remember, the goal is continuous improvement to enhance employee experience and overall engagement.
Creating an effective employee engagement action plan is a vital step in transforming workplace dynamics. It's where you turn insights into impactful actions. At the core of this plan, you'll identify and discuss the key drivers of engagement within your organization.
But empowering your people to drive action planning is often a challenge. Quantum Workplace's AFTER framework helps HR teams and their managers:
The first step to effective action is making sense of your survey results. Your goal is to help your leaders and managers analyze survey results with ease. You need to:
Analysis without focus can feel like navigating the universe without a compass. You need guiding stars to help you prioritize what matters most. Aim to:
Effective action planning cannot happen in a vacuum. Involving employees in the process helps them understand their feedback is being taken seriously. You need to:
It’s time to launch! You need an execution plan that is specific, measurable, and well-communicated to guide you. You need to:
Once your plan is launched, it’s essential to keep action top-of-mind to remain on course. This means communicating, tracking progress, and adjusting your plans as needed. You need to:
An engaging employee experience is table stake for creating a culture of employee success. You need critical insight into what's driving and stalling employee engagement. Capture employee feedback, uncover meaningful insights, and take targeted action to propel your business forward with the right employee engagement software.
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Employee Engagement SurveysUncover what's helping and hindering employee engagement. Measure employee engagement easily and accurately—and act on it in a strategic and speedy way—with employee engagement survey software. |
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Employee Pulse SurveysDon't wait for your annual engagement survey to check on engagement. Get a pulse on what employees are feeling at any given time. Collect employee feedback efficiently on any topic, any time with pulse surveys. |
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Employee Lifecycle SurveysAssess and improve employees' experience at every phase of their journey with employee lifecycle surveys. Uncover insights at critical moments and milestones and act on them before it's too late. |
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Employee Engagement Reporting & AnalyticsUnderstand the state of engagement and empower action with on-demand insights. Make sense of your complex people data at-a-glance with robust employee engagement analytics and reporting capabilities. |
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Employee Engagement BenchmarksGet context that builds confidence with best-in-class comparisons and benchmarks. Compare your engagement results to similar organizations in your industry, region, or size range. |
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BenchmarkingWhen comparing your employee engagement against like minded organizations, having access to a large database of quality data that helps you understand how you measure up is key. From company demographics to benchmarking tools, ensure your software gives you the right tools to understand how you’re doing. |
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Employee Engagement Action PlanningCreate visibility and accountability into post-survey action. Reduce time-to-action and increase impact. Enable managers to own and follow through on action items. |
We've been hearing "the future of the workplace is digital" for years—and that time is here. 61% of CEOs say their business will be more digital in the future and 50% of HR professionals expect to invest more money in technology this year. To be successful at employee engagement, you need the right employee engagement platform.
Make your employee’s voices heard, uncover helpful data, and arm yourself with the information to make strong decisions by using the following software checklist:
Now that you know what employee engagement is, why it’s important, and how you can make a difference – it’s time to get to work. If you’re looking for an employee engagement software that can support your strategy, learn about what makes Quantum Workplace stand out from the crowd.
Want to see how Quantum Workplace can help you understand and improve your employee experience? See our employee engagement software in action with a custom demo today!
Published August 5, 2024 | Written By Kristin Ryba
