Five top tips to create higher levels of employee engagement

Keeping employees engaged requires a much greater investment of time and attention than many managers realise. Here are five tips to guide leaders and managers in shaping an effective engagement strategy

In 2022, employee engagement remained the same or declined in 53 per cent of U.K. organisations. With engagement directly linked to a number of positive business outcomes including higher levels of productivity, companies need to continually invest in advancing employee engagement in order to gain a competitive edge. Here are five top tips on how business and HR leaders can best achieve this.

1. Take

the ‘pulse’ of

employees frequently Organisations must understand employee opinion and needs on a regular basis. By listening to the workforce through monthly or quarterly pulse surveys, leaders can gain valuable insights on what is and isn’t working, and how their people are feeling. This feedback can then be used to make positive changes. Employees will not only feel their voice is being heard and that their opinion counts, but will feel they can directly impact and be part of the company’s culture and its direction. Strong, strategic corporate narratives are important, as is the employee belief and understanding of the part they play in achieving corporate goals and objectives. Without regular listening, you won’t know whether these aims are aligned.

2. Create moments that matter

This requires assessing colleagues’ experiences at dif- ferent points in the employee lifecycle and also during milestone moments in their professional and personal lives. During onboarding, for example, are new hires made to feel welcome and valued? Are career anniversaries celebrated from one year onwards, and do remote workers feel as appreciated as their office-based colleagues? There’s a huge opportunity for organisations to create positive employee experiences, from onboarding through to exit, whether individuals are physically in the office or elsewhere.

3. Balance the need for strong connections with avoiding burnout

Some managers feel that, when their teams are remote and dispersed, they need to schedule more online meetings. However, this can lead to meeting overload – and, instead of employees feeling more connected, they feel increasingly burnt out. Instead, line managers must be thoughtful about how they use technology, and be more intentional about how they connect people to the company purpose, their achievements and their colleagues. This allows employees to feel part of a supportive and caring team without feeling the need to be ‘always on’.

4. Encourage in-person interactions

This won’t be possible for fully remote workers, however, when feasible, employees should be encouraged to attend the office for at least one day per week to help strengthen workplace connections. This face-to-face time together should be used for leaders to communicate strategy and for employees to enjoy quality interactions, from team meetings through to social catch-ups. If regular office time isn’t practical, think about how you can create regular calendar moments for in-person interactions.

5. Avoid a two-tier workplace culture

When workforces are split between those who need to be on site (such as customer-facing environments) and those able to work remotely, a two-tier culture can result in which office-based employees are potentially seen to have unfair benefits. There might be intentional or unintentional favouritism towards in-office workers, and feelings of resentment may grow among the workforce – leading to a ‘them and us’ culture. In fact, of those organisations that reported a decrease in employee engagement in 2022, 20 per cent had a ‘mixed’ workforce, versus only 12 per cent that were ‘primarily office-based’. Using technology to bring all employees together and ensuring equitable experiences and opportunities are key here.

Keeping employees engaged with their work can feel like a constant battle, especially now they’re demanding far more than a fair salary from their employer. They want purpose, belonging, and a range of opportunities to grow and contribute.

Organisations that continually listen to their employees and understand how to give them memorable, fair and meaningful experiences are more likely to have highly engaged employees – and a thriving culture.

All trends, good and not so good, come to an end. Time to look ahead for the next big adventure

The last few years brought us a plethora of changes and challenges. Formerly slow-moving, low-profile aspects of work and the workplace were catapulted to the forefront of business and people strategy by the pandemic. We saw the great work from home experiment as companies pivoted their entire workplaces to remote within a matter of weeks; we saw massive digital acceleration as business after business, cut off from their usual operating methods, turned to online alternatives.

Hot on the heels of these changes came the fallout: the great war for talent as that digital acceleration sent the demand for tech expertise sky-high, the upending of performance management and then talent management itself as leaders and managers at various levels of seniority had to adapt to leading and managing from a distance – without physical interactions, without eyes-on observation, without any of the tiny but critical cues that influence how a person views others and is viewed by them in the workplace.

We saw the sudden elevation of wellbeing as isolation and anxiety bit deep into disrupted workplaces, and the spotlight on leadership as the people most responsible for setting the tone in the new world of work but also often the most vulnerable simply because of their lone position at the top. We saw learning and development teams grappling with an unexpected need for skills that would tide organisations through volatile periods – not just in leaders but in the entire workforce.

Now, we are seeing yet more consecutive waves of disruption, this time against the backdrop of high global inflation and looming economic recession. Expectations in the workplace have been elevated by the war for talent. Advances in the way we use technology, not to mention the technology itself, is pushing organisations to redefine jobs and skills yet again; generative AI alone has, in a matter of months, upended the way dozens of types of work are viewed.

Our cover story brings together a series of viewpoints on what may follow each of these trends: how to keep the good and set aside the bad. We attempt to look at the future of work, not just the far future but the near future – three months away, three weeks away even – in terms of the big and small things individuals, organisations, and industries can do. Because as we have seen, every trend comes eventually to an end; what's important is to keep looking ahead.