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For Your Business Joe Galvin July 10, 2023

5 Ways to Increase Employee Engagement

After two years of a white-hot labor market, hiring has begun to see some cooling. In fact, Vistage research has recorded a steady decrease in the number of companies planning to increase head count over the course of the next year.

While hiring may be softening, it is critical for companies to prioritize retention, both to slow the high pace of workforce velocity--which has proved resilient even amid economic uncertainty--and to proactively prepare for the next growth cycle, in which the hiring frenzy of 2021 and 2022 will reignite with full force.

To inform a successful retention strategy, leaders must look to employee engagement--the degree to which employees are invested in, connected with, and committed to their work, colleagues, and the company's growth. Here are five effective ways CEOs can improve employee engagement levels:

1. Aligning behind a purpose

To increase employee engagement, it's important to first understand the evolving desires of employees. Workers today want to feel their work is valued internally and by the world at large. Today's employees want to feel they're a part of something bigger than themselves. To do that, they'll need to know and understand your company's vision and align with its overarching mission.

The rising class of Gen-Z employees, which will soon make up the majority of the workplace, is particularly motivated by purpose-driven work. As a result, employers need to ensure every employee, from senior executive to intern, is aligned with the organization's goals and understands how their daily outputs are making an impact outside of company time.

2. Measuring engagement

As a leader, you'll need to determine the best ways to quantify and capture employee engagement levels, e.g., regular pulse sentiment surveys or productivity metrics. Engagement should be measured on a regular basis to ensure you have a real-time understanding of individual employee concerns, feedback, interests, and commitment levels. A key to successfully measuring employee engagement is using open-ended questions that allow employees to provide genuine feedback.

3. Acting on results

Once CEOs have a standardized system in place for measuring feedback, it's crucial to act. This data should inform how employers shape and evolve their employee experience, as we know it plays a major role in engagement. That means looking at the company's culture and its working environment, which includes the physical office space as well as the technology and tools employees have access to. If employees don't have the resources they need to be successful at work, they will begin to lose motivation.

4. Manager training

While the rise of hybrid work hasn't created quiet quitting, it has made it more difficult for frontline managers and bosses to identify who is and who is not committed to their job. Engagement issues can spread like wildfire, as underengaged or underperforming employees often put an unfair brunt of the workload on their colleagues, creating a continuum of burnout across the organization.

Managers need to have a clear understanding of how to recognize engagement in the field; companies using hybrid or remote models require an entirely new set of competencies. Providing consistent training to managers throughout the organization will help to stop the issue in its tracks. One of the most important drivers of the employee experience is that of the boss. As the adage goes, people don't quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses. Investing in management's learning and ensuring bosses are in accordance with the overarching culture can improve employee experience 10-fold.

5. Stay interviews

Instead of waiting for exit interviews when it is too late to improve engagement issues, leaders can proactively implement quarterly or biannual stay interviews. These are two-sided discussions in which employees and bosses have interview-style conversations, aiming to identify if they would choose to work together again, as well as to determine what they need to move forward together.

Even in hiring lulls, CEOs can leverage employee engagement to increase productivity, shore up retention, slow workforce velocity, and proactively prepare for the next growth cycle. Regardless of the economic landscape, employee engagement is always a worthwhile investment, as organizations with high levels of engagement have even been shown to perform better.

 

This article was written by Joe Galvin from Inc. and was legally licensed through the Industry Dive Content Marketplace. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.

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