Boosting Employee Engagement: Do’s and Dont’s

A new generation of the workforce has emerged and they’re saying ‘no’ to the corporate ladder. As more young people start prioritizing purpose over pay in their career, organizations need to focus on cultivating employee engagement more than ever – or risk losing their workforce.

What Does an Engaged Employee Look Like?

Employee engagement refers to the emotional commitment and connection that employees have to their work, their organization, and its goals. In essence: people want to come to work, understand their jobs, and know how their work contributes to the success of the organization.

Engagement is a spectrum, and any employee on your team can usually fit into one of three buckets:

Engaged employees**:** highly involved and enthusiastic about their work. They take ownership and drive performance – like an employee who works an extra hour today to fix a problem directly affecting a client instead of delaying it to tomorrow because they care that one of your values is “quick customer service.”

Unengaged employees: no attachment to the outcome of their work. These employees still do their jobs, but they check boxes rather than approaching their tasks with energy and passion. They’re here to make ends meet.

Purposely disengaged employees: negative about their job, coworker and company. They’re disgruntled, like to cause chaos, and are probably for other opportunities.

Why Should You Care If Your Employees Are Engaged?

Employee engagement isn't a buzzword – research shows it's a key driver of organizational success. Here's why:

• Increased productivity: Engaged employees are 22% more productive, according to Gallup research.
• Better Decision-Making: Engaged employees make decisions and take actions that positively affect your workforce and organizational effectiveness.
• Improved Workplace Culture: How employees treat each other can significantly impact your organization's overall effectiveness.

But here’s the kicker: only 23% of employees worldwide and 33% in the U.S. are considered "engaged". That's a lot of untapped potential.

Wait. Is Employee Engagement My Job?

The reason most organizations struggle with employee engagement is because they shrug it off as one of those ‘HR things.’ Since no one takes ownership over it during the day-to-day, it slips through the cracks and becomes a game of “but that wasn’t my job” when teams eventually realize their engagement is low and their culture is bad.

In reality, managers are the best people to ‘own’ employee engagement. They ensure employees know what work they need to do, why it's connected to the success of their organization, and they’re usually the ones supporting and advocating for the team.

How engaged an employee is at their job often comes down to how engaged they are with their direct manager and how engaged their manager is with their own job. Essentially — a burned out, disengaged manager is bad the whole team’s engagement. In fact, Gallup found that  70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manger. Talk about influence!

What Drives Employee Engagement?

Contrary to popular belief, employee engagement isn't about money or sporadic attempts to make employees happy right before a big milestone, like an annual performance review, or when you need something from them. It's much deeper than that. People want:

1. Purpose and meaning from their work.
2. To be known for what they're good at.
3. Good relationships, especially with a manager who can coach them.

As a result, the key drivers of employee engagement are:

🎯 Purpose

🤗 A caring manager

💬 Ongoing conversations

How NOT to Measure Employee Engagement

Many organizations measure either the wrong things, or too many things, or don’t make the data intuitively actionable. Many don’t make engagement a part of their overall strategy, or clarify why employee engagement is important.

The top two culprits we see at Candor are:

1. Making employee engagement too complicated. Organizations make engagement metrics far too complicated by focusing on metrics that are outside the control of both managers and employees and have no bearing on employees’ actual needs. At Candor, we believe employee engagement is built during small, daily rituals — not big, complex KPIs that ‘overcorrect’ the problem.
2. They focus on vanity processes. They overuse things like surveys to get immediate feedback, but then do nothing with that feedback.

A Roadmap to Improving Employee Engagement

Keep it simple and actionable. Before implementing measures blindly, think about the core pillars employees care about at work and how they want managers to help with them. More often than not, it’s:

1. Growth
   • Employees care about:
     • How do I progress in my career?
     • Am I doing the right things to excel?
     • How do I know if I’m stagnant?
   • They look to managers to:
     • Help them review their contribution to the company
2. Teamwork
   • Employees care about:
     • Does my team care about me?
     • Do I feel like I belong here?
     • Do I feel comfortable enough to share ideas?
   • They look to managers to:
     • Help them build mutual trust
     • Listen to what they have to say
     • Validate their actions in front of others
3. Individual contributions

• Employees care about:
  • Is what I give to this company being recognized?
  • Does my manager care about me as an individual?
• They look to managers to:
  • Help them see their value

With this roadmap, you start implementing daily rituals that link to your pillars of engagement. For example:

1. Growth: Regular 1-on-1s to discuss growth opportunities. At Candor, we have guided agenda setting built into our 1-on-1 feature to make sure your conversations with employees are structured, productive, and cover whatever questions they have.
2. Teamwork: Embedding a culture of recognition through shoutouts. Shoutouts through Candor are always mapped back to your team’s values so you can also publicly reinforce behavior that aligns with your culture.
3. Individual Contributions: Solicit and act on employee ideas through things like regular polls. It also helps to know how your employees feel most valued. Candor profiles are designed for employees to share their work preferences, so managers can give them recognition in the way they most appreciate.

Apart from the day-to-day, one of the most powerful things you can do for engagement is to be clear on the purpose of the organization, and how employees’ individual purposes fit into that greater company mission. When employees clearly know their role, have what they need to fulfill their role, and can see the connection between their role and the overall organizational purpose –  that’s the secret for greater engagement.

Make Employee Engagement Your Mantra

People want to come to work, understand their jobs, and know how their work contributes to the success of the organization. If you make this your mantra, your employee engagement level will tick upwards. At the end of the day, boosting engagement isn't just about making people happy – it's about creating a workforce that's productive, passionate, and aligned with your organization's goals. At Candor, we’re obsessed with building the best, lightweight product to help do this. If you’re interested in learning more, try Candor for free!