It’s time to log in for the day at work. As you sit down with a fresh cup of coffee, your mind is brimming with ideas you want to explore, and you can’t wait to get started. You work at a company with values and a mission that you love. You know exactly what’s expected of you at work, and you feel like you have the support to do it.
You have a two-year plan for growth in your position and feel stable in your job. At the end of your annual review meeting with your boss, you leave satisfied with your job and ready for the new year.
This is an example of an engaged employee.
Employee engagement refers to how involved, committed, and enthusiastic employees are about their work. It measures how effective workplace factors such as culture, management, and rewards connect employees and their organization.
Well-engaged employees demonstrate dedication. They support organizational goals, commit discretionary effort above job requirements, support their teammates, and are excited to grow.
Engaged employees aren’t just pleasant to be around, they’re more likely to stay around. That means less turnover and less money to spend on hiring someone new.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. As you read on, you’ll discover helpful tips to drive employee engagement.
Why does employee engagement matter?
Highly engaged employees hold favorable opinions of their workplace. They speak highly of the company and encourage their colleagues to perform well through model behavior.
They are also more productive, stay around for longer, take fewer days off, and provide better customer service, according to ongoing Gallup research.
Employees with low levels of engagement are concerned more with basic needs like stress reduction and individual contributions/task completion.
On the other hand, when employees are more engaged, they begin to concern themselves more with teamwork, company-based goals, and challenging themselves to grow.
The cost of disengagement
What happens when an employee is disengaged at work?
Disengagement manifests in different ways, but typical consequences include:
Higher rates of absenteeism
More mistakes
Less enthusiasm to complete responsibilities
Poorer customer service
A lack of engagement in workplace training
Resignations
Clearly, just one disengaged employee can be seriously costly, so it's important to know how to identify what creates more engaged employees.
Key drivers of employee engagement
Your employee is looking at their work environment through two main lenses, which significantly affect their engagement.
Perceived value: This is how an employee views their employer and the value of their job, from salary and benefits to responsibilities and location flexibility. Perceived value can include opportunities for growth, mentorship, workload, and schedule.
Employee experience: This relates to an employee’s organizational experiences from orientation to exit. This includes workplace communication and workplace environment, as well as relationships with their boss and their coworkers.
Digging deeper, there are a variety of factors that contribute to each of these lenses and the emotional connection between your employee and their work, employer, and team. Consider which of the following might need improvement in your company right now.
Company culture
Company culture is reflected in the company’s values, environment, expectations, and behavior of leadership. Whether they’re most excited about your mission, the benefits you provide, or their coworkers, engaged employees need to feel like they fit into your company culture.
Pro tip: Effective teamwork, constructive feedback, and contextual communication are all important drivers of company culture, something that a video messaging solution like Loom can help support. Recording a short video in place of a long email can help you communicate with more nuance and empathy, using facial expressions and hand gestures to personalize your delivery.
Workplace wellness initiatives
Providing free wellness initiatives that are inclusive for all abilities encourages employees to stay healthy, which makes it easier for them to invest in their work. Consider offering mental health counseling benefits, a gym membership, fitness challenges, and great health insurance.
Flexibility
Allowing employees to work hybrid, remote, and flexible hours gives them the freedom to make healthier choices.
Whether it frees up time for exercise, reduces commutes, allows for more time with family, or increases an employee’s sense of control, providing flexibility results in employees who are less stressed and more grateful.
Pro tip: Reducing the number of meetings employees have to attend is another step in the right direction. By replacing all-hands meetings with quick Loom updates, shared via Slack and available for employees to watch when they get a chance, you provide team members with the flexibility to better manage their own work schedules.
Seamless onboarding
Onboarding and orientation are a new employee’s first impression of your business. For them to be engaged, they need to feel emotionally invested in your company.
Pro tip: Loom is the perfect solution for creating engaging onboarding videos that save time and provide a reference point for new employees to look back on.
How to Make Onboarding Remote Employees Personal and Scalable.
Positive work culture
In a positive work culture, employees’ opinions matter. Their workload is achievable, and their team participates in accomplishing mutual goals. They have access to personal and career development opportunities and receive support in pursuing them.
Team leaders model excellent workplace culture and inspire employees to thrive, and foster a healthy and optimistic relationship between employees and your company.
Productivity and time management tools
Knowing the productivity of different aspects of your company allows you to make changes that help both your employees and your business. This can help you see where you don’t need to have a meeting or could optimize in other ways.
Pro tip: Screen recorders like Loom are another productivity hack. You can cut down on unnecessary meetings by replacing them with a quick video that your team can watch when they have a spare five minutes. Or, they can easily return to training materials or best practices you’ve recorded.
Sense of belonging
According to McKinsey & Company, a sense of belonging in the workplace is critical to retention and engagement.
While flexibility is important to employee engagement, so is connection. Engaged employees should feel connected to their coworkers and the company.
Strategies that McKinsey cites include personal check-ins, opting for motivational strategies over top-down orders, and inclusivity-focused practices, like understanding the impact of digital communication tools on BIPOC employees.
Supportive leadership
A sense of belonging starts with supportive leadership. Strong leaders foster connections within their teams, drive team alignment, and provide a pathway to growth and future opportunities. A good leader keeps communication channels open and responds to feedback from their team.
Supportive leaders can motivate their teams by providing:
Rewards and recognition
Learning and development opportunities
Succession planning, or identifying and preparing for future staffing needs
Pro tip: Replace the standard monthly one-on-one with regular Loom videos providing praise, corrective feedback, and checking in on broader career goals.
Effective workplace communications
Poor communication has a ripple effect.
It’s estimated that U.S. businesses lose at least $128 billion yearly due to employees wasting time trying to communicate effectively. Good communication in the workplace is crucial for productivity and company culture.
7 employee engagement metrics to prioritize
If you want to lift employee engagement, you first have to understand how to measure and track it so you can monitor the impact of any strategies you decide to use.
For that, you need to use employee engagement metrics.
It’s impossible to measure “engagement” directly. Unlike revenue, it isn’t concrete and observable. To measure employee engagement, you can use proxy metrics that act as a leading indicator. If, for example, your employee turnover rate is decreasing, you can consider this a signal that engagement is improving.
1. eNPS
Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS, tells you how likely employees would be to recommend your workplace to friends or family members, giving you insight into their satisfaction and engagement.
Nobody would recommend a workplace they aren’t satisfied with.
eNPS is calculated using a survey. You ask employees one simple question:
“On a scale of 1-10, how likely would you be to recommend [name of your company] as a place to work?
Then, you divide responses into three groups:
Promoters: Those who scored 9 or 10
Passive/Neutrals: Those who scored 7 or 8
Detractors: Those who scored 6 or below
Next, you calculate percentages for each group. For example, if you have 200 employees, and 160 gave you a 9 or 10, then you would calculate your Promoters as 160/200 x 100 = 80%.
Finally, you ignore the Passive/Neutrals and subtract the Detractors from the Promoters to get your eNPS.
If, for instance, your Promoters make up 80% of your workforce and your Detractors make up 10%, your eNPS score would be 70% (80% minus 10%).
The goal here is to raise your eNPS score, which you can achieve by tackling both Passive/Neutrals and Detractors to lift them up into the next bracket.
2. Voluntary turnover rate
If employees are leaving, it’s typically a sign that they are unengaged or unsatisfied with some aspect of working for your organization. It’s important, though, to only calculate your voluntary turnover rate, not employee turnover as a whole.
Employees who have been dismissed, perhaps due to performance issues, or laid off should not be included in this calculation, as their reason for leaving isn’t related to lack of engagement.
To calculate voluntary turnover rate, divide the number of employees who left voluntarily in the previous year, and divide it by the total number of employees you had during that time.
For example, if your company has 140 employees and 7 left during the last 12 months, your calculation would look like this:
7/140 = 0.05 x 100 = 5%
With this metric, lower is better. Track voluntary turnover rate regularly and compare year on year, or quarter on quarter if turnover is a focus point.
3. Survey scores
One of the best ways to measure the effectiveness of your engagement initiatives is to use employee satisfaction surveys.
Here, you’ll ask questions like:
On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your overall work/life balance?
On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your overall job satisfaction?
On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your career progression opportunities at our company?
On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you in the leadership of this company?
Each of these questions provides a separate metric and insight into employee engagement. You can track these over time to see how the initiatives you implement impact scores.
You can also look at how employees engage with the surveys themselves by tracking survey participation rate, which is the percentage of employees who complete the survey.
Disengaged employees are less likely to be apathetic toward surveys and often complete them when given the choice. Higher survey participation rates, then, are in themselves an employee engagement signal.
4. Glassdoor rating
Glassdoor and other online job hunt and career communities can provide easy insight into employee engagement levels at your company.
On Glassdoor, employees can provide feedback on what it’s like to work at your organization, commenting on factors like the work environment, trust in the company CEO, and whether they’d recommend the workplace to a friend.
The platform helpfully processes all of this information through a proprietary algorithm and generates an overall rating as well as scores on work/life balance, career opportunities, and other factors.
Ratings like this are helpful and easy indicators of job satisfaction in that they don’t require the use of survey questions.
The downside is that your Glassdoor rating may not necessarily be a fair reflection of employee sentiment. Employees with the most extreme experiences—positive or negative—are typically the ones who dedicate the time to providing comments.
5. Improvement in performance metrics
Employees who demonstrate high performance tend to be more engaged at work and vice versa.
This means that you can read changes in individual performance metrics as a leading indicator of changes in employee engagement.
Say, for example, you’ve implemented weekly one-on-one check-ins and measured an increase in performance. This can be considered a sign that your engagement initiatives are working their magic.
6. Professional development
Employees who willingly engage in additional training are likely also engaged with their day-to-day work. This is especially true when it upskills them in a manner that’s consistent with their individual professional development plan and career goals.
A simple way to turn this into a trackable measurement is to measure participation on a monthly basis. That is, what is the percentage of employees who engage with workplace learning materials at least once a month?
7. Customer satisfaction
Another indirect method of measuring employee engagement is to track customer satisfaction using a metric like the customer satisfaction score (CSAT).
Disengaged employees show a lack of interest and enthusiasm for the role, which in turn harms the customer experience.
This would clearly impact CSAT scores, making the metric valid for measuring employee engagement.
To measure CSAT, you simply conduct a survey that asks customers a single question:
“On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate your overall satisfaction with [name of your company]?”
Then, you average the scores you receive from all customers.
This can allow you to understand employee engagement at the team level and even narrow it down to the individual level by assessing how CSAT scores for a specific support rep change over time.
Boosting numbers: 11 employee engagement and re-engagement strategies
Do some unsightly trends on your employee engagement metrics have you looking for employee engagement ideas?
A well-rounded employee engagement strategy will encourage growth, foster teamwork, support individual employees, and provide the basic benefits they’re seeking.
Each of these 11 strategies will support one or more of these aspects.
1. Identify areas of improvement
It’s impossible to increase employee engagement if you don’t know what’s lacking. Identify where you can improve your engagement strategy by gathering feedback. Then, prepare a plan to address areas affecting engagement.
2. Open up feedback channels
Feedback is where you’ll find the most answers to your engagement problems. The most accessible and helpful feedback usually comes from anonymous surveys. You can send out employee engagement surveys, including new-hire, pulse, stay, or exit surveys, to determine how your employees feel.
Open office hours are another great way to show your employees that you are there for them and you’re ready to listen. In general, it’s always good to have a workplace communication strategy. Your employees need to know how to communicate with their company’s leaders.
Pro tip: Send out a brief Loom video asking for feedback to kickstart the conversation. Give a bit of context as to why you’re doing what you’re doing, and ask team members to send back their own feedback video in response.
3. Always follow up on feedback
After you send out feedback surveys, always follow up. Let your employees know you’ve heard them and what you plan to do about their feedback. Schedule a time to provide a progress update if the change isn’t immediate.
4. Provide growth opportunities
Upward mobility is a critical engagement driver. Companies that give their employees time to innovate and channels to upskill will see their employee engagement rates and productivity improve. Mentorship, upskill planning, and professional development can also foster growth.
5. Set goals
When employees understand their role within an organization and what is expected of them, it’s easier for them to show up the way you want them to. When they have goals in mind, they also feel a sense of purpose. Team leaders can help your employees and teams set goals. These can be project-related, key performance indicator (KPI)-related, or career-related goals. Every employee is a part of your organization’s success and needs to know precisely how they’re contributing.
6. Recognize employees
Employees want to be recognized for their efforts. Recognition fosters a sense of belonging and appreciation. It helps employees to know when their work leads to the success of their coworkers or the business.
A simple way to start is by verbally acknowledging strong performances either in person or through a quick message. You could establish a monthly practice of recognizing one noteworthy thing about each employee. Whatever it is, show your employees that you care and appreciate them.
Pro tip: Replace the impersonal “great job!” email with a quick Loom video, and let them see just how excited you are to watch them succeed.
7. Train managers
Managers are responsible for the most noticeable changes in employee engagement. If you want to see big results, train your managers. Equip them with the ability to be coaches, not just delegators. A great manager will help employees grow, get them invested in helping their team, and keep things running smoothly.
8. Foster a welcoming company culture
Set standards for behavior, mission, vision, and values—which comprise company culture. If you hold your entire company to those standards, your team will be more cohesive and engaged. Show your employees what you want your company to be so they can fit into that vision.
9. Prioritize employee well-being
Paid time off and sick days are basic well-being gestures. But employee well-being is more than that. Well-being is an employee’s mental, physical, and emotional health. It drives productivity and engagement.
You can foster employee wellness through flexible work locations, adaptive scheduling, and accessible health and fitness programs. Great employers will consider offering no-meeting days, project management strategies to reduce overbooking, gym memberships, and mental health counseling.
10. Monitor productivity
Productivity is an indicator of many things. An unproductive employee could lack the skills, tools, or support needed to get the job done. But worse, they could be disengaged. Either way, monitoring productivity can help you better support your employees across the board.
11. Help employees communicate better
Working in a remote environment comes with some unique challenges.
Getting hold of team members when you need them is one challenge. So is communication overload, when you feel like you’re drowning in emails and Slack messages.
Then there’s the issue with asynchronous communication channels, especially text-based ones, which lack context, expression, and non-verbal communication cues.
Give your team members the tools they need to best get their message across. Video recording platforms like Loom help you incorporate tone and body language into workplace conversations, reducing miscommunications and improving productivity.
Maintaining employee engagement
Employee engagement isn’t something you can deal with once and move on. Like that houseplant in your office, it takes ongoing measurement and maintenance.
Engagement levels indirectly affect sales, customer communication and satisfaction, and turnover rates. When you begin monitoring employee engagement, take note of your scores in these areas so you can evaluate your strategies for improvement.
Here are some ways to measure employee engagement:
Pulse surveys
Sentiment analysis, or how employees feel about working at your company
Employee net promoter score
One-on-one meetings
Stay and exit interviews
Turnover
Business metrics
While surveys and interviews provide a direct channel for monitoring engagement, using a blend of communication methods to gather both qualitative and quantitative data will give you a holistic understanding of how well your employees enjoy their workplace.
There is no silver bullet to improve employee engagement
Leaders are often asked, “What’s the single most effective strategy for improving employee engagement?”
The answer is, it depends.
The truth is that there’s no one-size-fits-all, silver-bullet solution. Instead, you need to identify problem points in your own organization, prioritize them, and tackle the biggest issues first.
As a broad rule, though, improving communication between employees is a good place to start, being the central pillar of employee engagement.
Asynchronous video communication platforms such as Loom can help in a lot of ways as well, from reducing unnecessary meetings to making new employee onboarding more effective.
Drive employee engagement within your distributed teams using personalized videos.