What does employee engagement mean in your organisation? If your answer has anything to do with free fruit, a branded t-shirt on your one-year anniversary or a monthly employee newsletter, it’s probably time for a rethink.
In fact, employee engagement is one of the most important factors for the success of your business. A huge 80% of employees are motivated to work harder when they feel like their contributions are recognised, and those who feel valued are 2.7x more likely to be engaged with their jobs.
But so many employee engagement initiatives focus on the wrong things. A whopping 91% of Gen Zs, the newest generation to join the workforce, say that learning and development is a top priority when considering a job, and 89% of millennials say that having a sense of purpose is important to their overall job satisfaction.
So, with development opportunities and a sense of purpose at the top of the wishlist, what can you do to boost employee engagement in your own organisation?
Employee engagement refers to how committed and enthusiastic your employees feel about both their work and your company. It’s often related to factors like leadership, job satisfaction and your company culture – do employees feel safe to share ideas? Make mistakes? Can they talk openly about their concerns? Do they have a voice, even with senior leaders? Are their opinions valued? Are their achievements celebrated? Do they feel like they belong?
But you can’t improve employee engagement overnight. It takes time – especially if engagement is already low. The senior leadership team must discover the root cause of the low employee engagement, communicate a clear improvement plan (including acknowledging the current challenges) and, most importantly, commit to it.
If an employee is engaged, they’ll be more productive, motivated and innovative. They’ll be forthcoming with ideas, energised about their projects and invested in improving processes and outputs.
If an employee is disengaged, they will be less productive, will appear ‘checked out’ in conversations and will likely be searching for a new role – or at the very least, quietly quitting.
In fact, we’ll let the numbers do the talking – here are some key employee engagement statistics to prove why it’s so important to get it right:
As you can see, employee engagement has an impact on every single part of an organisation, from profit to productivity, so it really pays to make it a priority.
As we mentioned above, improving employee engagement isn’t a fast process. Engagement is earned, and it takes time and consistency to repair a culture of low employee engagement.
Here are 5 ways you can sow the seeds for great employee engagement that will continue to grow long into the future.
When it comes to work, there shouldn’t be a difference between what gets your CEO or your interns up in the morning. There should be a clear company vision that acts as a North Star for everyone to work towards, whether they’re in sales, marketing, customer service, accounting, IT…
Making this company vision highly visible is key to securing strong employee engagement. If nobody knows what it is or where to find it, you can’t ensure everyone is aligned and striving for the same goal.
Don’t be afraid to become a broken record! Put your company vision on the walls of your office, on the homepage of your LMS, on your screensavers... it acts as a useful reminder to help everyone pull in the same direction, and helps minimise distractions.
Top tip: Go one step further by making your company vision relevant to every single team. Create tailored playlists to ensure that everyone, from your branding team to your developers, knows exactly how their team contributes to the vision, which will motivate them to push forward productively.
Leadership is hugely important in employee engagement. In fact, up to 70% of engagement is directly influenced by managers, so ensuring your entire leadership team is speaking the same language and has the skills to motivate and inspire your wider team is key to the success of your employee engagement strategy.
Making it easier to hold two-way conversations between company leaders and employees is valuable in both directions. It helps managers tap into what the rest of the business is thinking, and allows employees to have their voices heard on important initiatives and updates.
For instance, your Head of Marketing may be planning a website redesign. They can post a video on your hub sharing a walkthrough of the new designs, and request feedback from employees. This allows the marketing team to benefit from the expertise and skills from elsewhere in the business (such as the developers or the sales team) to come up with a better solution together, and everyone gets to have their say.
In fact, our own CEO recently launched a new initiative, which he shared on HomeHub, our own instance of 5app. Here’s what he had to say:
A common challenge for L&D professionals is creating a continuous learning culture, where employees actively seek out new learning content and opportunities. Part of the challenge is maintaining a supply of fresh, interesting content – after all, who’s going to keep coming back to an LMS if they see the same old resources every time they visit?
The good news is that there’s an easy fix! With an LMS like 5app, you can easily surface new and trending content on the homepage, so employees are presented with something different every time they log in.
But that doesn’t mean you have to constantly create new content! With 5app, you can focus on content curation. There are well over 50 billion webpages in existence, so you might as well use them. Sign up for industry newsletters, new podcast alerts and YouTube channel updates for fresh content, then add it to your playlists (or create a dedicated ‘Industry news and thinking’ playlist) to share a constant drip-feed of new resources with your employees.
Top tip: Leave a comment on each new resource as a conversation starter. For example, ask ‘What stood out to you in this podcast?’ or ‘How could we apply this in our own company?’ to encourage comments and stimulate engagement.
85% of employees feel more motivated when company communication is clear, showing the importance of effective internal comms.
One way in which 5app customers see great success is by sharing video updates. This could be regular updates from team leaders, or a special announcement from the CEO, or even an internal SME creating a video to share their process for tackling tricky tasks.
5app customer Greystar used videos to capture the knowledge of SMEs and boost engagement with more human-focused learning. One of Greystar’s team was a spreadsheet whizz, so the L&D team asked him to record himself completing a series of common problems faced by his colleagues. These quickly became the most popular resources on the platform, as employees enjoyed learning genuinely useful tips from their peers.
Employees who feel recognised are 13% more productive than those who don’t, and this recognition contributes to higher employee engagement and motivation levels.
Recognition is super important for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) initiatives, as it makes people feel valued and appreciated. Creating a positive culture where achievements are celebrated will inevitably boost employee engagement – especially if you get employees involved by nominating their teammates for recognition!
This could look like:
Of course, no employee will ever complain about receiving a reward (such as a token gift or an extra day off) to celebrate their achievements, but genuine recognition and gratitude can go a long way when you’re just starting out.