Rethinking employee engagement: How to engage your modern workforce

While business leaders continue to cite employee engagement as a priority, many organizations struggle with how to do it well.

The engagement disconnect

While organizations today invest a lot of money in engagement initiatives, from implementing them to measuring and tracking success, engagement scores remain flat (a Gallup report proclaims a “worldwide employee engagement crisis”).

Despite employers’ awareness that old methods miss the mark, and that they need to harness and unleash creativity and innovation from within their organizations, research shows they’re still not connecting the dots of engagement as part of the greater employee experience.

A mindset shift about engagement

To weave engagement into the fabric of the employee experience, employers need to look beyond point-in-time solutions that don’t provide actionable results or an on-going pulse on engagement. Employers need to activate it and truly elevate it with methods that result in long-term motivation, innovation and enthusiasm. This requires a fundamental mindset shift about engagement, to include the following:

Engagement is not the endgame
Engagement is ongoing
Engagement is not one-size-fits-all

The five keys

Here are five keys to ongoing employee engagement, which should be integrated throughout the employee experience.

Recognize and reward your people
Let culture drive and reinforce communication
Provide learning and development opportunities
Get leadership on board and make them accountable
Simplify the world of work

Highlights: Why the five keys are critical to on-going engagement

High performers are more likely to work for companies that have clear values (85% versus 72% of respondents) and far more likely to know their company’s business goals (72% versus 49%) (Ceridian’s 2017 Pulse of Talent)
Seven out of 10 employees who reported receiving a form of appreciation from their supervisors said they were happy with their jobs (Harvard Business Review)
94% of employees say they would stay longer at a company if it invested in their career development (LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report)
50% of employees leave their jobs to get away from their managers (Gallup’s State of the American Workplace)
One out of five employees reports both high engagement and high burnout (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, 2018)

Bring engagement and experience together

Engagement isn’t an outcome to work towards – it’s a tool to get results. The future success of the workplace depends on companies building new systems that improve the employee experience.