Three Steps To Better Employee Engagement

These three steps can help engage your employees at work. You’ll inspire them to invest energy to make your workplace successful, boost commitment, ignite passion for their work, and strengthen loyalty to your organization.

1. Survey your employees

The first step to improving employee engagement is to measure the current state of the workforce.  Knowing what employees are thinking includes them and shows that their input truly matters.

Start with a short survey that can be benchmarked to other firms in your industry or region.

The problem with many annual surveys is the length. More questions don’t mean more valuable insights. In fact, the longer the survey, the less likely employees will give quality, thoughtful answers — or even be motivated to complete the survey.

By keeping your survey short, you can expect to cull better quality, more timely responses that yield actionable insights.

And be sure to thank survey respondents for their feedback and value their opinion.

2. Share your findings and drive dialogue

Once you’ve collected information, share it — good or bad.

It’s a mistake shield survey results from employees. To build a strong culture, employees need to feel informed, included, and appreciated.

Start by prescreening the results and reading employee responses. This way, if personal or sensitive information is included in the results, you can protect the anonymity of your employees.

Next, review the survey data with as many people as possible. Nothing will improve until you have used the data to inform productive conversations. Include staff at all levels in your action planning. Discuss what the data shows and get feedback on how to tackle issues. There may be simple fixes to engagement barriers in the workplace. Lastly, come up with a full-throttle action plan that tackles the issues you’ve found.

3. Put results to use

Take the information you’ve gathered and put it to use. After all, an action plan is useless if not executed.

We hear that employees suffer from survey fatigue. But we beg to differ. They suffer from inaction fatigue. Follow through. There’s nothing more disheartening to employees than the promise of change and a lack of follow-through.

Start by taking care of the smaller concerns of employees. This includes basic needs such as bathroom breaks, food, and overflowing trash cans. These may seem trivial but are close to employees’ hearts. Demonstrating follow-up action will improve the employee experience.

Work on tackling the more personal issues that hinder success. These problems include interpersonal issues, training and evaluating management, and job satisfaction.

Laura Brinton is content marketing director at Energage, a Philadelphia-based research and consulting firm that surveyed more than 2 million employees at more than 7,000 organizations in 2019. Energage is The Washington Post’s research partner for Top Workplaces.