15 Constructive Employee Engagement Strategies To Achieve Your Business Goals

The struggle to keep employees engaged is real for many organizations. It is common to see a new hire join the team; excited and full of ideas. Then within a few months, they become disconnected and slowly lose that enthusiasm. This disengagement results in lower productivity, frequent absenteeism, more room for human error, and safety incidents. 

Take a look at this:

• Engaged employees are 41% less likely to be absent from work.
• The US economy loses up to $550 billion each year on disengaged employees.
• Businesses with about 250 employees can lose more than $3 million per year to low employee engagement.
• Organizations with highly engaged employees get up to 22% more profits.

Isn’t that something?

Many HR leaders and successful entrepreneurs have struggled to manage disengaged teams, so you’re not alone in this. The good news is, there are ways to tackle it head on. 

Having a highly engaged workforce does not happen overnight. It requires intentional planning and the use of constructive employee engagement strategies. These act as motivators for the team and promise a better work culture.

Let’s explore some constructive employee engagement strategies and how you can use them to boost your workplace. 

First…

What are employee engagement strategies?

Employee engagement strategies are a set of plans that detail how you plan to keep your employees engaged. It is an outline of intentional steps to take to ensure that your team stays engaged and excited. 

Your employee engagement strategy should typically include explicit documentation of how you plan to measure engagement. This could be via lagging indicators like a drop in productivity or absenteeism. You could also use employee engagement surveys. Other key aspects of your employee engagement strategy are your budget, specific goals, and clear tactics for improving engagement.

Schedule a time for a quick chat to learn how Assembly can help you create an employee engagement strategy.

Having your strategies defined and outlined is a very important step in driving employee engagement. But, there are other key drivers of employee engagement that you’ll need to consider.

What are the top drivers of employee engagement?

The most constant drivers of employee engagement are:

• Career growth opportunities
• Competence-boosting opportunities and
• Empathy

These 3 key drivers stem from employee expectations. How so? 

For one, employees typically join organizations hoping to build and grow their careers. When the management becomes invested in planning career growth opportunities for team members, they feel seen and appreciated. This, in turn, fosters staff engagement.

Similarly, competence-boosting opportunities are a great way to drive team engagement. Think workshops and training sessions that help employees become more competent and grow their skills.

Empathy and care from team leaders or managers help employees feel like they belong. Little gestures that show understanding and concern for their personal and professional challenges will go a long way in keeping your team engaged.

It is important to note that there’s no one-size-fits-all employee engagement driver. You will need to study your team and figure out what matters most to them. A simple employee engagement survey can achieve this. Many companies have found Assembly’s Survey solution to be an excellent tool for creating and analyzing such surveys in real-time.

‍Book a demo to see how this tool can effectively boost your workplace.

15 constructive employee engagement strategies

1. Have a Solid Onboarding System

Employees who start off on the right foot tend to stay engaged for longer. The key to this is to help them retain that first-day excitement. This strategy ensures that new team members immediately get comfortable with their roles and teammates. 

Here are some practical ways to achieve this:

• Send team emails that announce and welcome the new employee.
• Provide fun employee onboarding handbooks that employees can always refer to.
• Give new employees a proper introduction to their role and their coworkers. This helps them settle in faster and makes them feel welcomed.

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2. Give Recognition

Verbally acknowledging and praising a well done job is an essential performance driver. Many organizations use this strategy to boost employee engagement. Why does this work?

People love to feel appreciated. It makes them want to do more. In a bid to keep receiving praises and recognition, employees will always strive to outperform each other.

You can constructively build this into your strategy by:

• Imbibing praise and employee appreciation into your daily work culture
• Systematically highlighting employee wins on high-visibility spaces like company socials and newsletters.
• Offering specific and genuine one-on-one commendations to individuals.

3. Improve Communication

Fostering active listening and communication at work is a great way to boost team performance and people engagement. Findings from a study by The Economics shows that poor communication is one of the highest causes of low morale, lost sales, failed projects, and unattained performance goals. 

Strategically improving communication among your team requires proactive work. You can do this by:

• Encouraging your team to use efficient productivity tools for effective communication. For example, when managing a distributed team, encourage the use of video conferencing tools. This helps make non-verbal cues visible and improves communication.
• Openly discuss company goals and project priorities. This way, everybody knows the company’s direction and can immediately align themselves to fit it. 
• Creating policies that require people to get off their phones when talking to others. Looking at your phone during conversations with colleagues and subordinates discourages effective communication and undermines trust.

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4. Invest in Employee Development

Actively helping your employees grow in their careers boosts their energy and satisfaction at work. This is why most people leave companies that lack opportunities for learning and development (L&D.)

Creating relevant and accessible L&D programs is a great strategy for boosting work engagement. What’s the best way to do this? 

Try to:

• Know your employees well. This makes it easy to offer relevant training opportunities.
• Build on their strengths. Don’t fixate on fixing what you think is wrong with them. 
• Set aside stipends for your employee’s work-related development. When there are few barriers to development opportunities, they’ll be better inclined to take advantage of it.

5. Maintain a Transparent Work Environment

Carrying your employees along is an excellent way to make them feel valued. The truth is - people can’t fully invest themselves into a job when they don’t know what’s going on. You can’t engage with something you do not understand.

By being transparent with your employees, you can help them to better engage with their tasks. Some constructive ways of doing this include:

• Being sincere about internal problems in the organization.
• Resisting the urge to hoard information or use it as a reward for high performance.

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6. Prioritize Employee Well-being

Never-ending deliverables and deadlines are a recipe for employee disengagement. Many employees constantly battle work-related stress and burnout.  You can help your employees feel valued by showing them how important their physical and emotional well-being is to you. This strategy is effective when you:

• Actively prioritize providing mental, emotional, and physical wellness opportunities for your employees. This can come in the form of vacations and short sabbaticals. 
• Provide options for pursuing their passion and/or hobbies. This helps them see that you are not only interested in work but in their personal well-being as well.
  

7. Provide Attractive Benefits and Privileges. 

Every industry is filled with organizations competing to hire top talents. This has created more room for tons of extra benefits and privileges. Imbibing this into your company culture is a sure way to ensure employee satisfaction. The more benefits you can offer, the better. These perks make your organization feel like home to staff - they’d never want to leave. 

Some of the most popular benefits and privileges you can explore are:

• Commuter benefits
• Equity packages
• Gym memberships
• Health insurance benefits
• Home office stipends
• Yoga sessions
• Shopping vouchers, etc.
  

8. Encourage, Plan and Execute Team-building Activities

As more organizations move the bulk of their operations online, fostering team-building activities becomes more complicated. Good thing is, complicated doesn’t mean impossible. You can constructively foster team-bonding activities to boost engagement even with distributed teams. 

Here’s how…

Think outside the box. Try not to restrict your ideas to the office break room (or the ping pong table.) You can plan after work office game nights. Celebratory cocktail parties and mixers are also a hit.

If physical events are not feasible, you could plan virtual events. Group lunches, happy hours, tea/coffee breaks are excellent opportunities for teammates to hang out and banter about anything other than work. 

Want to kick it up a notch? You could plan a virtual pasta night or cocktail night. Some companies prepare pasta making kits or cocktail kits and send them to employees. The team then live streams with a chef or cocktail expert who teaches them how to make pasta or cocktails. These companies have had tremendous success with these types of team activities.

9. Encourage Knowledge Sharing Across Teams

A lot of times, employees work in isolation. They end up restricted to their immediate teammates and have no track of what other members of the organization are working on. This could create a disconnect. 

To avoid this, create regular knowledge-sharing opportunities. Each team can present project updates and key learning points. This way, teams get to have a detailed orientation of every project.

10. Use feedback channels to track employee engagement

Getting detailed feedback from your employees and tracking employee engagement can help you determine whether your efforts are working. One effective way to do this is to analyze your internal communication engagement metrics. Email open rates, read time, and click-through rates can help you figure out the best ways to maximize internal communication. 

Assembly’s employee engagement KPIs help you figure out where to focus your efforts for better results. Feedback forms are also effective in measuring team engagement and employee satisfaction. 

11. Practice Random Acts of Fun (RAF)

 Spontaneity and fun can create a rewarding work environment, one in which employees want to come to work, spend more time with each other, and form bonds that promote the growth of the company. A simple strategy for building a culture that imbibes random acts of fun is to:

• Find team members who naturally liven up the work environment and make them RAF officers.
• Allow RAF officers to come up with creative ways to spring RAFs. They can also choose how often it should be. Some tried and trusted RAFs include a fancy-dress potluck lunch, spontaneously breaking into a song at the office, and flying a toy drone that randomly delivers candy to people around the office.
  

12. Set Up Efficient Rewards and Recognition Systems

You can do this by acknowledging the right talent in a defined and structured manner. Create reward systems that recognize employee accomplishments on several parameters. These could be either their technical competence or behavioral aspects like team participation and punctuality. 

13. Hire for Culture Fit

Hiring for competence and experience alone is bound to leave you with disengaged employees. On the other hand, when you hire employees whose attitudes align with your values, they’ll feel right at home. The most qualified candidate does not always deliver the best results - and that’s okay. 

14. Increase Employee Autonomy

Employees who have autonomy tend to find more satisfaction in their jobs. This freedom helps unleash their creativity and makes them feel more responsible for their work. In the end, they derive more satisfaction from the results. 

Unlike micromanaged teams, employees with increased autonomy are empowered to do more meaningful and fulfilling work. This keeps them connected and engaged; eager to be the best versions of themselves. 

15. Encourage Employee Social Responsibility

Encourage the importance of social responsibility in the workplace. When employees give back through their work, it instills a sense of pride in them and makes their work feel even more meaningful. 

Some practical ways to do this are organizing a fun charity run, donating to a charity course or hosting a car wash or bake sale to raise funds for a cause.

The takeaway?

Building and maintaining an environment that caters to the needs and requirements of the team is a huge plus for any organization. Once you know your team’s needs, you’ll be able to implement the right strategy to cater to their personal and professional development. Sometimes, all they need is some work-life balance and employee benefits. Other times, you may need to provide career development assistance. 

Keep in mind that what works for your employees may differ from time to time. Be sure to periodically track whether your strategies are having the desired effects.

Assembly has several tools that make it easy to keep your team engaged. Try it for free.