How to Increase Employee Engagement by Turning It Upside Down

Employees Are More Engaged When They Are Actively Involved
How emotionally committed to your organization and its goals are your employees? If the line of sight is far, you probably need to increase employee engagement.

Why Employee Engagement Matters
An increase in employee engagement is not just to create a healthy work environment; it is also about creating a healthy bottom line. Employee engagement research shows that higher engagement correlates to:

18% greater productivity
12% higher customer satisfaction
51% less voluntary turnover

The #1 Employee Engagement Mistake
Engagement levels in many companies remain low despite efforts to improve them. Perhaps because executive teams are going about it all wrong. They typically take a top-down approach. We recommend the opposite.

Turn Things Upside Down
If you really want to increase employee engagement, you need to turn things upside down. Rather than have the executive team drive the employee engagement process, solutions need to come from the bottom up.

How To Increase Employee Engagement
With over twenty years of success with our clients regarding how to increase employee engagement in terms of advocacy, discretionary effort and intent to stay, here is our advice:

Conduct a Well-Researched, Highly Customized Employee Survey
Be sure you are committed to taking employee engagement actions as a result of what you learn and that employees trust the confidentiality of their responses. Ask questions that not only measure the behaviors that promote better engagement (rewards and recognition) but also the level of engagement (e.g., how likely are you to stay with the company).
Share The Results With Your Front Line Managers
Each people manager should know how their own team scored and where they fit in comparison to other teams in the company. Like a well designed project postmortem, the information allows them to reflect upon what is going right, what is going wrong, and where they can improve. Then they can take specific steps to raise their score.
Have Managers Share Engagement Scores With Their Team and Agree Upon Actions
Discuss the report together. What were the high scores and what were the low scores? Could the team have predicted the results? Why or why not? What are some suggestions for improvement?

Take one score that, once improved, could have a direct and meaningful impact on how the team feels about their work. Collectively devise visible, meaningful, and relevant action steps to correct the deficit over the next 90 days. Then hold managers accountable for executing their action plan and showing real results.