Create An Employee Engagement Strategy

An effective employee engagement strategy can improve long-term employee engagement, support business performance and increase your appeal as a prospective employer so you can hire and retain the best talent.

There is no “one size fits all” solution to employee engagement. Instead, it’s important to identify what matters most to your organisation’s objectives and employees and build an engagement strategy around these factors.

Start by using an employee engagement survey. This will give you a clear picture of how your people currently feel. In addition, it will highlight the most important drivers of employee engagement within your organisation and provide actionable insights that you can build your engagement strategy around.

Here, we’ll help you create a first-class engagement strategy using People Insight’s framework and share examples of effective employee engagement strategies to inspire your planning.

Why it’s important to develop an employee engagement strategy

The end goal of an employee engagement strategy is to improve the engagement level that people feel at work and create a fair and engaging employee experience.

Engaged employees impact all aspects of work life. When an employee engages, studies show they will be more productive, go the extra mile for customers, come up with more creative ideas and stay with the company longer.

To improve engagement levels people feel at work, you need a strategy that steers your employee engagement initiatives towards a consistent goal. It gets everyone on the same page, sets out what you are trying to achieve and why, gives a clear action plan and keeps people accountable.

A cohesive strategy plots out how to get from where you are today to the engagement outcomes you desire in the short, medium and long-term. Some parts of your engagement strategy will be “quick wins” that can be put in place fairly easily. On the other hand, some initiatives will require longer-term planning and more investment.

How To Create An Effective Employee Engagement Strategy

There are 4 key stages to creating an effective employee engagement strategy:

1. Gathering insights
2. Defining your objectives
3. Building your action plan
4. Measuring progress

Step one: Gathering Insights

Before you start making changes, it’s important to understand how engaged your employees are. In addition, what’s driving – or holding back – this engagement. An anonymous employee engagement survey is the best way to achieve this.

An employee survey highlights where you are now, so you can measure the progress and impact of your engagement programme. In addition, it identifies your key drivers of engagement – the specific areas your strategy should focus on. These drivers have the biggest impact on how engaged people feel, so improving them should increase overall engagement.

Individual drivers of engagement vary by organisation however People Insight’s PEARL model of employee engagement is a good starting point. Our model is made up of 5 global themes, with questions beneath each:

• Purpose – What does your organisation stand for and where are you going?
• Enablement – Do employees have what they need to do their job well?
• Autonomy – Are you promoting healthy and positive behaviours?
• Reward – Are employee efforts and aspirations being recognised?
• Leadership – Are your leaders supporting and enabling change?

Once you identify the areas with the biggest impact on engagement, use them to drive employee engagement.

Step two: Defining your objectives

As well as being informed by employee feedback, your employee engagement strategy should align with your organisation’s objectives. Before you create your strategy, consider your plans for growth, your performance targets and what is at the heart of your business strategy.

1. PEARL – Model of employee engagement.
2. BELONG – Framework for diversity and inclusion.
3. THRIVE – Framework for employee wellbeing.

Next, establish how your people fit into this vision and how it will impact their roles. For instance, what behaviours will be expected of them? Will the way they work change? Are any new skill-sets required?

Finally, use the focus areas from your employee survey data and the key objectives for your business aim to create 3-5 employee engagement objectives to focus on.

For instance, your survey results might have highlighted a disconnect between employees’ sense of belonging and your desire for a diverse and inclusive work environment. So your employee engagement objective could be to ‘Cultivate a culture of belonging where people feel confident speaking up, sharing ideas and being themselves at work’.

You could look at your current score for a survey question like ‘My organisation ensures people are treated fairly’, with results broken down by gender, ethnicity or age and set a target to improve this score by your next survey.

Need a steer on your survey strategy? Our employee survey consultants are experts at designing surveys with change at their heart.

Step three: Building Your Action Plan

The actions in your employee engagement strategy will help you achieve the objectives you have set out for your programme. People Insight’s action plan framework is focused on delivering positive, lasting change.

Use it to create an effective employee engagement action plan for your organisation:

1. Understand the issues emerging from your survey data before you try to tackle them.
2. Share data and insights with line managers and leaders so they feel engaged and involved. Their input will be key to implementing long-term change.
3. Prioritise 2-3 actions per objective. For instance, if you are aiming to create an inclusive culture you could start by making sure everyone understands what diversity and inclusion means for your organisation.
4. Plan how you will make these actions happen, who will be responsible for each and set realistic timings. People Insight’s online action planning tool creates an interactive action plan, where you can track progress, share ideas across teams and offer extra support where needed.
5. Act on what you have committed to in your strategy. Come up with creative solutions and use focus groups to ask employees for input. Quick-wins deliver visible change for employees, but keep communicating about longer-term plans too.

Sustain the momentum for your employee engagement strategy, even once everyone returns to business as usual. Support action owners, follow up on deadlines and celebrate milestones as progress is made.

Step four: Measuring Progress

Now that you have a benchmark for engagement and a plan in place to improve how engaged people feel, make sure you consistently measure progress against your objectives. This will keep up momentum, show the impact you are making and help your employee engagement strategy to evolve as things change.

There are a number of ways to measure progress and understand how employees are experiencing the change you’re making. Pulse surveys are a shorter method of gathering employee feedback. Often run between annual surveys, they can dig into high priority aspects of work life such as diversity & inclusion, wellbeing or remote working. People Insight’s interactive action planning tool makes it easy to track progress of actions, highlight upcoming deadlines and check in with action owners.

Covid-19 has had a huge impact on how we work, how we manage team members and the emotional connection between employees and the organisations they work for.

Amidst the disruption of the pandemic, organisations that demonstrated transparency, authenticity and compassion actually increased overall engagement by 7%. This style of leadership will remain essential as we support employees returning to the office, adjusting to hybrid working and balancing work with personal commitments.

Examples of employee engagement strategies

1. Culture-lead change at Arrow Communications

Arrow Communications embarked on an ambitious growth strategy which involved acquiring a number of businesses. This dramatic increase in employee numbers prompted Arrow’s CEO to develop a collaborative new culture programme, #ARROWVISION.

The #ARROWVISION programme considers all areas of the employee experience with employee engagement initiatives including:

• Quarterly ‘Round ups,’ town hall meetings held at each Arrow site where leaders answer no holds barred questions from staff. This investment of time and transparency builds trust and loyalty towards a common goal
• Training passports for all staff, with an online platform where users can log all training, personal coaching and objectives.
• Ownership – shares are awarded to all employees with at least 1 years’ service to help everyone feel and act like an owner of Arrow.
• New organisational structure – this has created a more empowered culture with regional customer directors directly responsible for their business entities resulting in more targeted activities and improved performance.
• Regular employee surveys – Regular employee surveys measure progress of the #ARROWVISION initiatives and identify lower performing areas of the business. Survey results are shared via ‘You Said, We Did’ infographics, letting employees know how changes relate to their feedback.

 Read Arrow Communications’ employee engagement case study.

2. Empowering local leaders at LSBU

In recent years, London South Bank University have seen their performance increase year on year with a 3% increase in student satisfaction and a climb of 34 points in the Complete University Guide league table. LSBU have also recently begun to operate as a Group, with two technical academies and a further education college.

LSBU use employee engagement surveys to inform their 5-year strategy for the Group. Their survey data shows how engaged employees are, whether people are on board with the Group vision and what their engagement goals should be for the next planning cycle.

Informed by their survey insights, LSBU focused recent engagement initiatives on line manager development, better communicating the mission and ambition of the Group and increasing the wellbeing support on offer for employees.

To empower line managers to make local change, LSBU gave managers across the Group direct access to survey results. Using People Insight’s intuitive dashboard managers could see overall scores for their teams, how these compared to other parts of LSBU and what issues were having the biggest impact on their team’s engagement.

Managers feel the results belong to them, and this empowers them to make change on issues that are impacting engagement at a local level. Equally, employees see action taking place swiftly in response to their feedback which increases trust in the survey process.

For instance, the School of Applied Sciences focused on 2 priority areas of engagement: Inclusion and Leadership and the initiatives they introduced were closely tailored to local needs.

Read more about how LSBU is enabling local action.

Need help to develop a first-class engagement strategy?

Explore our case studies for more examples of employee engagement strategies in practice. If you need a hand putting your engagement strategy together, get in touch to see how we can help.