Employee engagement

Improving employee engagement starts with understanding what it means for your organisation. The first step in defining employee engagement is to look at your goals, how they might be impacting your people and how people feel about your workplace culture. You can then develop an engagement strategy which leadership, HR, and individual employees are all invested in. 

What does employee engagement mean?

Employee engagement can be defined as the emotional commitment an employee has to their work, the organisation and its goals. There are 5 indicators of how engaged an employee is. People Insight’s PEARL™ employee engagement model refers to these as Purpose, Enablement, Autonomy, Reward and Leadership. 

By understanding how people experience these at your organisation, you have a good chance of improving overall engagement. An employee engagement survey measures how people feel about these areas and highlights where action can be taken to improve overall engagement. You can then use this survey data to focus your engagement strategy on what matters most.

Improving employee engagement isn’t simply a case of paying people more, providing free breakfast or increasing annual leave. Instead, your organisation needs to understand which areas have the biggest influence on how engaged (or not) your people are. You can then create an action plan of what to change.

What are the key drivers of employee engagement?

People Insight’s employee engagement model (which we call PEARL) highlights the key drivers of engagement. Extensive research has shown that 5 universal drivers influence how engaged people feel at work: 

• Purpose – What the organisation stands for and where it is going;

• Enablement – Conditions that enable the individual to do their job well;

• Autonomy – Influence over your own work and healthy circumstances;

• Reward – Intrinsic (felt) and extrinsic (experienced) rewards for your efforts;

• Leadership – Leaders listen, support and enable positive change.

Understanding the drivers that are important to your organisation

The degree to which each of these influences engagement can vary by organisation, industry, sector and company culture. Understanding which drivers are most important to your organisation is a key step in developing your employee engagement strategy. The best way to identify these is via an employee survey. This will help you understand where you are doing well, where the gaps are and what to focus on in your action plan. 

The right employee engagement strategy will improve long-term engagement, support business performance and increase your appeal as an employer – helping you hire and retain the best talent. The end goal of an employee engagement strategy is to improve how engaged your people feel. It’s a structured plan that gets everyone on the same page, sets out what you are trying to achieve and why as well as keeping people accountable.

4 steps to creating an engagement strategy

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for an engagement strategy, however there are 4 key stages to consider when putting your strategy together. 

1. Gathering insights – use an employee survey to understand how your people feel and what is holding back engagement. 
2. Defining your objectives – your strategy should be aligned with your plans for growth and business targets.
3. Building your action plan – these will help you deliver effective, lasting change to achieve your objectives. 
4. Measuring progress – regularly measure progress against your objectives to keep up momentum and see the impact you are making. 

Employee engagement ideas should focus on the areas with the biggest impact on how engaged employees are. Before launching big ideas to tackle this topic, use an employee survey to understand how employees are feeling, what’s working well and what needs to improve.

Everyday employee engagement ideas

Creative ideas alone won’t fix the fundamental issues that stop your people feeling engaged at work for example development opportunities, leadership or line management. Your employee survey results will highlight the key issues for your organisation. You can then prioritise actions to tackle these themes. 

For example: 

• To improve Purpose – Promote your company values with a peer-nominated award, recognising colleagues who embody each value. 
• To improve Communication – Help remote/hybrid workers stay in the loop with regular virtual events, video messages and newsletters.
• To improve Leadership – Keep up the transparent leadership that was so effective during Covid-19, with Town Halls, Q&As and virtual newsrooms where leaders can update employees and take questions.

PEARL™ is People Insight’s employee engagement model. It’s a powerful framework that measures how engaged people feel and provides a robust, well-benchmarked engagement score. 

With PEARL ™, your engagement score is made up of 5 indicators. These are how employees demonstrate their engagement: 

• Pride – in the organisation and what it stands for 
• Endeavour – going the extra mile at work
• Advocacy – they’d recommend the organisation and its products/services
• Care – about the future of the organisation 
• Longevity – they want to stay working there 

You can influence each of these by acting on different parts of the employee experience. We group these into 5 PEARL™ themes: Purpose, Enablement, Autonomy, Reward and Leadership. 

A standard PEARL™ employee survey is made up of 35 core questions, covering each of these themes, however these questions can be adapted to suit your organisation or dig into a specific topic. 

Asking the right questions in your survey plays a key part in driving your organisation forwards. In this article we share examples of survey questions proven to result in action, explain how many questions your survey should include and offer best practice tips for question design (tried and tested by our experts).

Before getting started with question design, make sure you’re clear about the purpose of your survey. You might wish to measure engagement, understand how diverse and inclusive your workplace is, or look for signs of stress and burnout. Whatever the reason, it’s vital to tailor the questions to your specific needs. 

3 best practice rules for employee survey questions

Keep it short

• This is good: I feel valued for the work that I do.
• This is not good: I usually feel that my manager and my team mates really value me for the work that I do in my job on an ongoing basis.

Be unambiguous 

• This is good: I would still like to be working here in two years’ time.
• This is not good: I see myself here in the future.

Use neutral language 

• This is good: I understand the new strategy at [my organisation]
• This is not good: Would you say that the exciting new company strategy makes you feel great?

Running an employee survey is just the start. Once you’ve asked staff for their feedback and looked at your results, it’s time to make changes. A good action plan helps keep people accountable, maintains momentum when your survey closes and demonstrates to employees that you have taken their feedback seriously. 

Prioritising actions is key to creating change after a survey. Choosing too many actions risks losing track of what’s important or overwhelming people with change. To avoid this, we advise choosing 2-3 issue areas to focus on. This means you can create effective change and measure its impact. 

How to develop an action plan

Use People Insight’s 6-step action planning framework to help guide your discussions and develop an action plan.

1. Understand the themes in your survey results 
2. Share results with leaders and managers
3. Prioritise 2-3 issues to focus on 
4. Plan how to make change happen 
5. Act on what you’ve committed to 
6. Sustain momentum 

Our article takes you through the full framework and includes an editable template you can use to kickstart your action plan.