Employee engagement is the secret ingredient behind every high-performing team—but it’s harder than ever to maintain in today’s hybrid workplaces. The relationship between employee and employer has—understandably—changed. What were once face-to-face conversations and office-based meetings are now video calls behind screens, changing the way we engage with our work and our colleagues. While this provides more flexibility, it can also feed into feelings of isolation and disconnect.
The reality is that, according to Gallup’s report, 73% of workers find themselves not engaged with their work, showing there’s a significant need for improvement. Looking for how to improve employee engagement? You’ve come to the right place.
So, keeping your employees happy, engaged and excited to be part of your team is the key to a thriving organisation. But true employee engagement isn’t as simple as making sure everyone is working and getting paid for their work. It takes a fine balance and a little bit of ‘magic’. But when it works, it takes every part of your organisation up to the next level.
What is employee engagement?
As a HR professional, you’ll understand the importance of employee engagement as ‘people’ is what you do. But defining exactly what employee engagement is is somewhat challenging.
While some businesses believe employee engagement is about a state of mind and showing behaviours like enthusiasm, effort, and participation, others think it’s more about job satisfaction and having access to resources and other opportunities, such as personal development.
And it makes sense why there is confusion. As teams are separated between office and home, you can’t determine who has their head down every hour of the working day and who is the first one to start a conversation in the office kitchen. The reality is, it’s hard to measure employee engagement, but there will be clear indicators when your people are (or aren’t) engaged.
Why should employee engagement be a top priority?
Prioritising employee engagement is not just a trend, it’s a necessity for creating an environment that fosters productivity and happiness, significantly improving your retention and overall success rates.
After all, employees that are disengaged with their work and your overall company mission lead to stagnant growth and reduced profits. Engaged employees, however, contribute to:
- higher productivity and profitability,
- lower absenteeism and turnover,
- fewer safety incidents and quality defects,
- and stronger customer loyalty.
The benefits of employee engagement when done right
Employee engagement shouldn’t be seen as a stand-alone strategy. It should be multi-layered—aligning employees, teams, HR policies and systems, and other business functions, such as learning and development.
To be able to understand how to improve employee engagement, it’s important to first understand the benefits it can bring and how you can align them with your organisation.
New hires show up ready to be productive from day one
Authentic employee engagement doesn’t start when new hires join your company. An employee journey begins well before that, making pre-boarding as crucial as those initial weeks.
A poor onboarding experience can set the scene for disengagement in the workplace and doubles the chances of an employee ending their probationary period and seeking a new role.
An online onboarding portal, like Cintra’s Employee Onboarding Software, can send new starters essential information before they join, from welcome messages to any introductory information they’ll need before their first day.
From a business leader’s perspective, software like this can also support you in terms of compliance to, making sure you have any Right to Work documentation, so you stay fully compliant with employment laws.
Improved staff retention
Employee retention has become an increasing problem for many businesses. With 30% of employees actively seeking a new role, it’s important that you put the measures in place to engage employees before they begin drafting cover letters and updating their CV.
That said, true employee engagement isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s all about creating a workplace culture where your team feel like they are a part of the bigger picture, that each piece of work they do matters. While we might not skip out of bed to go to work every day, when it feels like more than ‘just a job’ we’re incentivised to work our best and stay where we are.
Engaging with your people
It’s no surprise that one of the biggest enablers of employee engagement is employee voice. After all, we all want to be heard and for what we say to be heard and valued.
Employees who feel heard are empowered to offer their best ideas so engage staff by asking for suggestions on new processes or thoughts on new software. It’s simple to listen – there are plenty of methods for getting feedback. The biggest step? Acting on it. That doesn’t mean silently implementing changes and hoping your people notice, it means keeping your teams in the loop on progress, demonstrating how you’re listening, and actioning their suggestions.
But it’s not just about getting feedback. It’s also about giving it too. It’s reported that about 10 million employees in the UK don’t believe they receive useful feedback from their manager or that their manager helps improve their performance. By providing valuable feedback, you work towards a culture of transparency and openness by engaging employees with 360-degree feedback.
Higher levels of productivity
The first step to understanding productivity and business growth is knowing where it comes from–that’s where genuine employee engagement comes into play.
Increase productivity by keeping engaged workers enthusiastic and absorbed by eliminating repetitive tasks.
Remember the buzz of getting a medal at your primary school sports day? Nothing much changes as we grow up–it still feels great when someone recognises your wins. Employees who feel seen and rewarded (as well as heard) feel that buzz. And positivity and engagement surge.
By bringing in incentive-based schemes, awards programmes, or even just a system for employees to publicly thank each other, your staff will start to feel a sense of affirmation. Those employees who thrive on recognition will feel valued, and those who thrive on competition will feel inspired to reach for more.
Employees feel valued
One way to keep your employees engaged and feeling valued is by giving them access to what they actually need. This doesn’t just extend to a self-service platform that gives them access to the personal information they need – although this is a definite way to support it – it’s about giving them the support they need too. And a great way to understand exactly what that is, is by creating employee engagement surveys.
Having performance management software in place can make collecting, reviewing, and actioning this information straightforward. By using a platform, you give everyone access to precise and up-to-date information about employee ratings, self-assessment, and manager feedback.
It can also aid in the appraisal process, helping employees to monitor their own progress and read previous reviews and feedback.
Improved job satisfaction
Disengaged employees are likely to take more unnecessary leave than those who are actively involved in their roles. A very obvious way to improve employee engagement is to simply make your people happy to come to work every day.
Keeping employees happy is more than just pay and other benefits, like free lunches or discounts. People look for meaningful work experiences and managers that care about their health and well-being. You can support job satisfaction for your employees by:
- Offering consistent career development opportunities: Use informal and formal discussions, like one-one-meetings and performance appraisals, to discuss career goals and put plans in place.
- Paying fairly and equitably: Conduct regular pay audits and share the results with robust analytics. Strong reporting and analytics features are essential in getting and using the pay data you need. Providers like Cintra offer a host of automated analytics like gender pay gap and variance analytics so you can make sure your people are paid accurately and fairly to get valuable pay data.
- Making sure employees take time off and use their leave quota: People can’t be their best if they don’t have the necessary rest and recuperation they need to thrive. Whether you embrace unlimited PTO or have a structured annual leave entitlement, it’s important that leave is monitored so you can see who isn’t (and is) taking it. You should also role model good practice by taking your full leave entitlement too!
- Showing your appreciation: Promote a sense of self-satisfaction by using shoutout features that recognise hard work and praise your people’s efforts in a shared environment.
Healthier workforce
If you want you people to show up engaged and motivated, they need to be at their best. Not just in the sense that they have the knowledge that they need, but that they have the everything they need to be healthy and happy. Alarmingly, it’s reported that seven in 10 employees believe that an intense workload has a negative impact on their mental health.
And nearly three-fifths (58%) of those who always or often feel under excessive pressure at work report work has a negative impact on their mental health compared with just 9% of workers who are rarely or never under excessive pressure.
If you want to boost engagement it’s important that you promote a healthier workforce with strategies like physical and mental health support. When you start investing in employee wellbeing, you’re already investing in engagement.
And it’s an easy thing to put into action. There are a number of different wellbeing initiatives you can introduce that helps promote happiness and healthy living in the workplace. It can be as simple as having healthy snacks to help fuel your people through their busy days to offering gym memberships or ergonomic workspaces for those who need them. All of these promote a healthy and diverse culture where your team feel their best.
You should also make sure that everyone has access to this support, both existing employees and new hires, so no one is searching for the help that they need.
Step up your employee engagement strategy with Cintra
Engaged employees offer a lot of benefits to your business so time spent investing in retaining and attracting motivated talent is time well spent. With growth and overall success as the result, it’s time to evaluate how you approach employee engagement, so you start the new year in the strongest position.
Hopefully, if you’ve made it this far, you’ll feel like the question of how to improve employee engagement has been answered. But if not, Cintra is at hand to help.
With Cintra’s employee engagement software, you have all the tools you need to support employee engagement now and in the future. This includes:
- Custom surveys
- People dashboards
- Trend tracking
- Suggestion boxes for anonymous feedback
- Peer shoutouts
- Company newsfeed
- Template library
Want to learn how Cintra can help your business improve genuine employee engagement? Book a demo to find out how we can transform your people management processes.
Cintra People HR Software
HR software that brings HRIS, payroll, performance, and engagement together—helping you see what’s really happening in your workforce, solve challenges quickly, and make work better for everyone.
