Check Your Employee Engagement Efforts

Engaging your employees isn’t just about delivering exceptional experiences, but about delivering experiences and benefits that hold value for your employees. When there is a mismatch between what companies are delivering versus what the employees expect, a gap is formed.

Just imagine for a moment that you’ve been conducting employee engagement activities – everything from team-building exercises to rewards programs for top performers – but still have a high churn rate.

Employee satisfaction reports show an all-time high, and employees have nothing but nice things to say. Even so, this isn’t reflected in the workplace atmosphere. This indicates a gap somewhere along the employee journey.

Employee engagement gaps might not always be obvious. That’s why you need to go beyond conducting your annual employee surveys and pulse checks. You need to assess your engagement efforts, too.

To better understand the causes behind employee disengagement, begin by understanding key employee engagement drivers.

What drives employee engagement?

While different organization might have different employee engagement drivers, the overarching themes are often similar. These are:

• Meaningful work
• Growth and empowerment
• Recognition
• Leadership and Management
• Work relationships

When you’re focusing on just one aspect while missing the rest, engagement is impacted. That’s why, while team building activities can help with building work relationships, these activities don’t address other issues that could be contributing to disengagement.

Evaluate your efforts

Take a closer look at the key engagement drivers to assess how you deliver on them. By comparing this with employee feedback, you can better identify the gaps that need to be bridged.

Here’s a quick checklist of questions you can use to evaluate your leadership efforts:

1. Meaningful work

To ensure you’re providing your employees with meaningful work opportunities, you need to first get everyone on the same page. The best way to do this is by understanding whether they align with your company values. Here as some questions to ask:

• Are your employees informed about your company values?
• Are company values demonstrated daily in your organization, especially by the leadership team?
• Do you regularly communicate and discuss the company values?
• Do you recognize your employees based on the company values?

2. Growth and empowerment

Are your employees feeling supported, challenged, and empowered to contribute more? To understand this better, take a hard look at your organization by asking:

• Do you encourage learning and development at work?
• Do your employees feel supported during times of crisis?
• Do you provide training opportunities for employees?
• Is there room for advancement at every level?

3. Recognition

Hard work without recognition is the quickest recipe for employee disengagement, and when your organization has large teams, this might be far more common than you realize.

To ensure you’re intentionally recognizing your employees’ efforts and showing them appreciation, ask yourself:

• Are your employees’ individual contributions being recognized regularly?
• Do you know how different employees prefer being recognized/appreciated?
• Do you offer any customized rewards?

4. Leadership and management

The way you lead your employees matters. Can your employees count on you? Do they feel comfortable turning to you? Here are some questions to assess this better:

• Do you communicate change with your employees?
• Do you empower your employees to share feedback?
• Are employees able to communicate honestly?
• Is employee feedback implemented?
• Do employees have regular 1:1 check-ins with their managers?

5. Work relationships

While it’s important to build the team spirit and improve teamwork amongst your employees, do your employee engagement activities have this impact? Take a step back and answer the following:

• Do you have regular activities planned?
• Do you know which activities your employees enjoy?
• Are most of your employees participating?
• Do you follow up with employees after events?

While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it’s one that will help you get started as you look to understand the effectiveness of your employee engagement efforts.

Ask the key questions

Gor your answers? Now it’s time hear from your employees.

When you focus on asking just the most relevant key questions, you make it easier for your employees to share feedback on the areas that matter most. This will help you to uncover engagement gaps and optimize your engagement strategy to deliver results.

Get started sooner with our employee engagement survey template!

Employee engagement isn’t a one-time approach, but an ever-evolving effort. As expectations evolve, so do the strategies needed to keep your employees happy.

While the annual engagement survey might shed some insights, it isn’t enough. That’s why it’s important to engage employees year-round with quick surveys to ensure alignment.

Want to understand your employee engagement better? SogoEX can help! Let’s get on a call, and we’ll walk you through all that we can do for you!