Mastering Employee Engagement: Best Practices + 13 Ideas

If your business struggles with employee engagement, rest assured that you’re not the only one. Studies report that 85% of employees are not engaged or actively disengaged at work.

This means more than just losing employees’ attention at your All Hands meetings. Employee engagement is a major indicator of your organization’s overall health, productivity, and effectiveness.

Fortunately, there are many formal and informal changes you can implement to keep your employees motivated. In this guide, we’ll cover the following essentials:

• Employee Engagement FAQs
• Employee Engagement Dos and Don’ts
• Employee Engagement Program Ideas
• Employee Engagement Plan Template

Let’s explore why employee engagement is so critical and how you can promote it on an everyday basis.

Employee Engagement FAQs

What is employee engagement?

eCardWidget’s guide to employee engagement defines this concept as:

“The level of commitment and investment employees feel toward their employers, workplaces, and jobs.”

Essentially, employee engagement measures how passionate employees are about their work and whether they’re aligned with your organization’s goals and values.

Usually, employers measure engagement through employee surveys, one-on-one meetings, exit interviews, and performance metrics. After pinpointing improvement opportunities, employee engagement can be enhanced through effective communication, recognition programs, positive work environments, and additional training.

What factors impact employee engagement?

A multitude of factors impact employee engagement, ranging from basic essentials to non-tangible influences. A few factors that typically affect employee engagement include:

• Job role and responsibilities. Employees are more engaged when they find their work meaningful, challenging, and aligned with their skills and interests.
• Leadership style. Gallup discovered that managers and their leadership styles are often the contributing factor to employee engagement, with 70% of the variance between highly engaged teams and consistently disengaged teams being solely the manager. Leaders who communicate clearly, show appreciation, and provide guidance usually influence employee engagement positively.
• Organizational culture. This includes everything from a nonprofit’s mission to work-life balance to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. A positive, inclusive, and ethical company culture that aligns with employees’ values fosters a sense of belonging and engagement.
• Workplace giving. Many employees prioritize working for socially responsible organizations. If you lead a company, be sure to offer employee giving opportunities and practice corporate social responsibility. For the best results, work with a CLMA-designated software provider to become a Certified Leader in Matching Automation and demonstrate the importance of employee-led philanthropy.
• Enrichment and advancement opportunities. Businesses and nonprofits that invest in their employees’ professional development tend to see increased effectiveness and loyalty.
• Remote workplaces. Some organizations struggle with engaging employees working from home. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to engage remote employees as well.
• Tech stack. Workplace software that streamlines daily tasks, records employee experiences, or improves your office culture can fortify employee engagement.
• Organizational stability. Job security and confidence in your organization’s future can influence engagement. Employees need to feel that their jobs are secure and the company is on a stable and positive trajectory. However, even if this is not the case at your business, it’s still important to maintain transparency so employees trust your leadership and feel prepared for the future.
• Compensation. Employees need fair compensation and regular raises. Provide generous base salaries, and consider other elements of compensation, such as health benefits, retirement plans, paid time off, and other perks.

Addressing these factors helps organizations enhance employee engagement, leading to better job performance, lower turnover, and overall organizational success. We’ll go over how to evaluate your organization’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to employee engagement strategies later on.

Why is employee engagement important?

Investing in employee engagement can yield the following benefits for your organization:

• Public reputation boost. Treating your employees well often translates to positive PR for your organization, which often leads to improved hiring and business.
• Improved profitability. High engagement rates can lead to a 23% increase in productivity and quality of work, boosting your revenue.
• Increased retention. Recruiting and onboarding new employees is far more costly than retaining existing trained employees. In fact, Highly engaged business units achieve a 43% difference in turnover.
• Talent attraction. Baking employee engagement into your organization results in better recruitment numbers.
• Enhanced community impact. Companies that engage employees through corporate giving programs not only enable employees to give back but also make a positive difference in their communities. This can lead to increased engagement and improved business reputation.

What are the barriers to achieving employee engagement?

Before we go over how to implement new strategies to engage employees, let’s discuss the challenges many organizations face when it comes to employee engagement, such as:

• Insufficient training. While employees appreciate work that challenges them, a lack of training can lead to a lack of confidence and direction. This often results in decreased motivation, mistakes, and, in some industries, safety hazards.
• Lack of leadership support. Leaders have the most power to create transformative and valuable programs for their employees. Without support from your organization’s leaders, implementing widespread change will be difficult.
• Inadequate communication. Communication is essential for keeping everyone at your organization on the same page. Poor communication can result in duplicate work, misaligned projects, and missed deadlines among other issues.
• Stress and burnout. When team members face challenges in their personal and professional lives, it can impact their commitment to their work.
• Unhealthy work-life balance. Similarly, when work bleeds into an employee’s personal life, it can cause burnout and decrease efficiency.
• Lack of recognition.Appreciating directs and peers for a job well done boosts morale, improves employee confidence, and fosters positive employee relationships.
• Remote work challenges. Remote work often makes maintaining a human connection with other team members difficult, which is the crux of a strong employee engagement strategy.
• Unclear expectations, performance metrics, and goals. Without an objective in mind or ways to measure progress, employees can feel aimless, confused, and frustrated.
• Lack of inclusivity and openness. Every team member should feel comfortable and valued, and employees might feel less motivated to succeed when those feelings are missing.
• Lack of resources. Not having enough resources to go around makes it difficult for employees to complete work, leading to stress and potentially burnout.

With these considerations in mind, let’s go over dos and don’ts when analyzing employee engagement and implementing ideas.

Employee Engagement Dos and Don’ts

Do

• Invest in employee wellness. Healthy employees are more likely to be happy and engaged. Add benefits to your employment package related to wellness, such as a gym membership or insurance that covers mental health appointments.
• Recognize and congratulate employees. Your organization can’t succeed without each employee’s efforts, so ensure you incentivize the behaviors you want to see by recognizing top performers.
• Schedule one-on-one meetings. Depending on your organization’s size, you might not have time to meet with all of your employees one-on-one. Delegate this responsibility to managers so directs have a consistent touchpoint with leadership they can use to communicate feedback.
• Set clear expectations. Whether your organization uses a task management system or organizes regular pipeline meetings between managers and directs, leadership should always communicate standards and project updates so employees can structure their workloads accordingly.
• Create employee engagement programs. Besides changing your leadership tactics, set resources aside for specific employee engagement programs.

Don’t

• Undermine work-life balance. Prioritizing employee wellness requires respecting work-life balance. Set clear standards for when employees are expected to respond to work matters, including when they’re taking time off.
• Neglect employee input. Lower-level employees have an on-the-ground view of your organization’s operations. This means they often have the most insightful feedback about improving the organization’s culture and work environment.
• Close off communication. Along with leveraging your middle management as conduits between directs and leadership, remember to talk directly to lower-level employees when big updates occur. For instance, your business might hold Skip Level meetings, which involve leadership meeting directly with lower-level employees to announce updates and field questions.
• Set it and forget it. Once you implement your new engagement programs, check in regularly and gauge their success.
• Copy blindly what other organizations are doing. Assess other organizations’ approaches to employee engagement and determine whether you can replicate their methods at your business. However, remember that you have unique needs and must adapt all strategies accordingly.

Employee Engagement Program Ideas

General Employee Engagement Ideas

Professional development opportunities.

Whether you’re paying for employees to attend conferences or go back to graduate school in your field, prove that you’re invested in your employees’ long-term growth with professional development opportunities.

A few ways you can support your employees include:

• Supporting their education. Help employees complete online credential courses to improve their range of skills.
• Encouraging association membership. Professional associations provide members with a number of benefits that can help them advance in their careers, such as access to online communities of other working professionals and attendance at industry events, which include skill-development workshops.
• Providing mentors. If employees aim to move up the ladder internally, arrange for serious candidates to shadow senior members of your team. This allows them to get hands-on experience to improve their skills and determine if they’re ready for promotion.

Direct feedback loop between lower-level employees and leadership.

Schedule monthly or quarterly Skip Level meetings where leaders can talk with directs to keep communication open. While you can structure these meetings however works best for your company, a common approach involves two components:

• Leadership presents. First, leadership shares any major updates. This might be business changes, progress reports, or anything else lower-level employees might want to be aware of. Remember, these meetings are one of your top opportunities to build and maintain transparency.
• Employee Q&A. Open the floor to employee questions. Additionally, allow employees to reach out to leadership with follow-up questions if something occurs to them after the meeting.

Mentorship programs.

Peer-to-peer mentorships provide new employees with a role model in a similar role to them, helping team members acclimate to your organization faster. Prior to bringing in a new hire, ask if any employees who will be working on their team would be willing to volunteer. Leaders can incentivize participation by providing free meals to mentors and mentees.

Mentorship meetings will be organized by the mentor, but in general, a mentorship should provide new employees with a friendly face they can turn to with questions they may feel are too minute to ask their managers. For instance, a new employee may hit a few snags learning your project management system or need help filling out a specific rudimentary report for the first time.

Fitness and mindfulness support.

Healthier employees have more bandwidth to focus on their jobs and complete high-quality work. Invest in wellness benefits, and encourage your employees to leverage them by running fitness- or mindfulness-based challenges. For instance, you could offer a prize for the most miles run in a month or reward participation in a daily meditation exercise.

For a real-world example, Adobe offers employee reimbursement programs for both physical and emotional wellness. Through these programs, employees receive free meditation apps and can get reimbursed for up to $600 each year for health and wellbeing-related expenses, including gym memberships, water purifiers, and art classes.

Employee experience programs.

Take an active approach to engagement with an employee experience program. These initiatives involve surveying employees about their day-to-day experience to identify moments of frustration and seek to resolve them.

Generally, employee experience programs have three stages:

• Employees are surveyed. Survey employees to learn about their daily experiences. Rotate between which employees you survey to avoid over-surveying any one member of your team.
• Surveys are elevated to proper members of leadership. Often businesses survey employees but fail to do anything with the responses. Employee experience programs rectify this issue by using software to automatically forward relevant surveys to the appropriate parties. This allows leadership to collect feedback and act on any issues employees identify.
• Problems are resolved. After an issue has been resolved or noted, leadership should follow up with the employee who reported the issue. This reassures employees that they are being listened to and that their concerns have either been cleared up or are being monitored if they are part of a larger problem.

Advancement opportunities.

Promoting from within the organization not only shows that you believe in your employees’ potential but also allows you to promote someone who already knows how your organization works. When hiring for middle- and upper-management roles, consider existing employees first.

Performance reviews are a prime opportunity to speak with employees about their goals and work with them to develop pathways for advancement.

Informal and formal employee recognition programs.

Show your gratitude for your employees’ hard work and contributions in a variety of ways. A few appreciation ideas include:

• Thank-yous. An everyday “thank-you” is the most informal type of appreciation, but regularly hearing it can still make a big impression on employees’ attitudes toward their workplace.
• eCards. Allow employees to recognize their peers with eCards. These are electronic greeting cards that usually consist of a colorful image and a short message. Design your eCards to represent your company values, and encourage employees to write their own custom messages.
• Awards. Awards like employee of the month can motivate employees to go the extra mile. Consider how serious your work awards will be. Some may be part of formal ceremonies and involve official recognition from leadership, while others might be lighthearted and include silly awards, like “Best coffee maker” or “Most detailed notetaker.”

Socialization opportunities.

The best way for coworkers to build friendly relationships is to get to know each other personally outside of work. Empower them to experience all your community has to offer by providing funds for social outings. For instance, you might allow each employee to plan an event once a quarter with a budget of $35 per person.

Employee Engagement Ideas for Businesses

Innovation challenges.

Many employees feel most motivated when they are given the freedom and creativity to tackle projects how they want. While you may not want to give your employees complete free range, consider implementing innovation hours or challenges. These are set periods of time where employees are encouraged to work on whatever they want with few limitations.

For example, you might highlight a business issue you’d like to fix, such as a lack of sales leads or product issues. Then, open the floor for your creative workers to submit proposals. This gets employees thinking about your business from new angles, which can deepen their investment in their role.

Cross-departmental presentations.

Building relationships across team boundaries helps strengthen your overall company culture. It’s easy for employees to be siloed in their own departments and unaware of how the rest of your business contributes to your goals. Be broadening their knowledge, they can appreciate the rest of your team and build cross-team friendships.

For instance, you might invite a team member to give a presentation about their team responsibilities in a “Lunch and Learn” format. Other employees can then ask questions and or offer feedback based on their own skills, experiences, and perspectives.

Corporate social responsibility programs.

When businesses actively support their employees’ philanthropic pursuits, they’re more likely to be loyal to the business and show more interest in their work. Offer corporate giving opportunities, such as:

• Matching gifts.Donate to the causes your employees care about by agreeing to match their charitable contributions to nonprofits. Set up a simple matching gift form employees can use to report their donations so your business can match their gifts.
• Volunteer grants. Employees can give back to nonprofits in multiple ways with volunteer grants. These programs involve your company donating to the nonprofits your employees volunteer at, usually depending on the number of hours volunteered. For instance, you might donate $15 for every hour volunteered.
• Volunteer time off. In addition to regular PTO, provide employees with volunteer time off (VTO). This is paid time off employees can take specifically to volunteer. This allows employees to give back to their communities without sacrificing a paycheck.

Employee Engagement Ideas for Nonprofits

Meet and greet with beneficiaries. 

Your employees work for your nonprofit because they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. The best way to connect them to your cause is through your beneficiaries. Introduce your beneficiaries to your staff so they can put a face to the campaign they’re promoting and feel more fulfilled in their roles.

Impact storytelling. 

On a weekly or monthly basis, get your team together to share a new impact story from a beneficiary perspective. This can not only spark emotional investment from your team members but also transform new marketing and outreach efforts.

When considering how to level up your nonprofit’s employee engagement efforts, remember that you’re already in the business of changing lives. Cultivating connections between your staff and your mission is key to promoting their connection with their daily work.

Employee Engagement Plan Template

In your employee engagement plan, ensure that you include the following information:

• Goals. The more specific, the better. Follow the SMART format to hone your objectives so you can develop the most relevant plan possible.
• Roadblocks. Similarly, paint a detailed picture of the challenges you’re facing, including qualitative and quantitative metrics from employees.
• Solutions. Come up with actionable solutions that help you tackle roadblocks and achieve long-term growth.
• Key Performance Indicators. Determine which information you’ll collect and how you’ll collect it.
• Owner(s). Ensure everyone involved in the rollout understands their specific role and expectations.
• Rollout Timeline. While your timeline might not be ironed out yet, make your best guesses so you can assess your progress regularly.

Remember to add or delete information as needed to fully customize this template to your organization’s needs.

Final Thoughts About Employee Engagement

No matter if you lead a business or a nonprofit, the crux of employee engagement is ensuring your workers are satisfied and given opportunities to grow personally and professionally. By allowing your employees to lean on and learn from each other, you can transform your workplace into a profitable powerhouse and a community.

Additional Resources

• From Cubicle to Community: How to Empower Workplace Giving. Workplace giving is a great way to rally your team around important causes. Learn about infusing your workplace with the giving spirit with this guide.
• What is Corporate Giving? The Ultimate Guide to Earning More. There are many facets of corporate giving that nonprofits should be aware of. Get all the information you need here.
• Nonprofit Basics: Employee Engagement. One of the biggest challenges of remote work is cultivating a sense of community without face-to-face interaction. Start with these tips to bring your remote employees together.