Rethinking Maximizing Employee Engagement

Employers know that employee engagement is crucial for staff productivity and retention. Yet, according to a 2024 Gallup survey, only one-third of the workforce is engaged in their jobs. This insight means HR leaders face the challenge of re-engaging a substantial portion of their workforce. That task may require some organizations to rethink their approaches to measuring and enhancing employee engagement.

While some long-standing solutions, such as annual engagement surveys and pulse surveys, still hold value, alternative methods are helping HR leaders improve how they monitor, measure, and address employee engagement. This guide explores those possibilities, providing the necessary tools to think differently about your employee experience.

Rethinking Methods for Monitoring Employee Engagement

Organizations have options for evaluating how employees feel about their jobs that go beyond the traditional employee engagement survey, and it’s important not to depend on just one approach.

The mistake organizations often make is looking at employee engagement myopically, said Kathleen Shaw, founder of End to End People Solutions. To Shaw, the wiser approach is using multiple data points.

“Employee engagement has many layers,” said Shaw, and your best bet is to leverage a mix of layered results to gauge your organization’s health. Below are some alternatives to consider.

One-on-ones. According to Shaw, one-on-ones—your weekly or biweekly touch points—are critical to monitoring engagement. “If managers aren’t doing that, and many aren’t, that’s probably part of your engagement issue,” said Shaw. HR departments can ask people managers to use these one-on-one meetings to conduct a stay interview to get ahead of a person leaving. During this stay interview, Shaw suggests managers ask:

• What keeps you engaged?

• What is dissatisfying for you? 

• What did you do this year that you really enjoyed?

• What did you do this year that you didn’t enjoy?

From there, managers can begin thinking about what projects would engage this person in the next year or how to support them differently based on their answers. Shaw noted that it’s also useful for leaders to perform skip-level meetings in these one-on-one scenarios to gain another perspective on the employee experience.

Focus groups. To balance your quantitative data with qualitative insights, Megan Bickle, former head of talent management, organizational effectiveness, and employee listening at Amplitude, suggests setting up focus groups to understand employee engagement better. For your focus groups, get as much representation as possible by looking at different cuts of your organization, said Bickle. This includes voices from people leaders and individual contributors of varying tenure, departments, and demographics. During these focus groups, it’s also wise to empower people leaders to use recent engagement survey data as a talking point, Bickle added.

Note that focus groups will only have a positive impact if you listen. Bickle mentioned one company that fueled negative sentiment after it mandated returning to the office on specific days—even though its employee listening team had just completed focus groups that asked for the opposite. This oversight made the policy feel tone-deaf and, ultimately, made employees feel that their feedback didn’t matter.

Observe social media channels. Shaw explained how, if you give your 10,000-person employee population a hashtag to use and you see 4,000 people who are positively commenting using your hashtag, that, too, is engagement data because it shows a willingness to openly promote the organization as an employee.

You could also use AI tools to automate getting insights into the mood of the organization. Bickle shared how one company she spoke to uses artificial intelligence to send emails at random asking, “How’s your day going?” or “How engaged are you on a scale of 1-10?” These simple, one-question surveys are an instantaneous way to gather employee sentiment. And because these questions are asked in the moment, Bickle believes they elicit more honest responses.

Pro tip: Avoid monitoring employees too much. Bickle called invasive employee tracking, such as the counting of keystrokes and mouse movements, “scary stuff” and pointed out how it can be inequitable for hybrid workplaces. Employees don’t like it either, with nearly half of respondents in a 2024 survey from Checkr saying they would consider taking a pay cut in exchange for their employer not tracking their online activity.

Rethinking Methods for Measuring Employee Engagement

You can use a host of metrics to assess employee engagement, including any of those listed below. How do you choose?

• Absenteeism rate

• Confidence in leadership 

• Employee burnout rate

• Employee development participation

• Employee net promoter score (eNPS)

• Employee recognition frequency

• Employee referral rate

• Employee retention rate

• Employee satisfaction (ESAT)

• Employee sentiment

• Employee turnover rate

• Indeed/Glassdoor ratings 

• Manager-employee one-on-one meeting frequency

• Productivity rate

• Survey participation 

• Time in meetings 

Know what your organization is trying to drive. To choose the right metrics to assess employee engagement, you need to know what your organization is trying to accomplish, said Bickle. She gave the example of Microsoft, which has moved away from engagement as its gold standard and toward “employee thriving.” Microsoft defines “employee thriving” as “to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work” and thus collects sentiment related to those three components.  

Consider measuring the employee experience. According to the SHRM report The Case for Employee Experience, measuring both employee experience and employee engagement can predict a little more than half of job satisfaction (54%) and can explain, on average, 42% of turnover intent. 

The employee experience includes culture, technology, and the physical workspace, all of which heavily impact engagement. According to Bickle, the continued tension around where work needs to happen plays a major role in engagement and leaves some employees feeling that, though they enjoy what they do, company policies make it harder for them to continue. Get feedback on this to get ahead of it.  

Rethink how you analyze the metrics. Getting an average engagement score can be helpful to benchmark year over year, but another, more beneficial, analysis is finding opportunity areas, particularly among teams. “Often, employee engagement stems from that manager level,” suggested Shaw. This insight aligns with SHRM’s employee experience research, which found that workers rank “managers” as one of the three greatest influences on employee experience.

Shaw explained that even if employee engagement is good overall, you may have pockets of poor engagement because a manager isn’t delivering—be it on recognition or growth—or isn’t articulating the organization’s strategy and how their team’s work aligns with it. AI can help analyze the data automatically to help you find trends like these—and others you might have otherwise overlooked.  

Narrow down the metrics you will act on. Bickle said it’s essential to focus on metrics on which you can take meaningful action. Though holistic data could be interesting, there’s no point in collecting it if you don’t act on it. “If you’re doing a survey audit, and ask, ‘How is that data being used?’ and the answer is, ‘Well, it’s not, really,’ then trash the question,” advised Bickle.  

Pro tip: Remove ambiguity in survey questions. Bickle told us how, in one engagement survey she was involved in, a question asked if employees had confidence in the executive leadership team; the company later found out that many employees weren’t sure whom the executive leadership team referenced, making the results null.

Rethinking Methods for Addressing Employee Engagement Results

How you act on employee engagement results will affect your engagement moving forward. And if your employees are asking about where the results are, you’re already a step behind. 

“The pitfall that I’ve seen repeatedly in organizations is that lack of follow-up communication,” said Bickle. “After spending all this time telling employees that their feedback matters, you need to let them know you heard them and tell them what you heard.”  

Have a communication plan. “Make a plan for when you’re going to communicate companywide results and have a commitment from the executive team as a unified front on what you’re going to work on for the months ahead,” suggested Bickle. The goal is to be as transparent as possible, she said. Let your team know, “We heard you, here’s the response rate, and here’s when you’ll hear more.”

Pull the thread through. Don’t expect employees to make the connections themselves between survey results and changes in the workplace. Bickle gave an example where survey results showed a need for better communication in the HR function. After running a focus group to understand what HR leadership could do to improve communication, they launched a specific Slack channel for HR, but the leaders didn’t tell people why they were launching the channel. Connect the dots for your employees so they see you following through. Shaw agreed, noting that when you implement something as a direct result of engagement data, start with, “We heard you, therefore we are…”

Recap progress before the next survey. Before you send your next engagement or pulse survey, Bickle suggests reminding people of your commitment and what you’ve done since then to get there. Shaw backs this up, suggesting giving employees an outlet to answer whether you hit the mark.

What Does Acting on Engagement Look Like in Practice? 

There are numerous other ways to respond to your employee engagement results. Hilton launched two initiatives to recognize and appreciate outstanding employee performance, while Mirvac added flexible working models. 

Case Study: What Seacoast Bank Did Differently

Seacoast Bank, a prominent Florida financial institution, wanted to enhance employee engagement, particularly at the associate level. It used employee engagement software to identify trends and listened to associates through life cycle surveys, strategic pulse surveys, and one-on-one meetings. From there, managers received training on and support with understanding the results and developing action plans for improvement.  

Meanwhile, associates were given autonomy in their engagement journey through personalized reports and collaborative planning tools. These tools allowed associates to review their feedback and actively participate in creating their action plans. The organization also launched associate engagement committees to facilitate open and ongoing dialogue. Since taking this approach, Seacoast Bank has reported positive impacts on associate turnover and development. 

While these examples are encouraging, they are not a one-size-fits-all recipe. Your engagement solution will depend wholly on the data you gather at your company. 

Pro tip: Don’t exaggerate the results. “I have seen organizations sometimes try to make the data more appealing than it actually is,” said Shaw. “People are smart…They can read through the way you’re delivering the information.”

Charting an Alternate Path to Employee Engagement 

By changing how you monitor, measure, and address employee engagement, you can increase engagement and make a lasting impact on the employee experience. Given that highly engaged employees are 73% less likely to think about quitting, the sooner you start, the sooner you can chart that alternate path for your workplace. Remember that engagement is ultimately a conversation starter you have with your employees. It’s your job and your opportunity to keep that conversation going.