Employees that are connected and concerned about their work are more productive than those who aren’t. Develop an effective employee engagement action plan to get the best from your employees.
There are all kinds of things you can do to engage your employees. But having a plan for these initiatives is far more effective than improvising your employee engagement efforts.
An employee engagement action plan lays out everything you need to do to connect your employees with your business and each other. We’ll show you how you can build your own action plan that works with your employees.
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What Is an Employee Engagement Action Plan?
An employee engagement action plan outlines the goals, steps, and metrics taken to improve an employees’ connection to their work and their coworkers. This plan is a road map your business will take to achieve a specific employee engagement goal.
An employee engagement action plan differs from an employee engagement strategy. Whereas an employee engagement strategy is an individual initiative you may try, an action plan consists of a collection of strategies, along with an overall goal and methods to measure success.
Why create an employee engagement plan?
Consistently engaging your employees can be a challenging task! How your employees feel can constantly shift according to numerous factors.
An employee engagement action plan creates a framework for achieving a particular engagement goal. While this plan is set on a specific goal, it includes methods for modifying your approach, like gathering employee feedback to inform your engagement initiatives.
Your action plan helps you stay on track while trying different things. Even if your approach changes, your action plan’s goal and key performance indicators (KPIs) remain the same, helping you determine whether your changes were effective.
Building an Employee Engagement Action Plan
While the specific initiatives, measurements, and strategies may differ, most employee engagement action plans adhere to a somewhat standard structure.
We’ll outline the different sections of your action plan, and give you some ideas as to what specifics you can include in each section.
Remember, every workforce is unique and requires special attention as to what motivates and engages them. Be sensitive to the needs and habits of your employees, and factor these considerations into your action plan.
Set realistic and specific engagement goals
Your goals can be based on areas you’d like to improve. Think about different instances where employees directly interact with your business: employee survey response rates, event attendance, employee net promoter scores (eNPS), or any other measurable aspect of employee engagement.
Your action plan goals can also be based on suggestions from your employees. If your employees report that they feel overlooked by their managers, aren’t given adequate feedback on their performance, or lack opportunities to move up in the company, then you can aim to improve these circumstances via your employee engagement action plan.
Example: You’ve received feedback indicating that numerous employees feel out-of-the-loop when it comes to your latest company updates. Employees aren’t clear on the status of ongoing projects, and don’t understand how their work contributes to the business’s overall success.
Your goal: Help your employees bridge the gap between their day-to-day work and the overall goals of your business. Increase employee recognition as to how their efforts contribute to the departmental and overall business success.
Mapping initiatives to achieve your goals
Once you’ve determined and outlined your engagement goals, you can start identifying employee engagement models, strategies, initiatives to achieve them. Sometimes your goals will have obvious solutions, other times you’ll have to brainstorm initiatives or ask your employees what they’re looking for.
Solicit engagement solutions from your employees by collecting feedback via email surveys and anonymous employee comments. A quick employee pulse survey embedded in your internal communications can give you a good idea of how your employees feel about your engagement issue…
…and even give you ideas about what initiatives or strategies you can use to address their concerns:
Ultimately, the best way to choose effective strategies for improving employee engagement will be the one that your employees identify. Listen carefully to their feedback and act on their suggestions.
If you need to gather feedback from a particular portion of your workforce, you can use custom email lists to send your survey to only relevant recipients. Using ContactMonkey’s List Management feature, you can create custom email lists—without IT—that integrate with your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) like Workday and ADP, as well as Azure Active Directory, so they’ll update automatically.
Create a timeline for initiatives and determine stakeholders
Once you’ve defined your goals and methods to achieve those goals, you need to figure out when you’ll implement your initiatives and when you’ll measure your success.
Create a realistic timeline for when you’ll employ your employee engagement strategies. This can look similar to an internal communications planning calendar; outline the date and duration for each of your initiatives ahead of time, so you don’t overwhelm your employees.
You should also determine who will be responsible for running your various strategies and measuring their effectiveness. Employee engagement can sometimes be split between internal communications teams and HR, so make sure you coordinate appropriately.
Implementing an Employee Engagement Action Plan
An important part of any employee engagement strategy is awareness. The more your employees know about what you have planned, the more likely they are to participate in your initiatives.
Create internal communications to promote your engagement initiatives to employees and remind them of when they’re happening. You can coordinate your initiatives with their relevant internal communications using your planning calendar.
Be sure to include feedback options on your employee engagement internal communications. Not only will their engagement with your emails give you an idea about overall participation, but you can also solicit feedback about how to accommodate employees or improve your engagement plan.
Try adding a pulse survey to your announcements. Ask about planned attendance, excitement levels, or any aspect of your plan that impacts employees:
Be sure to enable anonymous employee comments so your recipients can include suggestions or concerns about your upcoming event.
If you’re not sure what questions to include in your surveys, try using ContactMonkey’s OpenAI ChatGPT integration to generate questions based on prompts describing what kind of information you’d like to gain.
After the Employee Engagement Action Plan: Measuring Success
After your employee engagement initiatives conclude, it’s time to see whether they had their intended effect. Determine KPIs related to your engagement goals and measure them before implementing your plan.
For example, if the goal of your engagement plan was to increase eNPS, be sure to conduct an eNPS survey after your plan has concluded. Embed such a survey into your internal emails using ContactMonkey’s eNPS survey software, then compare the results to those you collect before conducting your plan.
For companies with large remote workforces, you can use email metrics to determine how your employees engaged with your plan and initiatives:
Measure things like open rate, click-through, and read time of your internal communications before and after your plan has taken place. Use employee feedback to contextualize your email metrics to get a complete picture of any improvement to employee engagement.
If your organization has external or internal regulations around email privacy, you can still gather email metrics using ContactMonkey’s anonymous email tracking while maintaining your employees’ privacy.
FAQs
What is an employee engagement action plan?
An employee engagement action plan outlines the goals, steps, and metrics taken to improve an employees’ connection to their work and their coworkers. This plan is a road map your business will take to achieve a specific employee engagement goal.
How do you write an employee engagement plan?
To write an employee engagement plan, you need to define your engagement goals and relevant KPIs, determine which engagement strategies you will employ, and outline a timeline and stakeholders for your plan.
What are employee engagement goals examples?
Your employee engagement goals can range from higher email metrics on your internal communications, better direct feedback from your employees, improved survey responses, or any other relevant metric that your engagement plan can positively influence.
Build an Amazing Employee Engagement Plan with ContactMonkey
In order to effectively manage your employee engagement plan—inform employees about your initiatives, collect employee feedback, and measure email metrics—you’ll need a comprehensive internal communications tool.
ContactMonkey is an all-in-one internal communications solution for businesses that want to save time on their internal communications, track internal emails, and prioritize employee engagement. Using ContactMonkey, you can let employees know about your initiatives, send event invites, measure employee engagement and email metrics, and much more.
Want to see ContactMonkey in action? Book a free demo to see how ContactMonkey can help make your employee engagement plan as effective and possible:
