Want to improve productivity at your business? Start by engaging your employees with our employee engagement best practices.
It’s no secret that employee engagement is directly linked to productivity. Engaged employees take their work seriously because it matters to them, and they’re more likely to suggest ideas and improvements for your business.
Whether you’re new to employee engagement or a seasoned communications pro, our employee engagement best practices can give you great ideas for measuring employee engagement and collecting employee feedback at your business.
This post will cover the most important best practice techniques for improving employee engagement at your organization.
What is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement tells you how connected your employees are to your business and to each other. It measures how much employees interact with their coworkers, management, and the business.
Benefits of employee engagement
Engaged employees feel a strong connection to their work and see your business’s success as a product of their efforts. Employees who feel pride in their work are more likely to contribute beyond expectations.
A highly engaged workforce can benefit your business in numerous ways:
- Greater productivity and willingness to contribute new employee engagement ideas.
- Higher employee retention levels.
- Critical perspective for business initiatives; can help fine-tune processes for greater efficiency.
- More likely to speak highly of your business to friends and family.
Want a data-based look at how engaged employees improve your business? Check out our blog on top employee engagement statistics to learn more about the benefits of an engaged workforce.
Employee Engagement Best Practices To Get Right
There are countless ways to boost employee engagement at your business. After all, your employees interact with your company in various ways.
But here, we’ve listed our overall factors for improving employee engagement and retention, under which many individual initiatives can fall. Use our list of best practices to improve employee engagement and inspire efforts specific to your employees.
1. Develop an employee engagement strategy
One of the most important best practices for employee engagement is developing a concrete strategy for motivating and inspiring staff.
Plan your success from the very start with an employee engagement strategy. This plan outlines everything you need to succeed at increasing engagement, including:
- Initiatives you plan on carrying out and when you’ll implement them.
- Employees responsible for carrying out your initiatives.
- KPIs you plan to measure to track employee engagement.
- Review processes to improve your engagement initiatives in the future.
When you’ve prescribed how your business will approach employee engagement, it’s much easier to find what works and what doesn’t. Employee engagement KPIs can help measure whether your efforts are effective and highlight areas where your strategy needs to be improved.
2. Keep your efforts consistent
Your employee engagement strategy should ensure consistency with your engagement initiatives. Your employees are creatures of habit, and consistent engagement efforts, like a monthly wellness session, help them incorporate them into their routines.
Schedule recurring initiatives at similar times across weeks, months, and years. Use your employee engagement strategy as a roadmap for future efforts and alert your employees to upcoming events. The more attention your efforts receive, the more likely employees will be to participate.
3. Make your expectations clear
Uncertainty breeds anxiety, which is the enemy of engagement. Employees who are unsure of their responsibilities, their position in your organization’s hierarchy, or their role in your company’s future will naturally have difficulty feeling connected and engaged.
Clarifying expectations and making information readily available for employees is an important best practice for employee engagement.
Foster an open and accepting company culture so your employees don’t hesitate to ask questions. If your employees feel comfortable in your organization, they can better determine what’s expected of them and get engaged with their responsibilities.
4. Use the right tool for driving employee engagement
Countless internal communication platforms on the market purport to improve your employees’ engagement levels. However, choosing the right employee engagement tool is about finding one that works best with your unique engagement challenges.
Some tools only offer specific engagement tools, like chat or surveys, while leaving out other crucial functions. ContactMonkey is designed with an employee engagement focus and includes a suite of tools for boosting and measuring engagement:
- Employee pulse surveys
- eNPS survey
- Staff engagement surveys
- Emoji reactions, star ratings, thumb-up/down reactions, and more
- Anonymous employee comments
- Response emails that work perfectly on all devices
- Detailed email tracking
- Outlook and Gmail integration
With ContactMonkey, you can carry out your employee engagement strategy right from your inbox. Since you can track email opens in Outlook or Gmail, you can access these insights regardless of the system your workplace uses. Whether your workforce is 500 or 5000+ employees, ContactMonkey can give you real results for increasing employee engagement.
5. Collect employee feedback
Nurture employee engagement by allowing your employees to share their opinions and feelings about your business. Employee feedback is an email engagement best practice that can give you a detailed look into what matters to your employees and help you focus your engagement efforts.
Surveys, emoji reactions, star ratings, anonymous comments, eNPS, and other feedback methods included with ContactMonkey give your employees numerous ways to share their opinions:
Help your employees feel their opinions matter by regularly collecting (and acting on) their feedback. Our step-by-step guide will help you create a pulse survey that engages employees.
Using ContactMonkey’s email template builder, you can easily embed staff survey questions on your internal emails and internal company newsletters.
If you need ideas for your survey questions, you can use ContactMonkey’s OpenAI ChatGPT integration to generate content for your email. Describe the information you want to gather, then edit the output according to your audience.
6. Focus on employee fulfillment
Everyone wants to feel like their work makes a difference. Feeling that one’s work contributes to the success of others is a hallmark of engaged employees and a key best practice in employee engagement.
Find what matters to your employees and make that your focus. Collect employee feedback about what milestones stood out to them, and then resolve to emphasize those successes in the future.
Showing your employees that their work matters to the business’s overall success is a terrific way to foster a connection between your employees and their work.
7. Educate management
Employee engagement isn’t created; it’s grown. Your managers should cultivate that growth. That’s why continuously educating management on the latest innovative employee engagement best practices is vital.
Create employee handbooks and train your managers to think through an employee engagement lens; emphasize their sensitivity to the struggles and successes of your employees.
When your managers listen to employee feedback, it’s easier to create a strong, trusting relationship from which both parties can find meaning and fulfillment.
8. Invest in your employees
Another way you can prioritize the success of your employees is by providing them with opportunities for growth outside of their prescribed roles. This is an indispensable best practice for employee engagement.
Offering professional development opportunities for your employees helps your workforce develop useful skills that matter to them. It also emphasizes that your workforce isn’t replaceable; they are integral parts of your organization whose development helps everyone.
Organize one-on-one discussions with your employees and survey their career interests. Find useful intersections with your business’s priorities and research programs, certifications, and training sessions that develop those interests. If you’re not sure how to do that, you can always learn more on writing a training email to employees with our examples.
9. Prioritize employee wellbeing
Treating your employees like people is essential for building solid employee engagement. While focusing on their success is important, it’s equally important to recognize their struggles, both professionally and personally, and prioritize employee well-being.
Facilitated by strong employee/manager relationships, emphasize to your employees that taking time off is OK if they’re struggling with whatever issue.
Have easily accessible resources to help your employees engage and overcome their struggles, like a health plan directory on your company intranet or employee handbook. Provide a pressure-free working environment to help your employees approach their jobs with enthusiasm and optimism.
10. Measure your employee engagement success
After all your efforts, how can you tell if your employee engagement best practices are working? Start by measuring engagement and feedback via internal communications.
Your internal communications are a terrific barometer of your employee engagement situation. Engaged employees are more likely to take their internal emails seriously, paying more attention to the information contained within them.
Metrics like open rate, click-through rate, opens by device and location, and read time can tell you what your employees are paying attention to. Combined with employee feedback, your internal email metrics give you a detailed look into your employee engagement levels, which you can compare to other companies in your industry. You can also use these metrics to boost employee engagement, like pinpointing your company’s best time to send employee emails.
With ContactMonkey, all of your email metrics and employee feedback are visualized within your analytics dashboard:
You can compare the engagement information from multiple campaigns and filter metrics using different criteria. ContactMonkey makes measuring your employee engagement super easy.
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.
11. Build engagement with great company events
Employee engagement happens in all aspects of your employees’ experience at your business. Company events allow your employees to relate to your business and their coworkers in a different capacity than their day-to-day work allows.
Weekly fitness challenges, monthly town halls, and yearly holiday parties are some ways you can use events to improve employee engagement. Not only do they give your employees something to relate to their coworkers, but they also break up the monotony of your employees’ work schedule and give them something to look forward to.
Using ContactMonkey’s event management feature, you can create, send, and track event invitations from your Outlook or Gmail inbox:
Event RSVPs are easily tracked within ContactMonkey, and your employees can include comments on them so you can gauge interest in your next event.
12. Recognize success
We mentioned earlier the best practice for employee engagement: highlighting your employees’ good work. However, recognizing success can take many forms.
The most traditional form of employee recognition idea is when management congratulates an employee for a particularly good effort. But just as important is other employees recognizing their peers’ success.
Give your employees a chance to raise up their coworkers when they do good work. For example, during company town halls, designate time for your employees to highlight each other for their efforts in the previous month. Add an incentive for sharing or receiving praise to increase employee engagement.
13. Have solid onboarding and offboarding procedures
A positive company culture is crucial for consistently strong employee engagement. Your employees’ contribution to company culture begins on their first day of work, so ensure they’re set up for success.
A thorough, formalized onboarding process can help new employees navigate their new workplace. Familiarizing hires with your product or service, important members of your organization, and coworkers they can turn to with questions are all indispensable aspects of a solid onboarding process. You can also do this with a new employee welcome email to set them up for success.
Similarly, your offboarding process should be prioritized to elicit actionable feedback from your employees before they move on to new opportunities. Use surveys and exit interviews to understand your employees’ successes and challenges. Taking this feedback seriously and acting on it is crucial for ensuring positive future employee experiences.
14. Reach all employees
More companies have remote workforces than ever before, which presents unique challenges for keeping all employees engaged. When managers may have been able to ask their employees how they’re doing, now this same task requires them to set up Zoom meetings or lengthy Slack back-and-forths.
Ensure you make an effort to keep your remote employees engaged. Having the right employee communications software in place will help a great deal. Establishing guidelines for remote employees to help remove assumptions and clarify key processes is a vital employee engagement best practice.
Prioritize employee feedback and be sensitive to the challenges they face from working remotely. Opt for the easier option if a meeting could be substituted with a simple Slack message. This easy employee engagement best practice can have a big impact.
If you need to contact only a select portion of your employees, you can use custom email lists to reduce the number of irrelevant emails your employees receive. With ContactMonkey’s List Management feature, you can create custom email lists—without needing IT—that integrate with your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) like Workday and ADP, as well as Azure Active Directory, so they’ll automatically update as employees join and leave your company.
15. Rally employees behind your company mission and values
Effectively communicating your company’s goals and values is an important best practice in employee engagement. When your organization’s objectives inspire employees, they derive meaning and purpose from their work.
In turn, employees are more motivated to become engaged in day-to-day processes at your company and more dedicated to their projects.
Effectively communicating a strong company vision and values is a cumulative process. It involves reminding employees about team wins and client achievements to encourage pride in their work.
It also entails communicating consistently, with cohesive messaging, brand voice, and visuals to help employees understand the brand identity. Using consistent employer branding across your communications and choosing appropriate graphics, colours, and designs is an important part of this.
In the end, employees need to understand your company and their role in it. Once they know this, they’re more motivated to become fully engaged because they have direction and know how to succeed.
16. Promote diversity and inclusion
The significance of this employee engagement best practice can’t be understated. Creating an environment promoting diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the workplace is the minimum for facilitating employee engagement.
Feeling comfortable and safe in the work environment is essential for employee engagement. When staff don’t feel welcomed in the office and sense that their ideas are being excluded from discussion, they avoid engaging.
Promote D&I policies, standards, and training to foster employee engagement. Use your leadership communications to underscore your company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.
In addition, try to establish and promote any D&I-related employee coaching opportunities, webinars, and other resources.
17. Foster connection through team-building
At the office, it’s easier to build bonds with colleagues. After all, we see them almost every day.
Remote and hybrid work have made team-building a bit more complex. However, these flexible work policies are important to your employee engagement strategy, so you don’t want to scrap them.
Instead, it would be best if you struck a balance between engaging in-person and virtual team-building events.
Try organizing virtual game nights, wine-downs, lunch and learns, and other events that allow employees to connect beyond work in a remote setting.
At the same time, make sure to set up in-person events, such as escape rooms, paint nights, and dinners once a quarter to get employees mingling in person. This balance enables employees to retain the work flexibility they value while gaining opportunities to make meaningful connections.
18. Stick with it
It’s worth mentioning again that good employee engagement doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, it’s a continuous process that needs frequent refining and updates according to the many factors that affect your employees.
A solid employee engagement strategy combined with effective and frequent measurement can provide a solid foundation for building greater employee engagement.
Formalizing this often nebulous aspect of your organization can help you unlock greater productivity and camaraderie from your employees.
Give Employee Engagement The Attention It Deserves
It’s easy to overlook the importance of employee engagement best practices, but do so at your peril. Low employee engagement can drastically reduce productivity at your organization, resulting in low morale, high turnover, and dissatisfied employees.
Emphasize employee engagement in all your initiatives and consider its importance to your business’s overall success. When you invest in your employees and genuinely care about their success, you will quickly see that this effect is reciprocal.
Engaged employees save your business time and money while helping it grow and achieve its objectives. Invest in employee engagement by using a dedicated employee engagement tool like ContactMonkey. With ContactMonkey, you can take a data-based approach to employee engagement at your business and easily prove the ROI of employee engagement.
Want to learn more about increasing employee engagement at your business? Book a free demo to see how ContactMonkey makes growing and tracking employee engagement a breeze.
