7 ways to drive employee engagement

Your employees want to be engaged and undertaking high-quality, meaningful work just as much as they want to work with leaders who foster high performance and who care. When your team’s performance isn’t quite up to scratch, it might be time to look at your company culture more broadly to gauge its impact on employee engagement. 

As a leader, company culture may not be something you can always steer directly — especially in a frontline or deskless organisations. With heavy workloads and dispersed workforces, finding the time to team-build, upskill, and socialise can be tough. This considered, there are still numerous ways to foster a highly engaged workforce.  

Whether you’re a HR manager, line manager, team leader on the frontline, or senior leader, this article unpacks the key drivers of employee engagement and will provide you with the tools you need to enact change in your work environment.

What is employee engagement?

Engagement isn’t just your people showing up to work on time every day — it’s about their relationship with, and commitment to, your team and business. However, building and maintaining an engaged workforce is rarely a set-and-forget process. It takes time, consideration, and strategy — but the rewards are worth the effort. 

When your employees are actively interested in the work that they’re producing and understand how it relates to the mission of your organisation, then they’re more likely to commit more effort to their work. According to Gallup, highly engaged employees achieve: 

• 10% higher customer loyalty/engagement 

• 18% higher productivity (sales)  

• 23% higher profitability 

Engaged workers can also result in: 

• 78% less absenteeism 

• 21% less turnover for high turnover organisations 

• 63% fewer safety incidents (accidents) 

Engagement doesn’t simply occur naturally to some and not to others; employees who were once engaged can become disillusioned or burnt out, losing sight of their goals and losing their motivation to do great work. In turn, the responsibility falls on HR, business leaders, and direct managers, who are tasked with building and maintaining a culture that keeps employees interested and on-track. Here’s how you can do it.

1. Live your values

Strong, authentic leadership is the driving force behind creating an engaged, motivated workforce. Leaders need to meet, discuss, and lay out values and strategies that can then permeate other areas of the business. Of course, the best way to spread this culture is to embody it. Naturally, employees look at their leaders for inspiration, direction, and overall morale.

For example, imagine a Retail store with a core value of “patience and respect for customers at all times”. Before opening, the manager revises the company values to the team to boost morale. The store opens, and you overhear the manager dealing with an inquisitive and persistent customer. The manager becomes frustrated, raising their voice at the customer and walks away. While this may have been a one-off occurrence or an understandable response to a difficult customer, the manager inadvertently set the tone for how a customer can be treated. On the other hand, the manager could have exhibited patience by de-escalating the situation and leading by example for their team members. 

The point here is that managers and leaders play a key role in setting the tone of expected behaviours, culture, and values for the wider team. 

How you can do it:

Jon R. Katzenbach from the Harvard Business Review recommends Cultural Intervention as a first resort when an organisation’s actions fail to meet its values. Culture runs deep, and it takes time to build trust in new processes and change ingrained ways of thinking. 

Think about what you’re trying to achieve as a business. Will your organisation’s values help achieve this overarching goal? 

If the answer is yes and the organisation is still failing its targets, then your senior leadership needs to shift their priorities to help the organisation achieve results. However, if the answer is no, then your values need to be rethought so that your people can know how to go about achieving their goals.

2. Be transparent and authentic in your leadership

We’re in the midst of a “trust crisis”. Mass layoffs, misaligned values, and the pursuit of record profits continue to divide employees and leaders. In fact, the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer found that just 19% of associate level employees trust their CEOs to tell the truth. 

In keeping with living your values, it’s important for the leaders of your business to demonstrate transparency and be authentic. This extends to your employees believing that your leadership team can achieve the goals they set out for your organisation. 

When employees trust that their leaders can achieve what they’ve set out to do, they’re much more likely to stay on board and aim to achieve the goals together.

How you can do it:

The most effective way to increase trust in your leadership to drive employee engagement is to improve communication.  Research by MIT Sloan Management Review showed that trusting employees are 260% more motivated to work, have 41% lower rates of absenteeism, and are 50% less likely to look for another job. 

The only way that upper management can be authentic and trusted is through clear and transparent communication with their employees. This may be through line or direct managers, who then speak with their teams and align on goals, or by communicating clearly with the entire organisation.

3. Communicate with your people

For communication to be effective there must also be room for response. Generally, people will have questions about what informed the business strategy, and the targets they’ll be working towards. This is referred to as ‘two-way’ communication. 

Humanforce spoke to Business Psychologist Eleni Dracakis who helps high-performing leaders, teams and organisations go from good to great. She has years of experience in unleashing the potential in teams about why effective communication is so vital. 

If communication has been off within your organisation, and your people are confused about what’s going on, it will be reflected down the chain, Dracakis advises. 

"Humans have inbuilt BS detectors. If we detect something that’s off i.e. misalignment of values, we automatically tweak and perk up that something’s not quite right here. It’s a surefire way to get people to stop, think, and talk about the ‘way things should be." 

Just as it’s important for business leaders to communicate the organisation’s vision, it’s also just as important to ensure that your people understand what’s being said, and a big part of that is asking questions and seeking clarification. 

The format in which information is delivered is an important consideration. In the context of a large company meeting, it may be a great chance to speak about a new company direction but may not be the right forum for detailed questions from your team to be asked. People may also be hesitant to speak up with so many others around and in such a formalised environment. 

To ensure this understanding is driven across the organisation, personalised one-on-one communication is key. 

“It’s really important for line managers to maintain open lines of communication when an employee wants to talk about a misalignment of values and work together to come up with a mutually acceptable solution or change to satisfy the matter at hand,” Dracakis said. 

How you can do it:

• Host a town hall meeting. If your senior leadership is launching a new strategy, consider organising a town hall meeting directly afterward, so that your people can ask questions they may have. Just be sure to be mindful of your shift-based workers. Can they attend? Are multiple meetings required? Have alternatives in mind if scheduling is an issue – e.g. can the frontline managers be involved in disseminating the information?  

• Organise team meetings. Once a new strategy has been released, encourage your managers to meet with their teams to discuss the new goals and how any changes may impact them. In these meetings, encourage your managers to ask for ideas from your people, so that they’re being brought along on the mission. 

• Send out regular communications. If there’s a new project that impacts across the organisation, provide regular updates so that your people feel they understand what’s happening and what’s impacting them. Brief your managers beforehand so that they’re aware of what’s happening, and can field any questions that their team might have. 

• Have an “Ask me anything”. Get your teams to send in any questions that they might have and answer them in a public forum. This could be hosted on a messaging platform or through video conferencing. 

4. Home in on engagement

We’ve detailed a few examples of how leadership can foster a positive culture and drive employee engagement. Now we’re going to delve into how team leaders can encourage their people to engage in their work. 

Your people want to work hard and create meaningful work. Generally, people are keen to contribute value to objectives and be part of the team’s achievements. Very few employees set out to create subpar work or be completely disengaged for eight hours every day. 

If your people are letting their standards drop with the work they’re putting out, it may be that they don’t see a point to the work or they’re confused about how it relates to company goals. Perhaps they think there’s a better way to do things.

How you can do it:

There could be any number of reasons why your people feel that they aren’t creating meaningful work. And as people leaders, it’s your job to find out. Here are some common reasons that people might feel their work doesn’t create value: 

• Their recommendations haven’t been listened to and it’s resulting in needless work 

• Projects they’ve been working on have been changed without consultation 

• Their work isn’t contributing to company goals 

• They don’t have enough work to keep them engaged

The best way that you can understand these issues is to speak directly with your team members one on one. A great way to start that conversation is to first send out an engagement or pulse survey with a few key points that you can work off. 

In your engagement survey, make sure you’re asking questions such as “do you see value in your work?”, or “do you feel satisfaction when you complete a large project?”. Ask your people to supply a rating for this along with an explanation, so that if rankings are low, you can understand why. 

Go into these conversations with an open mind and work with your team members to find a solution.

5. Give feedback

Through the process of ongoing and regular feedback, employees are able to grow and stretch as they integrate feedback into their work. 

How often are your managers providing feedback? 

We spoke to Ducakis about the importance of providing feedback to your employees. 

“We are humans first. Throw all the money and good conditions at us, but the need for approval and belonging will always get you what we call in psychology ’emotional’ engagement,” she said. 

“Emotional engagement is up to three times more powerful than other forms of engagement. i.e. doing something because logically you know you should do it (cognitive engagement).” 

Feedback is necessary for employees’ continual development, whether it’s providing notes on a draft of a project, or providing positive feedback after a presentation has gone well. It’s important for your employees to be able to benchmark their performance against what their manager thinks. 

It’s this that creates emotional engagement. 

"Managers who say thank you, well done, and give specific and genuine positive feedback will always have a higher-performing and truly engaged team that has their back in times of need." 

How you can do it:

The best way that you can encourage more feedback in your workplace is by introducing a continuous feedback cycle within your teams. Check in with your team members on a monthly basis and see how they’re tracking with their KPIs and goals.  

A great way to introduce a consistent feedback cycle is to use your HR software. Scheduling 1:1 check-in meetings is made easier with Humanforce’s Employee Engagement solution. 

In this same conversation, give them pointers on how they could improve their performance. Ensure that you also commend them on areas where they’re doing well. Essentially, you’ll want to incorporate the principles of the Pendleton Feedback model to make them feel heard and supported. 

Create a culture of feedback. Your employees need to understand where they stand with the work that they’re doing, so that they’re able to know when they’re doing well and that their work is being recognised. 

Feedback is such a crucial element in driving employee engagement, so if your managers are pushing back on implementing a feedback process, check out this on the importance of continuous feedback.

6. Recognition

Does recognition differ from providing sufficient feedback? The answer is yes. 

Recognition isn’t just leaving a note in a Google doc with a positive comment, it has to go deeper. Like Ducakis mentioned, it’s about emotional engagement. 

Reward your top performers when they achieve their goals. Recognise employees who have completed probation with flying colours. Work with your people to build a culture of positive engagement around work, and this in turn will create positive attitudes when people approach their work. 

Encourage peer-to-peer recognition as well. Recognition isn’t limited to managers — it can also come from those who’ve worked on projects with your team and have seen your team members put in the extra effort.

How you can do it:

There are plenty of ways that you can introduce rewards and recognition practices with your team. Ask your team if they have any ideas around recognition – everyone likes it differently. One option is taking time at your regular team catch-ups to recognise the fantastic work that has been achieved. 

There are plenty of services available to automate recognition: 

• Bonusly: Give your team points with a GIF and a couple of emojis. These points can be traded in for vouchers or other work perks that you set up for your team.

• Kudos: A recognition program that can dole out appreciation tokens, with or without gift cards attached to them.

7. Look to the future

Career development is a driving factor for employee engagement. 

People need to see that your organisation has a future that includes them as part of it, and that you’re willing to help them get there. 

Gallup found that organisations who made a strategic investment in employee development report 11% greater profitability and are twice as likely to retain their employees. Your team needs to see that they’re working towards something bigger and better. Continuing to do the same thing endlessly with no room for progression will absolutely make your people disengaged.

How you can do it:

• Promote top performers. If someone is doing well at their job, provide recognition. Not only does this reward the star employees, it also demonstrates to other staff that progress is achievable if they work hard. 

• Progression plans. Integrate these with your monthly check-ins. Talk to your people to show them what they need to be doing to develop their careers and track their progression. Add on some new tasks to help prepare them for the future. 

• Encourage training. If there’s training available that will help your team with their soft leadership skills or improve their technical capability, book them in and watch them grow professionally. 

Bonus tip: Driving employee engagement in frontline organisations

These takeaways aren't restricted to the office — they're also perfectly applicable to frontline organisations and teams.

Frontline and deskless workers work under high pressure, and are susceptible to burnout, mental health issues, and more. As such, it’s important that frontline managers and teams stay diligent with their employee engagement programs.  

Though it may be easier to have a quick catchup with your team members on the fly and provide feedback in passing, that doesn’t mean you should skimp on feedback opportunities with your team members who are working off-site or overnight shifts, for example.

How you can do it:

As we covered earlier, continue to send out engagement pulse surveys and check-ins for your continuous feedback cycles. But additionally, you can organise more one-on-one meetings with them so that they’re being updated on information that may not be available to them effectively in the frontline. This can be done easily via Employee Engagement, as we noted above. 

Another tool for keeping frontline and deskless workers engaged is an accessible and functional mobile app. The Humanforce Work App, for example, gives workers on-the-go access to the organisation-wide notice board and news hub, complete with push notifications and messaging functionality. This allows them to stay connected and in-the-loop, regardless of their work hours or proximity to the business.

Interested in more?

Humanforce is passionate about teams reaching their potential and giving business leaders the tools they need to enable their people to succeed. If you’re curious about how our HR solutions and tools can help drive employee engagement, improve culture and give your leaders oversight of team members’ happiness, speak with one of our experts today.

About Humanforce 

Humanforce is the all-in-one platform for frontline and flexible workforces, offering a truly employee centred, intelligent and compliant human capital management (HCM) suite – without compromise. Founded in 2002, Humanforce has a 2300+ customer base and over half a million users worldwide. Today, we have offices across Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK. 

Our vision is to make work easier and life better by focusing on the needs and fulfilment of frontline workers, and the efficiency and optimisation of businesses. 

To learn more about how Humanforce’s solution can help automate people processes in your business, please contact us.