The Employee Engagement Starter Kit: 5 Essential Steps to Get You Started
Employee engagement isn't a magic trick. It's a strategic and ongoing process that requires dedication and effort. But where do you even begin? Don't worry, we've got you covered. This starter kit provides 5 essential steps to jumpstart your employee engagement journey and transform your workplace into a thriving environment.
Step 1: Where do you stand?
Have you done a pulse check with your team? An engagement survey?
If not, it is a good idea. A free team health check takes two minutes and is a reasonable first pass.
Don't start creating solutions before you know where there are improvement opportunities.
1. Make sure it is confidential and truly confidential. Let your team speak freely. Eventually, as you foster engagement, you will use confidential surveys less because your team is open to telling you and your leadership where they stand
2. Make sure it is based on some sort of pillars that are important to you, but generally look at satisfaction, work-life balance, feedback, development, and company culture
3. Once you have the data, dive into the people analytics and see where you have opportunities to improve. If nobody in-house has time to do that reading, engagement consulting vs software is a fair question to ask at this stage.
Step 2: Define your goals
What does employee engagement mean for you and your company?
What does an engaged employee look like?
Set clear goals for what you would like to improve. Tie each one to a number you can defend. Engagement survey ROI shows how to connect a survey result to a financial outcome.
Goals can look like:
Increase feedback/development scores by 3 percentage points in 60 days. Raise eNPS by 10 points over two quarters.
Reduce turnover by 15% by quarter 2.
Step 3: Data Strategy
Every goal or objective should be able to be measured by data points. This way you can have a timeline and goals for each initiative. What would make the biggest impact on your organization, and how do you want to track it? Do not try to fix everything at once; choose either the biggest opportunity or one that you know you can make a quick impact on. A category-level engagement survey gives you the baseline for every one of these.
With each initiative, you will need to have data that can be tracked, for instance:
Communication is tracked through pulse checks or the number of messages in group chats. Pulse checks only produce honest data when people trust them. anonymous and confidential surveys compared explains the difference.
Onboarding effectiveness based on feedback survey results. Thirty, 60 and 90-day surveys catch the problem behind why new hires seem unprepared while there is still time to fix it.
Development based on performance review results.
Step 4: Implement your plan
You need to tell your staff that you are beginning initiatives to better their work environment. This shows them the investment in their day-to-day lives. You will need to get leadership buy-in, and they will be a driving force of each initiative. It is best practice to meet with your leadership team before announcing it to the rest of the team so you're aligned.
Ensure you let your team know you have mechanisms in place to receive regular feedback on how you are doing. This can be through surveys, 1:1s, or performance reviews.
Step 5: Read the results and adapt
Now that you have completed an initiative, how did it go?
Did you get the results you had hoped for?
Even if you exceed expectations, how can you adapt your initiative to improve?
You can always refine your strategy to create an even more impactful strategy. These improvements will show in your business. A short quarterly pulse is the easiest way to see them. This pulse survey small business guide covers cadence and question count.
Use these steps to create an even more engaged workforce and a business that continues to grow as each team member is invested in your brand and represents your culture.