How Companies Can Improve Employee Engagement Right Now

Summary: A year and a half into the pandemic, employees’ mental “surge capacity” is likely diminished. Managers must take proactive steps to increase employee engagement, or risk losing their workforce. Engaged employees perform better, experience less burnout, and stay in organizations longer. The authors created this Employee Engagement Checklist: a distilled, research-based resource that practitioners can execute on during this critical period of renewed uncertainty. Use this checklist to boost employee engagement by helping them connect what they do to what they care about, making the work itself less stressful and more enjoyable, and rewarding them with additional time off, in addition to financial incentives.

As the world stumbles toward a Covid-19 recovery, experts warn of a surge of voluntary employee departures, dubbed the “Great Resignation.” For instance, one study estimates that 55% of people in the workforce in August 2021 intend to look for a new job in the next 12 months. To counteract the incoming wave of employee turnover, organizations — more than ever — need to focus on cultivating employee engagement.

The evidence is clear. Engaged employees perform better, experience less burnout, and stay in organizations longer. Given engagement’s critical importance, we’ve created the Employee Engagement Checklist: a distilled, research-based resource that practitioners can execute on during this critical period of renewed uncertainty.

To develop the checklist, we reviewed the academic literature, compiled a list of the 20 most important drivers of engagement, collected original data about what makes employees engaged in the post-Covid era, compared that to what managers predicted would boost their employees’ engagement, and formulated a series of evidence-based recommendations to promote it.

Our findings highlight that the three most important levers managers have at their disposal right now to boost their employees’ engagement are to (a) help employees connect what they do to what they care about, (b) make the work itself less stressful and more enjoyable, and (c) reward employees with additional time off, in addition to financial incentives.

However, as we found in a follow-up study involving 302 managers, leaders are often not aware of what is most important for driving employee engagement. The levers leaders think are most important do not correspond to what is actually most important. The mismatch between what leaders think their employees need versus what they actually need is further evidence that practitioners require guidance on what will work most effectively to engage their employees.

Translating Science into Practice

In the academic literature, employee engagement includes four elements and can be thought of as the degree to which an employee:

• Feels committed to an organization
• Identifies with an organization
• Feels satisfied with their job
• Feels energized at work

These tend to be measured by asking employees to complete a self-report scale (e.g., “How committed are you to your organization?”). We have posted our measure of employee engagement in a public repository for interested readers to download and use.

Academic researchers have been investigating issues central to employee engagement for over half a century, including how it can be improved. In 2020 alone, more than 1,500 academic articles were published on the topic of engagement. For management practitioners and consultants keen on taking an evidence-based approach, this can be an overwhelming amount of knowledge to distill. How can all these insights be applied correctly?

To answer these questions, we recruited a sample of 395 U.S. professionals and measured our exhaustive list of engagement drivers and their level of reported engagement at two time points (one week apart) during April and May 2021. From the list of the 20 most influential engagement drivers identified by prior management theory, our results and checklist highlight the three most critical ones.

The Employee Engagement Checklist

1. Connect what employees do to what they care about.

Consider the following three actions:

Revise your organization’s mission statement to connect with employee values. Employees are more likely to feel they fit at an organization that stands for social change. Studies show that people are willing to give up financial benefits to work for an organization that practices corporate social and environmental responsibility.

If your organization’s mission is to become the industry leader and nothing more, then it will be difficult for employees’ goals and values — which are likely about the individual’s aspirations, not the organization’s — to fit in. On the other hand, if your organization’s mission is to have some societal impact (such as Airbnb’s “create a world where you can belong anywhere”), then it’s easier for employees to align their goals and values with the organization’s mission and thus feel that they fit in.

Show how an employee’s work is related to the organization’s purpose. A purposeful mission is not sufficient to establish feelings of value alignment. Employees have to see a connection between their day-to-day work and the organization’s greater purpose.