Motivate Your Employees With This Employee Engagement Handbook

How do you engage your employees and retain their long-term interest in your company?

As Telebu’s Head of HR, I’ve tried different strategies to keep each employee emotionally connected to the company. 

In this playbook, I’ll explain everything you need to know about motivating your employees to peak performance and developing a conducive work environment.

From explaining what motivates (or demotivates) your employees to simple employee engagement strategies.

Let’s jump in.

Want to be one step ahead in 10xing positive employee engagement? Give them Talk Magnet. Learn more or see how it works with a demo.

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is the connection and level of motivation your employees feel towards your organisation. It’s the engagement and excitement they feel when completing a task or visiting the work every day.

Why should you take this seriously?

If your employees feel connected to your organisation, they work harder, yield better results, and stay loyal to your company for years. 

An engaged employee is in it for more than a paycheck and may consider their well-being linked to their performance.

For example, I’ve been working with Telebu since the early 2000s. 

When I think about it, I’ve stayed this long because of my emotional connection to what we’re trying to accomplish at Telebu—not the money. I can get the money (and maybe more) working with another company.

You already know what the reverse will be.

Now that you know the concept, let’s dive into more details. 

What are the types of employee engagement?

Every employee commits to your company in one of the following ways:

• Emotionally
• Cognitively
• Physically

Let’s consider each of them.

Emotional engagement

Emotionally engaged employees commit their energy, mind, and time and feel fulfilled by the organisation’s progress. 

You’ll find such employees in top positions in different organisations. These people love to work for their organisation’s cause and commit many years of their lives to the company’s goals.

When I think about it, this perfectly describes my case.

Emotionally engaged employees will:

• Have less stress
• Have better relationships with superiors
• Have high-quality results on all tasks
• Have a low absenteeism rate

From my experience, emotionally engaged employees will become more connected to your company when you reciprocate their feelings. You do this when you demonstrate that you understand their problems and are ready to help them with complaints.

More on how to improve your employees’ emotional connection to your company later in this guide.

Cognitive engagement

If employees love their jobs and work environment, they’re always ready to put in all the mental and cognitive effort to get the work done.

This engagement relates to how your employees use critical thinking when performing their jobs at your organisation. 

It’s how much your employees’ brains stay active during working hours and how they use that brain power to produce results. 

It’s one of the most essential types of engagement as it is directly linked to employee performance.

Cognitively engaged employees are more likely to bring innovative ideas to the table to achieve the organisational goals.

Physical engagement

Physical engagement is the energy and activeness employees usually invest in your organisation to accomplish things. 

These employees are more likely to invest their time in development opportunities, thrive in fieldwork, and handle heavy workloads with high energy levels. 

Overall, the ideal employee should be engaged in all three ways. It’s your job to help each employee achieve this.

That’s exactly what I want to help you accomplish with this playbook.

What are the advantages of high employee engagement?

Here are five of the most essential advantages of highly engaged employees.

• Lower employee turnover: If your employees are emotionally engaged and look forward to the next office day, they’ll not want to quit. The more they feel like a part of the company, the lesser the turnover. 
• Increased productivity: Cognitively engaged employees know what is expected of them and are committed to completing the work well and on time.
• Decreased burnout: Emotionally and physically engaged employees enjoy high energy levels, which means they’re less prone to exhaustion and stress.
• Innovative minds: If you work to make your employees cognitively and emotionally engaged, they’ll feel their job’s role in achieving your goals and mission. This will ignite their creativity and innovative minds. 
• More loyal customers: How a person is treated reflects how he treats others. If your employees feel happy, they’ll keep the customers happy. You’ll enjoy high sales and a more loyal and active customer base.

With such mouth-watering benefits, who would not want to improve employee engagement in their workspace?

But what determines employee engagement? What makes one employee engaged and the other unengaged?

Read the next section to find out. 

Also:

• Discover how to reduce employee turnover in an enterprise.
• Discover how to reduce employee turnover in an SME.

What factors drive employee engagement?

Let’s not beat around the bush and jump straight into it. 

Here are the five factors determining or affecting your employees’ engagement level.

• Company culture
• Promotion opportunities
• Flexible schedule
• Cultural diversity
• Values and mission

Company culture 

If your company culture is warm, welcoming, and high on positive energy, it will remove stress and fear of work from employees’ minds. 

For example, Google is a prime example of how company culture and physical work environment can motivate employees. Many reels online show employees given a tour of the company’s lush office. 

See this IG posts, for example.

The building is attractive to work in, and employees feel that the aesthetics of the workplace help them avoid monotony.

In addition, Google provides meals of different cuisines, free trips, and gym memberships to fulfill the employees’ mental and physical needs. 

See it in this video 👇👇

However, if your employees work in a toxic work culture where their ideas are not appreciated and their efforts are ignored, they’ll slowly stop putting in their energy. 

Your employees will become reluctant to come to work every day and start making excuses. They will also start looking for jobs elsewhere. 

Check out our ultimate guide to company culture.

Promotion opportunities

Top talents are interested in companies that provide them with a career path that moves upwards. 

According to PwC Global’s ‘2024 Hopes and Fears’ survey, 28 per cent of workers said they are “extremely or very likely” to change their employers.

This statistic is worrisome. 

It shows that companies are misinterpreting the idea of a conducive workplace, and employees are willing to change their jobs if they don’t feel more fulfilled there. 

This dissatisfaction arises from obsolete practices, stagnant growth, and low praise for their efforts. 

Without opportunities, your employees will feel stagnant and quietly disengage from the work. They will stop putting in effort and start wasting time on less meaningful activities, and you will see a drop in their results.

On the other hand, if you provide remuneration, salary increases, and better working conditions for your employees, they’ll engage more in activities and show up every day with excitement. Promotion opportunities also mean they’ll not have to switch companies and stay a part of your organisation in the long term. 

Flexible schedules

A flexible schedule doesn’t mean providing a holiday whenever they want; instead, it means allowing them to work late on some days, work from home (WFH) for a few days, or half a day if needed. 

You can judge if they’re using the time lucratively by observing whether they complete their tasks on time, even when logging in late or working for more hours.

Flexibility reduces stress and also allows them to work without any worry. 

When you are too stringent about your employees coming to work every day, their performance will be affected. You’ll see they spend more time on each task and do not produce the expected results.

Cultural diversity

Cultural diversity in the workplace occurs when you hire people from diverse backgrounds. This diversity is important, as your workplace should not discriminate against anyone.

When cultural diversity is overlooked, you risk creating stereotypes, biases, and discontentment among your employees. This reduces engagement and also increases absenteeism and conflicts in the workplace.

In a culturally diverse workforce, you do better marketing because your team members can better understand the wants and needs of a broader range of potential customers. 

This principle also applies to the customer service team. When composed of individuals from various backgrounds, they can more effectively appreciate customers’ perspectives when they reach out with questions or concerns.

Conversely, dissatisfaction and rebellions may form within the team if your company discriminates against employees and favours individuals based on cultural orientation.

Check out my interview with Shirlyn Njeri (from our Social Media team) on how to manage a diverse marketing team.

Values and mission

Having well-defined values enhances employee engagement and productivity. 

When employees connect with the organisation’s goals and values and recognise them as their personal values, they engage with all tasks more actively. 

For example, suppose your company follows a zero paper waste or recycling waste policy, and you have employees who love the environment. In that case, they’ll be more motivated to do good work daily. 

If your company secretly violates its policies, such as harming the environment or not being conscious enough, these kinds of employees will start quietly quitting and finding work at companies with better and more transparent values. 

Now you know what affects employee engagement.

Let me show you how to control these factors to help you build highly engaged employees. 

What are the different employee engagement strategies?

To engage your employees, here are five simple places you can start. To make it relatable, I made it one strategy for each factor explained in the previous section. 

• Appreciate their suggestion
• Encourage constructive feedback
• Address grievances
• Praise their work
• Establish transparency

Let me walk you through how to go about each of them.

Appreciate their suggestion 

Nobody feels loved when their ideas are not appreciated or welcomed. 

If you want to increase how much your employees feel loved and connected to your company, welcome and appreciate their suggestions.

When you appreciate their suggestions, they’ll be willing to give more. They welcome invitations to brainstorm with the team and will be happy every day at work.

Here are three ways you can praise the efforts of your employees:

• Shout-out in meetings
• Social media appreciation
• Lunch or a gift card reward

When you show your respect for their initiative, it will also enhance their productivity.

However, you should avoid playing favourites or being biased when appreciating employees. If anyone on the team has a good idea, you need to appreciate it without ill intentions. Otherwise, it can create dissatisfaction among employees. 

Appreciate constructive feedback 

You’d agree with me that your employees are your company’s greatest asset. 

Constructive employee feedback will lead to a better understanding of your customers, increase sales, reduce the scope for errors, and help provide facilities that will allow your employees to perform better. 

To get this feedback, you need to keep a positive mindset. Even when an employee is pointing out your mistake, you should be a sport and not punish them for bringing the problem to your attention. 

To get this feedback, you can conduct 1-on-1 meetings, create feedback forms, conduct surveys and reviews, and give updates on the outcome. 

On the other hand, you should remember not to hold grudges against any employees who give you feedback because it will deter them from sharing ideas in the future.

Address grievances

Your company needs to address your employees’ concerns or complaints proactively. 

Here’s an example of what you can include in your grievances/complaint form for your employees. 

This is an example of an employee grievance form, which shows the details you can add to a form to get employee feedback. 

Employees are like a family to the company. 

If your employees are distressed, this will reflect on their work and feedback. 

As such, you should solve their problems quickly and maintain a happy and satisfying working environment. 

Praise their work

When employees work at your organisation, they want to fulfil their needs as defined by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

This includes– shelter, belongingness, financial stability, status, and self-actualisation. 

To meet these needs, you can provide them with different perks motivating them to work daily. These can include a sabbatical, car, lodging, or any other basic amenity or reward. 

Here’s an example of how the Tata Motors company rewards its employees:

This way, the company appreciates their employees while promoting itself.

It highlights a positive work environment and demonstrates the leaders’ commitment to making employees feel like an essential part of the Tat family.

If you’re a new company, you can start with small benefits, like gift cards or paid time off, to show your support.

If you don’t praise good work, employees will not be motivated to put in effort for other tasks and will lose interest in producing better results and more revenue for you. 

Transparency

You should always be transparent about new goals, updates, clients, and changes in the respective department to your employees. 

Regular updates about the company keep employees motivated and give them the idea that they are working towards something substantial.

With transparency, you’ll engage more employees as there’ll be:

• Better delegation and performance management
• Improved results for a goal
• Improved communication
• Improved goal setting

As such, transparency as a strategy goes a long way in engaging your employees and also creating a clear picture of the organisational goals.

How do you even know where your employees’ engagement levels are? Let’s talk about how to measure employee engagement.

How do you measure employee engagement?

Perhaps we should have treated this before talking about the strategies to improve your employee engagement. But I left it for last so you can see it as a way of evaluating your employee engagement improvement effort.

Here are some ways to measure your company’s employees’ engagement.

Run employee surveys

Surveys are a great way to reach large numbers of employees at once. 

Also, you can use surveys to ask multiple questions and gather feedback at once. 

Creating, distributing, and collecting surveys is time-consuming, but it’s a great point to start building a solid foundation of your employee engagement awareness. 

Your surveys can be open-ended or closed-ended. In these surveys, you can ask questions about a new policy you implemented, satisfaction with the number of leave days, recent views on an event in client operation, etc. 

You can also conduct annual employee engagement surveys that include questions about the employees’ work experience in the past year. 

For the best results, it would help if you asked your employees the right questions. Some of the questions you should include in this measurement technique are:

Source

• Use mixed questions: Use a mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions. This way, employees can answer the questions more personally and add extra remarks if needed. Combining these questions will help you extract better insights and make more informed decisions. 
• Use online apps: Surveys on paper are a thing of the past. Online surveys are the new cool and can be distributed and submitted anywhere. You can find different online survey websites and Google Forms to create these surveys.
• Be neutral: The key to an excellent survey is not to offend or ask personal questions that will hurt someone’s feelings. Your questions need to be strictly related to the company.
• Don’t send surveys on weekdays: Employees don’t want to be hassled with the company work after their time off. So, you should schedule your survey either in break time or on the weekend. 

Tracing employee journeys

This means keeping a record of all the activities, initiatives, and even complaints your employee has had since the day of joining. 

If their results have been consistent, and minimum complaints, you can proudly say your employees are engaged in your goals. 

You can also create a scale on which they’ll score their journey from 1 to 10 to define their experience in your organisation so far.

When you trace the journey, you also learn when your employees have felt dissatisfied with the company.

As such, you can ask them what you could have done to improve the situation. This will create a bond between you and the employee. 

Performance analysis

A performance analysis shows how an employee has performed over a certain period of time.

The different metrics you can use to conduct this analysis are:

• Productivity checks
• Employee sales metrics
• Employee mistakes and errors
• Contribution to different projects
• Alignment of personal and organisational goals
• Revenue or profit generated by an employee

Performance analysis also helps you discover where employees are lazy and not working enough. This will help you rethink hiring and improve the process to hire better candidates next time. 

Employee net promoter score (eNPS)

eNPS reflects on how satisfied your employees are with working in your company. It defines the level of job satisfaction, company culture, and opinion of your employees for the company initiatives. 

The higher the eNPS, the more engaged your employees are in the company. They work with excitement to achieve your business goals.

This score also reflects on how likely employees will recommend your company to their friends and family. 

To calculate the eNPS, use this formula:

eNPS = % promoters – % detractors

Note: A detractor is the person who ranks your company a 0-6 on the scale.

Here is an example to help you understand how to calculate eNPS.

Source

eNPS is usually measured on a scale of 0 to 100.

Anything above 90 is considered excellent. This means your company has a good reputation amongst employees.

Absentee rate

If people are unwilling to come to the office to work, you should know something is wrong. 

When your employees view your office as a place they enjoy working, they will not miss a day. 

Several factors, including a poor working environment and a lack of communication between superiors and subordinates, contribute to the high absenteeism rate in your organisation.

Want to be one step ahead in 10xing effective employee communication? Use Talk Magnet. Learn more or see how it works with a demo.

The threat of a low retention rate also looms on your company if there is too much absenteeism.

To calculate the absenteeism rate, use this formula:

Absenteeism rate = Number of absent days/ Number of work days in a month

This does not include the sick or emergency leaves.

If you want your absenteeism rate to be low. You can:

• Take feedback from employees on what you can do better to improve the aura of the workplace
• Conduct leisure activities or hobby classes
• Take employees on break lunches
• Provide counselling sessions

If you don’t measure the absentee rate, you won’t know if someone has been taking leaves without any cause. This will affect the whole team’s results and bring down your revenue as well.

Pulse Surveys

Unlike normal surveys with a deadline to fill, pulse surveys are continuous or regular. 

Source

Pulse surveys are quick, trouble-free, and engaging because they allow employees to answer some generic questions in a fun way. These surveys aim to measure employee engagement and check the employees’ emotional commitment within their workplace. 

An ideal number you can include in a pulse survey is 10-15 questions.

What kind of questions should it include?

• How happy are you at work?
• Rate your work-life balance on a scale of 1-10
• Do you feel accomplished here?
• How likely are you to recommend this company to friends and family?
• How content were you with the work this week?
• Rate your satisfaction with the management on a scale of 1 to 10

A pulse survey helps you bond daily with your employees; without it, you won’t know if something has gone wrong during the day. It’s a day-to-day event check that helps you keep up to date on what goes on in your organisation. 

Remember, you can measure employee engagement as much as you want, but it will only reap results when you implement changes based on the feedback you receive. 

Check out our communication and collaboration tool, Talk Magnet, to help your employees work efficiently and increase engagement.