PURPOSE – MEASUREMENT – ACTION
These 3 MUST are also part of the “Employee Engagement Strategies Checklist “. Lets learn a little bit more about them:
Prioritize promoting mission and purpose, especially among remote workers.
Employees who can do their work remotely have an eroding connection to their organization’s mission or purpose. The drop is more pronounced recently for exclusively remote employees: 28% strongly agree they feel connected to their organization’s mission and purpose.
This does not mean that remote work cannot work, but it requires exceptional managers.
Managers must clearly communicate the organization’s mission and purpose while tying them to each team member’s daily work.
Measure engagement.
Measuring engagement signals to employees you care about their feedback and want to know how they are doing. Whether you already have a tried-and true method or need to develop a way of gauging your employee’s enthusiasm, measuring engagement is essential to having a baseline understanding of your workforce and its needs.
The goal is to start a conversation between managers and each of their employees. An engagement survey will do just that by helping employees communicate their needs and managers know which needs they should prioritize.
When should you measure engagement? The best time to send a survey is when employees have time to complete it (avoid peak vacation times and holidays) and when there’s time to report, discuss and act on the goals from survey results.
Take action on survey results.
An engagement survey is the starting point, not the ending point, of motivating employees. You must act on the results you gather, or you could cause more harm than good. If you just do a survey and nothing more, employee engagement will likely decrease, and turnover will increase. If you ask an employee for feedback about their workplace or engagement and then do nothing about it, resentment quickly rises. However, nothing builds positive momentum for an engagement initiative more than asking for feedback, doing something about it, and then sharing and celebrating positive results. Here are some steps you can take in response to a survey:
- Build grassroots accountability. After collecting data through a survey or other means, managers must lead action planning sessions at all team levels. Managers should use these sessions to foster employee engagement at a local level where every person in the organization takes accountability for making their workplace great. Effectively creating a culture of engagement means that every person in your organization is part of your business’ success. When there is personal and organizational alignment on a common goal, it accelerates job meaning and engagement.
- Have effective action planning sessions. The environment a manager creates for action planning is vital. Such sessions must establish a safe place and provide ample time for employees to discuss and share their true thoughts and opinions about what will make their workplace better, more productive, and successful. The action planning meeting should always include the question, “What can we do individually and as a team to make things better for our organization and ourselves?” Most importantly, making progress on your action plans and achieving your goals is a top predictor of how engaged your team will be in the future.
- Assign action item leaders. Once the team has discussed and agreed on at least one key SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely) action to take, an action item leader from the team should be assigned. An action item leader is a team member who takes accountability to ensure a single team action item is completed as expected and when promised. If a team has more than one identified action, assign a separate action item leader to each goal.
How can we help? We’ve studied employee engagement for years and can help you strengthen engagement; whether you’re just starting out and need a trustworthy survey or ready to incorporate engagement principles into your organizational culture.
Want to go further and build an employee engagement strategy? We have courses, consulting, and technology to aid the process.
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