The Only Employee Engagement Strategies Checklist You'll Ever Need

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Looking to boost staff morale, productivity, and retention? Check out this employee engagement strategies checklist to boost your organizational performance in 2024. 

Introducing employee engagement strategies is an excellent way to boost performance and employee relations for organizations looking to succeed.

Research from Gallup confirms that

  • Employee engagement results in 21% enhanced profitability and 17% higher productivity. 
  • In addition, engaged employees are happier, more loyal, and unlikely to indulge in absenteeism. 

So where’s the problem?

Key decision-makers and management teams often need help to connect with employees, sustain engagement, and meet their needs. They face challenges such as communication gaps, a lack of awareness about mental health and DEI policies, and employees' unmet desires to learn and grow. 

If this describes your situation, worry not! We have compiled an actionable employee engagement strategies checklist you can follow.

Actionable employee engagement strategies checklist to boost workplace performance

Be approachable

Being approachable promotes two-way communication, feedback sharing, and conflict resolution. Approachable leaders flatten hierarchies and enhance staff morale.  Here are three iconic examples of leaders boosting engagement with their leadership style:

  • Elon Musk communicates directly with his Twitter followers. This makes him seem much more approachable. 
  • Charismatic leader Oprah Winfrey allows her employees to take risks. As she urges them not to take themselves seriously all the time, she builds an environment of freeness in behavior.
  • Steve Jobs was loved by his employees for his approachability. He made it a point to get involved with them until they got things right. 

Inspired? Here's how to be more approachable:

  • Be available for employees when they need you. 
  • Learn their names to present a humanized persona. 
  • Respond to emails, text messages, and telephone calls promptly. 
  • Display concern and empathy toward your employees if you sense something amiss. Do it confidentially to comply with mental health privacy laws. 
  • Always use polite and friendly language. Yet, ensure you also display tough love so that being friendly and approachable does not make you seem indulgent.

Celebrate employee milestones

Celebrating and recognizing employee milestones reinforces organizational belongingness, validates self-esteem, and boosts employee morale. Here’s how you can put this into the process:

  • Create a hierarchy of employee milestones by importance. For instance, birthdays, promotions, and retirements could be high on the list. A regular positive appraisal could be lower on the rung. 
  • Announce employees' milestones. An excellent way to do it is using an employee engagement app. This makes it more universal for everyone to operate, and teams can celebrate milestones with a few taps. Pro tip: Use high-quality images while announcing to show you’ve put in work. 
  • Additionally, to make the milestones feel more special, send personal acknowledgment notes via email, text, or telephone call.

Encourage employee-driven learning

Innovations are spurred by employee-driven learning. Moreover, encouraging career development helps ensure top-performing employees are engaged and less likely to churn, rendering the importance of learning high up. Data validates these claims. Statistically, 76% of employees seek new opportunities to expand their careers, but retention increases by 58% when companies invest in employee development. Furthermore, there’s a clear correlation between employee learning and innovations at work. 

To assist employee-driven learning, you can:

  • Build a pool of learning materials and ensure they’re digitally available. A centralized employee hub is an excellent place to put it up. 
  • Leverage gamification to boost content engagement.
  • Partner with third-party learning providers to help employees find courses unavailable at your organization. This will ensure their learning needs are met and they’re engaged.
  • Make career guidance essential to regular appraisals, track employees’ learning progress, and incentivize knowledge-sharing and innovation.

Enforce well-rounded mental health policies

Creating an inclusive mental health policy and encouraging employees to seek help confidentially boosts morale, productivity, and engagement. While close to 48% of employees feel their mental health has declined in recent years, only 13% feel comfortable discussing their issues at work. Follow these steps to tackle stigma and encourage help-seeking behavior:

  • Conduct regular mental health awareness campaigns.
  • Create an on-site mental health team consisting of registered professionals. If this is out of budget, liaise with third-party mental health providers.
  • Encourage employees to share their mental health experiences safely and comfortably.
  • Discourage oversharing on employee engagement apps or team communication channels, as it may make people more vulnerable. Instead, create confidential channels on the same app for employees to share their woes. 
  • Identify employees who may be at risk of developing mental health issues. For this, you can track signs like absenteeism, poor performance, changes in behavior, and sharing disturbing information on employee engagement apps.

Prioritize enabling workplace inclusivity

Developing a nuanced understanding of the root causes of inequality ensures everyone feels welcomed and included at work. Anti-discrimination, disabled-friendly policies, and representation of minorities create an equitable environment fostering organic engagement. To that end, here's what you can do:

  • Identify target individuals that may need specific policies built for them. For instance, LGBT or specially-abled individuals. 
  • Create specific, inclusive language guidelines to be used in all communications so that no individual feels targeted. Basic-Fit, for example, worked with Speakap to allow employees to choose their pronouns on its global internal platform "Orange Connect." 
  • Include inclusiveness as a part of your organizational culture.
  • Create confidential and secure lines of communication to report harassment, bullying, and discrimination. 
  • Offer help and support to individuals experiencing difficulties due to their identity or beliefs through employee resource groups (ERGs).

Monitor engagement regularly

Engagement rarely follows a linear course. It requires regular monitoring and iteration of plans to ensure it is optimum. This is possible by tracking relevant data, identifying patterns and leakages, and working on existing gaps. Here’s how to monitor employee engagement progress:

  • Conduct A/B tests before launching any internal communication campaigns to boost performance.
  • Evaluate metrics likes, comments, and interaction rates alongside the employee engagement score.  Iterate communication strategy and campaigns if you notice these metrics plateauing or dropping. 
  • Identify any challenges impacting engagement. These could be anything ranging from employee stress levels to a lack of seamless communication or other issues. For instance, Brinks measured how fast messages were experienced on its internal comms app. This enhanced two-way communication and content engagement. Q&D Construction measured employee adoption rate consistently, helping it increase engagement.
  • Conduct feedback surveys and interviews regularly to discover unidentified needs. 

Want to know the secret to making excellent data-driven decisions to optimize engagement? Check out our white paper on Measuring Internal Communication Effectiveness and leverage the learnings to boost employee engagement. 

Download White Paper: Measuring Internal Communication Effectiveness 

Bottom line: Holistic success starts with employee engagement

Nurturing continued and growing engagement signals a superior organizational culture. Engaged employees perform at peak productivity and stick with an organization for longer. 

You can ensure this by taking charge of the situation. It’s as simple as being more approachable while validating employees’ concerns, achievements, and desires. While you’re at it, ensure everyone feels included. Robust DEI policies and mental health programs help. Finally, a well-rounded strategy is incomplete without monitoring and iteration. Do these, and you’ll reap the benefits of employee engagement.

Want to know a simple way to put all of these into action and do so much more? Use an employee app to streamline your internal communication and leverage it to boost employee engagement and performance.