How to Improve Employee Engagement in Transformation

Efforts to engage employees can benefit an entire organisation in many important ways, from reduced turnover rates and increased productivity, to higher levels of job satisfaction and improved capabilities to foster innovation, supporting businesses in adopting change more effectively. However, recent data suggests only 10% of UK workers feel engaged at work, revealing a pressing issue for many companies.

Over the years, many thought-leaders and consultants have shared interesting strategies designed to help teams improve employee engagement, focusing on key factors like work-life-balance, ensuring employees feel valued and boosting well being through training and skill development programs. But the truth is, improving employee engagement requires an introspective look into unique business structures.

At Sideways 6, we work closely with companies of all sizes to help leaders pursue effective employee engagement strategies tailored to their unique needs. Supported by findings from our very own case studies, the following guide explores how to improve employee engagement to support transformation.

What Does It Mean to Engage Employees?

Employee engagement can be a surprisingly complex measure to pin down. In simple terms, employee engagement can be defined as the levels of commitment, involvement and enthusiasm team members display when performing professional tasks. But the roots of engagement lie far deeper than many think.

Engaged employees are actively committed to their work, have a desire to pursue both professional and personal growth and are motivated to support the betterment of their businesses. By creating a working environment in which employees feel valued, team members are more likely to share innovative ideas, approach tasks from interesting angles and feel empowered to adopt transformations more successfully.

To engage employees, however, doesn't only mean to give staff more responsibilities or more important tasks, it more broadly means to develop a company culture that's focused on the mental, emotional and physical well being of team members across an entire organisation. We've seen this in our own projects, helping staff at Discovery foster a greater sense of belonging via the development of more effective communication tools, with 76% of employees finding this made them feel their voices were being heard.

The Key Characteristics of Engaged Employees

While accurately measuring employee engagement and implementing effective engagement strategies requires time and dedication, organisations can gain a general idea of how engaged their employees are at any given time by searching for a few key characteristics commonly displayed by engaged employees.

• Aware: Engaged employees don't only focus on their own tasks, they also consider the company's mission and how their strengths can be used to help the entire organisation reach wider objectives.
• Committed: When an employee is engaged in their role, they'll feel committed to ensuring all tasks are completed to the best of their abilities and empowered to overcome challenges with innovation.
• Content: Highly-engaged employees understand the value they bring to an organisation, and feel a significant sense of job satisfaction due to receiving the support, training and respect they need.
• Motivated: Employees that feel engaged in their work and company culture are often among the most active participants in key projects, feeling empowered to share creative and inventive ideas.
• Enthusiastic: When an employee is actively committed to their work, and happy to be part of a positive organisational culture, they'll be more enthusiastic and more likely to enjoy being at work.

The Current State of Employee Engagement

Despite it being well-known that efforts to improve employee engagement can contribute significantly to a company's success, businesses across the globe continue to struggle to actively engage core team members. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, only 23% of employees feel that they're engaged while at work, with a shocking 15% claiming to be actively disengaged in their positions.

While global employee engagement figures remained somewhat stable between 2022-2023, employee engagement figures in the US have hit an 11-year low, with almost 5 million fewer employees claiming to feel engaged in their work as of Q1 2024. Things don't look much better in the UK, with only 10% of staff claiming to be engaged, and as many as 40% experiencing significant levels of daily, work-related stress.

When we consider that research shows efforts to improve employee engagement can help businesses boost productivity by 17% and profitability by 21%, it becomes clear that the current state of employee engagement needs to be addressed. Both to improve business outcomes and help workers live happier and healthier lives so teams feel more able to share knowledge and engage in transformative processes.

What Factors Influence Employee Engagement?

Improving employee engagement is a top priority for many modern organisations, with over 70% of UK-based HR professionals claiming efforts to improve employee engagement and employee experience in the workplace are central to current operations. However, turning disengaged employees into content, motivated and committed members of a team requires transformation across multiple business aspects.

Engagement levels are dependent on combined factors, stretching across employee well being, mental health, work-life-balance and performance management, with efforts to improve employee and team engagement reliant on the deployment of inter-connected strategies. To support employee engagement and build a stronger company culture, bespoke training and development programs, knowledge sharing initiatives and team building activities should be explored and adjusted in line with employee feedback.

To create effective employee engagement ideas, leaders must gain a good understanding of the factors that influence their teams' well being, with most factors falling into one or more of the below categories.

Purpose

Experiencing a strong sense of purpose is a driving force behind engagement and well being for many professionals. Data suggests 82% of employees feel an organisation's purpose affects their motivation to achieve goals, with 70% believing the work they produce helps to define their own sense of purpose.

Purpose can mean different things to different people, but in most cases, implementing structures that encourage employees to share ideas and their own unique ways of thinking can be an effective way to make employees feel their work is purposeful. When Sideways 6 partnered with M&S to implement such a system, the brand saw a 70% year-on-year increase in the volume of employee ideas shared amongst teams, with this influx of innovative ideas directly linked to an increase in employee engagement levels.

The Marks & Spencer Story | A Process Improvement Case Study

Values

Values, for many workers, are closely tied to purpose, but often involve bigger-picture elements of the employee experience. A large segment of professionals, especially younger members of the workforce, believe alignment between a company's values and their own is vital, with almost 90% of adults aged 18-41 saying they'd leave a role to work for another organisation whose values better-align with their own.

Company values cover the core principles and ethical codes that govern all decision-making processes within an organisation. To boost employee engagement and improve employee participation in large-scale changes it's wise to encourage managers to ensure employee and company values remain aligned.

Recognition

Receiving recognition for good work is a major contributor to employee engagement, providing staff a sense of accomplishment and ensuring they feel valued for their efforts. Whether through implementing systems to reward employees for the completion of tasks, or simply taking the time to respond to ideas shared by team members, recognising the work put into a project makes people feel part of a collective.

Even the simplest forms of recognition, like taking the time to explain why an employee's idea might not have been pursued, can offer welcomed encouragement to employees. An example of this can be seen in British Airways' adoption of Sideways 6 idea management tools, with managers claiming the ability to better communicate ideas between core departments led to improved engagement levels across teams.

The British Airways Story | Sideways 6 - Customer Stories

Development

Providing employees with professional development opportunities and training programs positioned to help them pursue career growth is central to improving employee engagement. When staff are given the chance to advance their careers and learn new skills that help them perform their roles more effectively, they're likely to become more motivated to engage with key tasks and feel more valued by their leaders.

Offering development opportunities can also improve employees' mental health, providing staff a clear sense of purpose and giving them new goals to achieve. This can also bring better business outcomes, teaching staff new skillsets that help inspire innovation and support successful change, as well as cut employee turnover, with 76% of people more likely to stay at companies that offer continuous training.

How to Accurately Gauge Employee Engagement

Accurately measuring employee engagement can be difficult in some situations, requiring leaders and managers to adjust practices in line with the unique quirks of their organisation's culture. Many factors must be carefully considered, including employee well being, work-life-balance, productivity and even team engagement, with leaders committed to uncovering the driving forces behind their teams' efforts.

The most engaged employees might be easy to identify, but efforts to improve employee engagement must take into account the thoughts and needs of the entire organisation. Business owners should elect a team of employee engagement leaders tasked with analysing present engagement levels and ideating beneficial initiatives, with a variation of the below survey acting as a good starting point for this process.

1. How Satisfied Are You With Your Organisation as a Place of Work? Answers to this question form a baseline for the level of job satisfaction that each employee associates with their current position.
2. Do You Know What Is Expected of You at Work? Understanding expectations is a basic employee need; staff who think their job description aligns with their work are 2.5x more likely to be engaged.
3. Do You Have the Materials and Equipment You Need to Work Effectively? Staff who aren't given the tools they need to work properly are more likely to become stressed and actively disengaged.
4. Are You Afforded the Chance to Work to Your Strengths Every Day? Employees have worked hard to develop unique skills and abilities, failure to speak to these strengths can be demoralising.
5. Do Your Managers Demonstrate Appreciation for Your Work Regularly? Professional and peer recognition initiatives help to motivate high-performing staff by demonstrating that they're valued.
6. Do You Feel Your Managers and Colleagues Care About You? If a business is to grow, leaders need to provide employees a sense of community conducive to the formation of innovative ideas.
7. Is There Someone at Work Who Encourages Your Development? Lack of career growth is among the most common reasons why people leave jobs and a major contributor to active disengagement.
8. Do Your Opinions Seem to Matter at Work? When ideas are heard, staff feel more connected to a business, Page Group saw a 120% increase in engagement after adopting idea management tools.
9. Does Your Organisation's Mission Make You Feel Your Job Is Important? Employee engagement for high-performing staff often centres on purpose, with people wanting to feel their work matters.
10. Are Your Colleagues Committed to Producing Quality Work? Seeing your work marred by a lack of effort from others can be incredibly demoralising, negatively impacting employee engagement.
11. Do You Feel You've Built Genuine Friendships With Your Colleagues? Businesses with a stronger company culture adapt to challenges more successfully, meaning social connections are important.
12. Have You Had Meaningful Discussions About Your Progress in the Last Year? When people feel their professional growth slowing, they may lose motivation and begin looking for roles elsewhere.

The PageGroup Story | Sideways 6 - Customer Stories

Sending out a survey similar to the above through an employee engagement platform, or conducting a set of personal interviews that incorporate these questions, will help leaders understand how engaged employees feel at any given time. Staff responses should help managers to ideate personal engagement strategies and effective team engagement ideas, positioned to reliably promote organisational success.

Compiling collective data will help leaders identify ways to improve employee engagement on a macro scale. For example, if several employees feel the business displays a lack of care, leaders may decide that promoting work-life-balance, improving health benefits, introducing flexible work arrangements or rewarding teams for outstanding performance might be central components of engagement strategies.

How to Improve Employee Engagement: 5 Ideas and Strategies

Taking into account insights from engagement surveys and team meetings, alongside ideas shared by employees, leaders should have all the information they need to equip managers with the tools required to increase employee engagement. Successful ideas and strategies will not be determined solely on the insights covered below, but the following 5 strategies can form effective foundations for improvements.

1. Promote Separation Between Work and Personal Lives

Making efforts to improve work-life-balance for all employees can help to boost employee engagement significantly. By providing employees the time they need to fulfil private duties, managers can help their teams alleviate stress and remain focused on work tasks when necessary. When employees are shown this level of respect, they'll also be more likely to reciprocate, fostering a positive organisational culture.

Small adjustments like implementing tools designed to pause emails after working hours can help create a separation between work and private lives, demonstrating to staff that their private commitments are respected by leaders. Offering employees the chance to become remote workers either permanently or rotationally can also help employees find a more sustainable balance between their work and home lives.

2. Encourage Staff to Influence Decision-Making Processes

Involving employees in decisions regarding transformations and business processes helps to make all members of an organisation feel part of the same team. When implementing change, employees will be the ones actively adjusting processes and communicating new practices to clients, so it's vital they feel their ideas are being heard, especially those that generate actionable insights from a fresh perspective.

Implementing idea management software like Sideways 6 is an approachable way to do this, enabling staff to share great ideas with leaders across existing communication channels. When Discovery chose this approach, leaders saw a 4x increase in the number of ideas shared among teams, with 72% of staff claiming the deployment of a dedicated idea sharing platform made them feel part of a bigger team.

3. Implement Employee Reward Management Programs

When big decisions and transformations are implemented into organisational structures, it's likely that existing workers will be asked to take on new roles and responsibilities. While opportunities for growth can be a great driver of employee engagement, overburdening staff can have the opposite effect. So, it's important that leaders and managers find a sustainable balance between development and stability.

Implementing a reward management program can help organisations to achieve this, putting systems in place to ensure the hard work of employees doesn't go unnoticed. This easily-implemented strategy can significantly improve employee engagement, a statement that almost 82% of surveyed staff agree with.

4. Create a Welcoming Physical Workplace Environment

Improving employee engagement isn't solely about processes and practices, in fact, research suggests the physical environment people work in can be a critical factor in how engaged they are with key tasks. 67% of surveyed employees believe creating workspaces filled with natural light, fresh air and spaces in which they can practise mindfulness increases their productivity, helping them remain engaged at work.

This can be particularly beneficial during periods of increased business activity, such as when teams are implementing transformations. Providing staff a calming and grounded environment in which to work can help them passively de-stress and better-focus their minds on creative ideas and helpful solutions.

5. View Employee Engagement as a Long-Term Commitment

When improving engagement, it's important that leaders commit to long-term improvements rather than viewing engagement initiatives as a short-term solution. The key to achieving consistently high levels of employee engagement is to work employee ideas into most core facets of an organisation, making sure to communicate to employees that their opinions and insights will always be listened to and respected.

Through the implementation of idea management solutions, recognition and reward initiatives, training programs and regular team meetings, leaders can help ensure employee ideas are always factored into organisational developments. The more effort placed on making staff feel part of a collective company culture, the more they'll feel their opinions matter, and the more invested they'll be in business success.

Conclusion

For organisations of all sizes to successfully grow, change and adapt to new challenges, it's important to make sure hard-working employees feel their efforts are making a difference. When employees are happy, feel supported and are given opportunities to positively impact their work environments, teams become better-prepared to adopt change and more engaged in their work. By learning how to improve employee engagement through continuous practices, organisations can set themselves up for success.

Learn more about our product or book a free demo today to find out how you can take employee engagement and idea management to the next level.