20 Employee Engagement Strategies To Retain Top Talent

Are you ready to transform your workplace? Discover 20  employee engagement strategies that will boost your workforce's motivation and commitment, making them never want to leave. From promoting work-life balance to appreciating frontline workers through an employee engagement software, this blog covers all the bases to ensure your frontline employees are engaged, productive, and driven to contribute their best. 

We’re sure you’ll agree that developing and implementing employee engagement strategies is among the key differentiating factors between the most successful and average organizations. Leaders at thriving organizations realize that employees are the lifeblood of an organization. When highly engaged, employee productivity, motivation, and commitment to the workplace become unparalleled. This drives their best performance and steers an organization to success. And, it’s not us saying this, but the numbers: Companies with highly engaged employees show a 21% increase in profitability and a 41% reduction in absenteeism. So where’s the problem?

While most organizations successfully implement engagement approaches for their in-office workers, a common problem is that the frontline groups end up getting left out. Where can you start developing holistic employee engagement strategies that also include frontline workers in your organization? In this blog, we share  20 actionable employee engagement strategies that you can follow to build an engaged workforce.

Follow these 20 employee engagement strategies for a committed workforce

#1Acknowledge and appreciate people

Recognizing and appreciating employees' efforts is a simple yet highly effective way for you to engage employees.  67% of workers feel this is a more significant motivator than receiving financial or non-cash incentives. 

While recognizing in-office employees in meetings is simple, your out-and-about frontline workers often can get left out and feel their contribution goes unnoticed. To address this, invest in acknowledgment and appreciation efforts to boost their morale. Small interventions like sending a personal note of appreciation via instant message, congratulating a frontline team for its performance, or recognizing the week's star performer in employee groups can help you go a long way. All you need is a few messages in your unified employee engagement platform!

#2Emphasize holistic wellness for employees

You’ll agree that how workers feel physically, mentally, and emotionally affects their performance. If they start feeling burned out, it will hinder their ability to operate at optimum productivity and fizz out their engagement. This is quite common with customer-facing frontline roles.

You can address this by introducing with holistic wellness initiatives for all employees. You can implement wellness programs and share resources to maintain work-life balance. Additionally, extend mental health support to those who need it while ensuring the scope to maintain anonymity. This will ensure people are comfortable seeking help.

#3Implement development-focused initiatives

All employees, whether your desk or frontline workers, want career growth. When you provide accessible opportunities for employee development, you send out a message that you value their sentiment for growth. This ends up engaging them and increasing their commitment to the organization.  

You can implement this by intervening with mentorship programs for your workers and also providing them with learning opportunities. Ensure this is easy to access via a mobile-friendly tool so the frontline can, too.

#4Develop a sense of purpose, values & mission

An engagement gap sometimes arises because not all employees align with your company's mission, values, and purpose. According to a survey, while 47% of executives can identify with their company's purpose, only 30% of employees feel the same way, impacting their commitment. 

You can address this across your organization by familiarizing everyone with your vision by sharing it in a common space accessible to all.  In the world of dispersed work, it’s your comms tool that’s a great place for this. So, regularly share content that makes them feel valuable in implementing the mission. This will go a long way in creating a shared sense of purpose organization-wide.

#5Maintain transparent communication channels

Another engagement strategy is to nurture an environment of trust in your organization. 96% of engaged employees reveal that they trust management, and you need to strive for the same across the organization. 

For this, prioritize an open and transparent communication culture for both in-office and frontline workers. Communicate transparently about aspects like understanding your employees' position, clarifying the KPIs you use to measure performance, and providing growth opportunities. Implementing proper comms tools can enable your leaders and managers to do this.

#6Create conducive working conditions

Sometimes, the cause and solution for disengagement lies in looking more closely into your workflows. If your workplace is not well-equipped and supportive of performing one’s role and abiding by expectations, your employees are bound to feel dissatisfied and unengaged.

For instance, suppose your organization’s official mode of communication is email. If you expect your frontline workers at a quick-service restaurant to respond via that means or share best practices with peers over email, they will be frustrated, won’t they? Instead, if you give them a mobile-friendly solution, you can make it easier for them to communicate and share. 

#7Introduce fun & happiness

All work and no play is the perfect formula for a dull environment and an unengaged workforce.

Building a light-hearted environment with fun and happiness can help you ensure employees are enthusiastic. 

You can approach this in many creative ways. For example, organize social events to connect everyone, including those on the frontline. These can be town halls, planned meals, or events like fitness fests to help people unwind. You can also create a culture of celebrating team members' birthdays with cake. The possibilities are endless!

#8Encourage workplace autonomy

If you expect your frontline employees to be committed and proactive, ensure you give them autonomy and freedom. They’ll be less likely to innovate and actively engage unless they feel in control and empowered.

Some ways you can address this include allowing them to work out of anywhere they want as long as they’re accountable. Similarly, you can build an asynchronous work culture where they needn’t respond to every message immediately unless it’s urgent. Allow them to make decisions on the spot as per pre-agreed ground rules. Avoid micromanaging; you’ll surely see a remarkable difference in your engagement levels. 

#9Involve employees in decision-making

Involving employees in more significant decision-making processes is another excellent way you can make them feel engaged, valued, and integral to the organization. A Salesforce report outlines that when employees feel their voice is heard at work, they’re 4.6X times more likely to perform their best work and remain committed to the company’s goals.

Making everyone feel integral to the organization, including frontline workers, revolves around establishing and encouraging consistent, two-way communication. This conversation can be as simple and quick as polls and quizzes as long as it prioritizes employee feedback for making policy decisions. Go for it!

#10Ensure fair compensation

Compensating all employees fairly is fundamental to their financial security. It ensures they have a high morale and stick around with your organization. If your employees feel their take-home justifies their effort and commitment while caring for their needs, they will be motivated and engaged. So, review their salaries regularly and ensure they are competitive. Without addressing this baseline, your other employee engagement strategies will be inadequate.

#11Offer employee incentives

While financial compensation is essential, make sure you also include performance-based incentives for high engagement. This could include anything from rewards, benefits, or services over and above the employees’ salaries. You can get creative and innovate with this and offer different monetary or non-monetary incentives to engage your workers. Think bonuses, learning opportunities, extra time off if they meet specific targets, and so on. 

#12Promote internal mobility

Another great way to engage employees is to help them learn new skills and seek alternative roles with your organization. This helps you to save time and recruitment costs for all employees and boosts their motivation. Internal mobility sends out the message that you value employee growth and are willing to invest in their future. Research published in a Deloitte report shows that an organization experienced a 30% increase in employee engagement after introducing an internal career program. That's good motivation for you to start too, isn’t it?

#13Conduct regular feedback sessions and surveys

Another aspect of ensuring continued engagement is investing in understanding your employees' needs and concerns. With the changing business environment, how they feel can vary over time. Staying in touch with your people via regular employee feedback and surveys can demonstrate that you value their input and are committed to continuously improving their experience. To know about your out-and-about frontline employees, you can conduct surveys efficiently using a mobile-friendly comms app.

A word of caution: Ensure it’s easy to use so they’re inclined to answer. If the tool has analytics features, it can also make it super simple for you to interpret results.  

#14Involve employees in decision-making

Though less evident in employee engagement strategies, ensuring robust onboarding can be a super important step. It sets the tone for an employer-employee relationship and defines your recruits' engagement level. With proper onboarding, you can get both in-office and frontline workers to perform efficiently, stay motivated, and remain with your organization for longer. 

To implement effective onboarding, ensure you provide new hires with the necessary resources to get started. Try to add videos for visual learners. Provide prompt support to address any queries.

#15Promote work-life balance

A healthy work-life balance and a robust employee engagement strategy are essential for well-being. Today, employees highly value remote work or flexible hours to manage their personal and professional lives better. If you support them in achieving this, you can boost their satisfaction, reduce burnout, and ensure continued engagement.

How do you do this? You can promote effective work-life balance by intervening in your work culture. Start prioritizing accountability over rigid operating procedures. To simplify work-life balance, equip employees with the necessary tech tools. For example, provide messaging apps, an e-learning hub that allows any-time learning without restricting hours, and so on. Even better - choose tools that allow employees to set up notifications in a way that allows them to create a boundary between work and personal life.

#16Focus on continuous performance management

Employees can become misaligned with the overall organizational objectives in the daily grind of work and start feeling disengaged. This is especially common with frontline workers, who tend to have demanding customer-facing roles and a lot to attend to simultaneously every day. 

Step in here with regular check-ins and goal setting. This can help the employees stay aligned with your objectives and feel more supported in their roles. Make sure you provide ongoing feedback and support to enhance performance and engagement.

#17Create an inclusive company culture

A positive and inclusive company culture is another crucial element to ensure employee engagement. You must build a thriving, engaged environment to foster community and ensure people feel safe and respected. 

Using technology can help you implement different inclusivity initiatives. For example, it can help you provide multi-language support to let different linguistic groups communicate efficiently, encourage using inclusive comms channels where people can choose their pronouns, etc. 

#18Utilize technology and AI (responsibly)

An often underexplored employee engagement strategy that you can implement includes personalizing employee experiences and improving communication using technology. This will enable you to ditch a cookie-cutter approach and streamline processes per different employees’ needs to boost engagement and efficiency. 

Suppose you’re operating a restaurant chain and using a unified comms tool across your branches. Using technology with the right personalization features can allow you to turn on notifications for management staff and disable them for servers constantly on their toes. This can ensure the right balance of communication and ensure people are engaged. Similarly, using employee engagement tools like Speakap, you can create, manage, and track personalized multi-step journeys. ChatGPT AI powers these and can help you with seamless administration, which boosts employee engagement.  

#19Conduct stay interviews

Another employee engagement strategy you can implement is conducting stay interviews. What are they? One-on-one meetings between a manager and a current employee, designed to understand what keeps the employee engaged and satisfied at their job, as well as to identify any potential issues that might lead to dissatisfaction or departure. Data suggests that stay interventions can engage employees and reduce turnover by over 20%.  

If you perform these regularly, you can skip the guesswork out of employee engagement and identify concerns before they become deeper issues. The easiest way to conduct these is to use technology to gather and interpret results.

#20Consider a more flexible and multi-directional way of career development

Last but not least, you can also explore the career lattice approach to boost employee engagement levels in your organization. This involves enabling employees to move vertically, horizontally, or diagonally to explore different roles. It is an excellent way for them to gain diverse experiences and test various career paths based on their ambitions. 

If you successfully build a contemporary environment like this, your workers will feel more satisfied and engaged. Statistically, in a survey, 75% of Gen Z preferred a situation where they could have multiple roles within their workplace. It’s a win for you, too, as this will create a more versatile and committed workforce.

Remember: Implementing employee engagement strategies is an ongoing process

Enhancing employee engagement benefits employees and steers success for your organization. Ensuring an engaged environment for both in-office and frontline workers requires a multifaceted process with ongoing effort and commitment. Follow these strategies, measure performance, and iterate, and you’ll surely be able to create a more engaged, motivated, and productive workforce. 

Using enabling technology is the simplest and most efficient way to implement and automate the approaches discussed here. Using Speakap’s employee engagement platform can empower you to build a company culture that motivates internally and resonates externally.