Employer's guide to employee engagement strategies

By Zach Links|7 min read|Updated Nov 5, 2024

Hands holding a heart, representing employee recognition, appreciation, and engagement.

Effective employee engagement strategies separate thriving workforces from struggling ones. Gallup's engagement meta-analysis found that top- and bottom-quartile businesses had the following differences:

81% in absenteeism
18% in sales productivity
23% in profitability

So what do the most engaged organizations do differently?

In this article, we’ll share the employee engagement strategies of companies that are consistently awarded honors for their culture and employee experiences. Plus, we’ll explore how you can implement similar strategies to motivate your teams.

Beyond the productivity and profitability gains, engaged employees drive several more critical business outcomes:

Innovation soars: Engaged employees are 1.5x more likely to suggest and implement innovative ideas. When people feel valued and invested in their work, they're more likely to think creatively, take calculated risks, and propose solutions to business challenges. That’s a sustainable competitive advantage that's hard for competitors to replicate.
Customer satisfaction climbs: Companies with highly engaged workforces see 10% higher customer satisfaction rates. Zappos demonstrates this with their 75% repeat customer rate, driven by highly engaged service representatives. Engaged employees naturally become brand ambassadors who go above and beyond to solve customer problems.
Recruitment gets easier: Companies known for high engagement tend to land the top 20% of talent. Strong company culture becomes self-perpetuating as top performers attract other high-caliber candidates. And that means less time and resources spent per hire — companies pay between 90%-200% of an employee's salary in overall losses when they need to replace them,
Retention gets easier, too: Turnover rates are up to 43% lower for highly-engaged employees compared to lower-engaged employees. Your investment in engagement can create a virtuous cycle where satisfied employees stay longer, perform better, and inspire others to do the same.

The bottom line: Companies consistently ranked as the "best places to work" outperform their peers in the stock market by 2.3-3.8% annually, proving that engagement isn't just good for employees — it's good for business.

There are dozens of ways to improve employee engagement. Below are a few strategies for each stage of the employee lifecycle.

Before you can judge whether your employee engagement strategies are working, design surveys to measure them. This will give you a benchmarks to compare against.

Salesforce surveys its employees twice a year and uses that data to improve the employee experience.

Instead of asking a vague question like "Do you feel engaged at work?", get at each specific engagement component.

For example, one of Salesforce's questions is, "Are you willing to give extra to get the job done?" which measures how motivated employees feel to do their best work. Buffer's engineering engagement survey asks team members if they have energy after work for leisure, friends, and family to understand their work-life balance.

Of course, this data is more valuable when you can gather more of it. To boost survey participation, offer gift cards to employees who complete your engagement surveys. This could be a small incentive for every participant, or a larger reward for a winner you choose at random.

If you have the budget, it’s more effective to send small incentives to everyone vs. enter all employees into a lottery. Guaranteed incentives increase survey participation by up to 30%, while sweepstakes increase participation by about 18%.

Most importantly, be sure to act on the feedback.

Consider publishing anonymized results to your teams and outline the changes you're making because of it.

Companies with the happiest workforces prioritize engagement at every step of the lifecycle—starting when new team members first join.. A Brandon Hall and Glassdoor report reveals that a strong onboarding program boosts new hire retention by 82%.

Eyewear retailer Warby Parker understands this. The company, which has earned multiple Top Workplaces awards, has a thoughtful onboarding process that includes:

A welcome packet with a copy of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, from which the name Warby Parker originated
A custom balloon at the new hire’s desk so team members can introduce themselves
An introduction at the all-hands meeting
C-suite involvement in new hire onboarding

Warby Parker’s quirky twists to the standard onboarding process allow the company’s culture to shine through and signal to new hires that they are valuable to the company.

Rewarding your employees for their contributions really does boost engagement. And 82% of employees say recognition contributes to their happiness at work.

Peer-to-peer recognition. Verizon, a four-time winner of the Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award, launched an internal program called Recognizing You, where peers can send each other thank-yous and monetary awards.
Annual incentives. Provide end-of-year rewards at a banquet for team members who truly shone or offer bonuses based on annual performance.
More paid time off. Recognize your top performers with additional PTO. It’s the next best thing to money, according to our research.

With Tremendous, it's simple to send, track, and manage recognition awards. We offer over 2,000 ways to reward your employees, from Amazon gift cards to charitable donations.

Learning opportunities are much more than a nice-to-have. According to a recent report, more than half of employees believe they're on their own regarding career development, and 25% are likely to quit within the next six months because their company doesn't provide career development opportunities.

Allianz Life, one of the 50 Most Engaged Workplaces of 2023, promotes career growth among its employees through a well-thought-out L&D program that includes:

Tuition reimbursement
A global objective of 43 learning hours per employee
Personal development plans
Encouraging employees to dedicate one hour per week just to learning

Investing in L&D pays off. One survey of 2,000 employees found that those who have access to professional development have 15% higher engagement and 34% higher retention.

While the return to office has sparked debates over how effective remote work is, the research is clear: Employees value flexibility, with 63% saying it's the number one factor they consider when deciding whether to accept a job. On top of that, recent Gallup research shows that on-site employees with no remote options have the lowest engagement.

Just how you offer flexibility as an employer can vary widely. Deltek, named a top workplace by The Washington Post multiple times, credits this honor partly to its flexibility. The enterprise software company offers its employees:

Remote and hybrid work options
The freedom to take a half-day every other Friday
Volunteer time off (VTO)

Not every role can be fully remote, but nearly every employee can enjoy some flexibility, whether that's choosing their work hours or having certain days off. Some employers empower this flexibility by providing remote work stipends for employees to set up a home office or join a coworking space.

Companies with the most engaged employees support their staff's physical, mental, and financial well-being. Hilton, which boasts a 93% engagement rate, designed Thrive at Hilton, which provides financial literacy webinars, free mental health counseling, and access to caregiving resources. Its DailyPay initiative lets employees access their earnings early, and enrollees have 40% lower turnover.

That aligns with our own research, which shows that employees prefer monetary rewards (as opposed to gifts like food and swag). Regions Bank gets this right with its Well app, which gives employees personalized health tips and rewards them with gift cards when they've earned enough points.

While you may not be able to offer wellness incentives formally through your benefits package, you can always tailor one-off programs for your employees. For example, one medical organization started a four-week wellness challenge for members to take classes on topics including mental health, sleep, and fitness. Every member who completed 100 minutes a week for the whole challenge got an entry into a raffle. The program reached 48% staff engagement.

Employee engagement strategies are most effective when you understand your team and know what motivates them. If you noticed from the above workplace examples, most of them involve providing incentives to team members.<H2> FAQs about employee engagement