Top 15 Employee

Engagement Best Practices

For 2024
It’s no secret that employee engagement is directly linked to
productivity. Engaged employees take their work seriously because
it matters to them, and they’re more likely to suggest ideas and
improvements for your business.

Whether you’re new to employee engagement or a seasoned

communications pro, our employee engagement best practices can
give you great ideas for measuring employee
engagement and collecting employee feedback at your business.

In this post, we will cover 15 employee engagement best practice

techniques that are sure to improve employee engagement at your
organization.

What is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement tells you how connected your employees are
to your business and to each other. It measures how much
employees interact with their coworkers, management, and the
business in general.

Benefits of employee engagement

Engaged employees feel a strong connection to their work, and see
your business’ success as a product of their effort. When your
employees feel pride in their work, they’re more likely to contribute
beyond expectations.
A highly engaged workforce can benefit your business in numerous
ways:

• Greater productivity and willingness to contribute

new employee engagement ideas.
• Higher employee retention levels.
• Critical perspective for business initiatives; can help
fine-tune processes for greater efficiency.
• More likely to speak highly of your business to friends
and family.

18 Best Practices for Employee

Engagement
There are countless ways to boost employee engagement at your
business. After all, your employees interact with your company in
all kinds of ways.

But here we’ve listed our overall factors for improving employee
engagement and retention, under which many individual initiatives
can fall. Use our list of best practices to improve employee
engagement and inspire efforts specific to your employees.

1. Develop an employee engagement strategy

One of the most important best practices for employee engagement
is developing a concrete strategy for motivating and inspiring staff.

Plan your success from the very start with an employee

engagement strategy. This plan outlines everything you need to
succeed at increasing engagement including:

• Initiatives you plan on carrying out and when you’ll

implement them.
• Employees responsible for carrying out your initiatives.
• KPIs you plan to measure to track employee
engagement.
• Review processes to improve your engagement initiatives
in the future.
When you’ve prescribed how your business is going to approach
employee engagement, it’s much easier to find what works and
what doesn’t. Employee engagement KPIs can help measure
whether your efforts are effective, and highlight areas where your
strategy needs to be improved.

2. Keep your efforts consistent

Your employee engagement strategy should be designed to ensure
consistency with your engagement initiatives. Your employees are
creatures of habit; consistent employee engagement efforts, like a
monthly wellness session, help employees incorporate them int o
their routines.

Schedule recurring initiatives at similar times across different

weeks, months, and years. Use your employee engagement strategy
as a roadmap for future efforts, and alert your employees to
upcoming events. The more attention your efforts receive, the
more employees will be likely to participate.

3. Make your expectations clear

Uncertainty breeds anxiety, which is the enemy of engagement.
Employees who are unsure of their responsibilities, their position in
your organization’s hierarchy, or their role in the future of your
company will naturally have a difficult time feeling conn ected and
engaged.

Clarifying expectations and making information readily available for

employees is an important employee engagement best practice.

Foster an open and accepting company culture so your employees

don’t hesitate to ask questions. If your employees feel comfortable
in your organization, they’ll be able to better determine what’s
expected of them and get really engaged with their responsibilities.
4. Use the right tool for driving employee engagement
There are countless internal communication platforms on the
market purporting to improve your employees’ engagement levels.
But choosing the right employee engagement tool is about finding
one that works best with your unique engagement challenges.

Some tools only offer specific engagement tools, like chat or

surveys, while leaving out other crucial functions. ContactMonkey
is designed with an employee engagement focus, and includes a
suite of tools for boosting and measuring engagement:

• Employee pulse surveys

• eNPS survey
• Staff engagement surveys
• Emoji reactions, star ratings, thumb up/down reactions,
and more
• Anonymous employee comments
• Response emails that work perfectly on all devices
• Detailed email tracking
• Outlook and Gmail integration

With ContactMonkey, you can carry out your employee

engagement strategy right from your inbox. Since you can track
email opens in Outlook or Gmail, you can access these insights
regardless of the system your workplace uses. Whether your
workforce is 500 or 5000+ employees, ContactMonkey can give
you real results for increasing your employee engagement.

5. Collect employee feedback

Nurture employee engagement by giving your employees a chance
to share their opinions and feelings about your business. Employee
feedback is an email engagement best practice that can give you a
detailed look into what really matters to your employees, and help
you focus your engagement efforts.

Surveys, emoji reactions, star ratings, anonymous comments, eNPS,

and other feedback methods included with ContactMonkey give
your employees numerous ways to share their opinions:
Help your employees feel their opinion matters by regularly
collecting (and acting on) their feedback. Learn how to create a
pulse survey that truly engages employees with our step-by-step
guide.

Step up two-way communication across your company with

our employee feedback examples.

If you need ideas for your survey questions, you can use
ContactMonkey’s OpenAI ChatGPT integration to generate content
for your email. Simply describe the kind of information you want to
gather, then edit the output according to your audience.

6. Focus on employee fulfillment

Everyone wants to feel like what they’re doing makes a difference.
Feeling that one’s work contributes to the success of others is a
hallmark of engaged employees and a key best practice in employee
engagement.

Find what really matters to your employees and make that your
focus. Collect employee feedback about what milestones stood out
for your employees, and then resolve to emphasize those successes
in the future.

Showing your employees that their work really matters to the

business’ overall success is a terrific way to foster a connection
between your employees and their work.

7. Educate management
Employee engagement isn’t made, it’s grown. And your managers
should be the ones cultivating that growth. That’s why continuously
educating management in the latest innovative employee
engagement best practices is vital.

Create employee handbooks and train your managers to think

through an employee engagement lens; emphasize their sensitivity
to the struggles and success of your employees.

When your managers listen to employee feedback, it’s easier to

create a strong, trusting relationship from which both parties can
find meaning and fulfillment.

8. Invest in your employees

Another way you can prioritize the success of your employees is by
providing them with opportunities for growth outside of their
prescribed roles. And this is an indispensable employee
engagement best practice.

Offering professional development opportunities for your

employees helps your workforce develop useful skills that matter
to them. It also emphasizes that your workforce isn’t replaceable;
they are integral parts of your organization whose development
helps everyone.

Organize 1-on-1 discussions with your employees and survey their

career interests. Find useful intersections with the priorities of
your business and research programs, certifications, and training
sessions that develop those interests. If you’re not sure how to do
that, you can always take a learn how to write a training email to
employees with our examples.

9. Prioritize employee wellbeing

Treating your employees like people is essential for building solid
employee engagement. While focusing on the success of your
employees is important, it’s equally important to recognize the
struggles they may face, both professionally and personally, and
prioritize employee wellbeing.

Facilitated by strong employee/manager relationships, emphasize

to your employees that it’s OK to take time off if they’re struggling
with whatever issue.

Have a set of easily-accessible resources to help your employees

engage and overcome their struggles—like a health plan directory
on your company intranet or employee handbook. Provide a
pressure-free working environment to help your employees
approach their jobs with enthusiasm and optimism.

10. Measure your employee engagement success

After all your efforts, how can you actually tell if your employee
engagement best practices are working? Start with measuring
engagement and feedback via your internal communications.

Your internal communications are a terrific barometer of your

employee engagement situation. Engaged employees are more
likely to take their internal emails seriously, paying more attention
to the information contained within them.

Metrics like open rate, click-through rate, opens by device and

location, and read time can tell you what your employees are
paying attention to. Combined with employee feedback, your
internal email metrics gives you a detailed look into your employee
engagement levels, which you can compare to other companies
in your industry. You can also use these metrics to directly boost
employee engagement, like pinpointing your company’s best time
to send employee emails.
With ContactMonkey, all of your email metrics and employee
feedback are visualized within your analytics dashboard:

You can compare the engagement information from multiple

campaigns and filter metrics using different criteria.
ContactMonkey makes measuring your employee engagement super
easy.

If your organization has external or internal regulations around

email privacy, you can still gather email metrics using
ContactMonkey’s anonymous email tracking while maintaining your
employees’ privacy.

11. Build engagement with great company events

Employee engagement happens in all aspects of your employees’
experience at your business. Company events give your employees
a chance to relate to your business and their coworkers in a
different capacity than their day-to-day work allows.

Weekly fitness challenges, monthly town halls, and yearly holiday

parties are just some of the ways you can use events to improve
employee engagement. Not only do they give your employees
something with which to relate to their coworkers, but they also
break up the monotony of your employees’ work schedule and give
them something to look forward to.

Using ContactMonkey’s event management feature you can create,

send, and track event invitations from your Outlook or Gmail inbox:

12. Recognize success

We’ve mentioned earlier the employee engagement best practice of
highlighting your employees’ good work. But recognizing success
can take many forms.

The most traditional form employee recognition idea is when

management congratulates an employee for a particularly good
effort. But just as important is other employees recognizing their
peers’ success.

Give your employees a chance to raise up their coworkers when

they do good work. For example, during company town halls
designate time for your employees to highlight each other for their
efforts in the previous month. Add an incentive for sharing or
receiving praise to increase employee engagement even further.

13. Have solid onboarding and offboarding procedures

A positive company culture is crucial for consistently strong
employee engagement. Your employees’ contribution to company
culture begins on their very first day of work, so ensure they’re set
up for success.

A thorough, formalized onboarding process can help your new

employees navigate through their new workplace. Familiarizing
hires with your product or service, important members of your
organization, and coworkers that they can turn to with questions
are all indispensable aspects of a solid onboarding process. You can
also do this with a new employee welcome email to set them up for
success.

Similarly, your offboarding process should be prioritized to elicit

actionable feedback from your employees who are moving on to
new opportunities. Use surveys and exit interviews to understand
the successes and challenges of your employees. Taking this
feedback seriously and acting on it is crucial for ensuring positive
future employee experiences.

14. Reach all employees

More companies have remote workforces than ever before, which
presents unique challenges for keeping all employees engaged.
When managers may have been able to simply ask their employees
how they’re doing, now this same task requires them to set up
zoom meetings or lengthy Slack back-and-forths.

Ensure you make an effort to keep your remote employees

engaged. Having the right employee communications software in
place will help a great deal. Establishing guidelines for remote
employees to help remove assumptions and clarify key processes is
a vital employee engagement best practice.

Prioritize employee feedback and be sensitive to the challenges

they face from working remotely. If a meeting could be substituted
with a simple Slack message, opt for the easier option. This is an
easy employee engagement best practice that can have a big
impact.

If you need to contact only a select portion of your employees, you

can use custom email lists to reduce the number of irrelevant
emails your employees receive. With ContactMonkey’s List
Management feature, you can create custom email lists—without
needing IT—that integrate with your Human Resource Information
System (HRIS) like Workday and ADP, as well as Azure Active
Directory, so they’ll automatically update as employee join and
leave your company.

15. Rally employees behind your company mission and

values
Effectively communicating your company’s goals and values is an
important best practice in employee engagement. When employees
are inspired by your organization’s objectives, they derive meaning
and purpose from their work.
In turn, employees are more motivated be become engaged in day -
to-day processes at your company, and more dedicated to their
projects.

Ultimately, effectively communicating a strong company vision and

values is a cumulative process. It involves reminding employees
about team wins and even client achievements, to encourage pride
in the work they do.

It also entails communicating consistently, with cohesive

messaging, brand voice and visuals to help employees understand
the brand identity. Using consistent employer branding across your
communications and choosing appropriate graphics, colours, and
designs is an important part of this.

In the end, employees need to understand what your company is all

about and their role in it. Once they know this, they’re more
motivated to become fully engaged because they have direction
and know how to achieve success.

16. Promote diversity and inclusion

The significance of this employee engagement best practice can’t
be understated. In fact, creating an environment that
promotes diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the workplace is the bare
minimum for facilitating employee engagement.

Feeling comfortable and safe in the work environment is essential

for employee engagement. When staff don’t feel welcomed in the
office and sense that their ideas are being excluded from
discussion, they will avoid engaging altogether.

To foster employee engagement, make sure that you’re promoting

D&I policies, standards, and training. Use your leadership
communications to underscore your company’s commitment to
diversity and inclusion.

In addition, try to establish and promote any D&I -related employee

coaching opportunities, webinars, and other resources.
17. Foster connection through team-building
At the office, it’s easier to build bonds with colleagues. After all, we
see them almost every day.

Remote and hybrid work have made team-building a bit more

complex. But these flexible work policies are an important
component of your employee engagement strategy themselves, so
you don’t want to scrap them.

Instead, you need to strike a balance between engaging in -person

and virtual team-building events.

Try organizing virtual game nights, ‘wine-downs,’ lunch & learns,

and other events that allow employees to connect beyond work —in
a remote setting.

At the same time, make sure to set up in-person events, such as

escape rooms, paint nights, and dinners once a quarter to get
employees mingling in person. This balance enables employees to
retain the work flexibility they value while gaining opportunitie s to
make meaningful connections.

18. Stick with it

It’s worth mentioning again that good employee engagement
doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, it’s a continuous process that
needs frequent refining and updates, according to the many factors
that affect your employees.

A solid employee engagement strategy combined with effective and

frequent measurement can give you a solid foundation on which to
build greater employee engagement.

Formalizing this often nebulous aspect of your organization can

help you unlock greater productivity and camaraderie from your
employees.
Give Employee Engagement The
Attention It Deserves
It’s easy to overlook the importance of employee engagement best
practices, but do so at your own peril. Low employee engagement
can drastically reduce productivity at your organization, resulting in
low morale, high turnover, and dissatisfied employees.

Emphasize employee engagement in all your initiatives and consider

its importance to your business’ overall success. When you invest
in your employees and genuinely care about their success, you will
quickly see that this effect is reciprocal.

Engaged employees save your business time and money, while

helping your business grow and achieve its objectives. Invest in
employee engagement by using a dedicated employee engagement
tool like ContactMonkey. With ContactMonkey, you can take a
data-based approach to employee engagement at your business and
easily prove the ROI of employee engagement.

Author – Alex Clearly