Your organization is an ecosystem teeming with energy and opportunity. But to capitalize on the potential your organization and its employees hold, you’ll need to ensure that your teams are engaged in the work they do. Engaged employees are more productive, more likely to stay with their organizations, and happier. Still, striving to improve employee engagement is easier said than done, especially if there are one or more flaws in your current employee engagement initiatives. Let’s explore some common challenges that tend to limit the success of these initiatives and what you can do to combat them.
Despite the importance of employee engagement, many workplaces haven’t yet taken steps to implement robust employee engagement strategies.
To keep top talent interested in and passionate about being a part of your organization, you’ll need to return the favor. In other words, it’s important to show employees that fulfilling their needs and engaging them in the workplace is a priority for your business.
Low employee engagement is a common concern. However, it’s one that you can tackle with the right approach. The first step is understanding which factors drive employee engagement.
According to a 2024 Gallup report, the key drivers of employee engagement – regardless of your industry or niche – include the following:
You may notice that a hefty paycheck is nowhere to be found on this list. While good pay and enjoying where you work are important to today’s employees, they’re not enough to ensure engagement and satisfaction.
Workers want to feel purpose and meaning from the work they do. They want to know what makes them unique and put those skills into action. True engagement requires connection, understanding, and a mutual desire to grow.
If you’ve already invested in workplace engagement programs or efforts but haven’t seen the results you hoped for, you’re not alone. In fact, many companies and organizations strive to boost engagement but find themselves held back by one or more limitations. But it’s not all bad news: many of the obstacles that hinder initiatives for employee engagement are avoidable or solvable. Let’s take a closer look at some of the biggest offenders.
We know that a key driver of employee engagement is growth, or allowing employees to maximize the contributions they make while learning new things.
Many times, talented and dedicated employees want to contribute more than they already do. They want to be seen and want their contributions to be understood and appreciated. Gartner research reveals that the overwhelming majority of employees (82%) in today’s workforce believe that it’s important for their organization to see them as full people, not just workers.
So, if you find that your employee engagement efforts don’t seem to be hitting home, open up new opportunities for employee input. Listen to feedback from your teams and genuinely strive to apply it.
Make the process of giving feedback simple and rewarding, and ensure that employees always have a place to turn when they have something they’d like to contribute.
Managers and team leaders alone play the biggest role in determining engagement levels. As such, one of the greatest causes of an engagement initiative’s failure is a lack of support or guidance from leadership.
A place where many organizations fall short is considered employee engagement as little more than a goal for HR departments. Many times, organizational leaders don’t play an active role in engagement. Managers and front-line employees may not fully understand what’s available to them or how to take advantage of it.
The result, in many cases, is an organization that believes it has fully exhausted all of its resources and options – but, in reality, has yet to truly explore the full potential of engagement.
The solution here is simple: ensure that leaders within your organization engage with your initiatives, too. What this looks like depends on your needs. Sending out communications, joining events, or even acknowledging employee contributions can make a world of difference.
If your social impact initiatives don’t align with your organizational values or those of your employees, they’re probably not doing much to engage your teams. While engagement may only be one reason to pursue social impact strategies, it’s undoubtedly an important one for many organizations.
Ensure that the social impact efforts you invest in align with what your community truly wants and needs. It’s also important to seek opportunities to give back that leverage employee skills (remember, employees want to feel seen and have their unique abilities recognized).
Having high-quality and strong relationships with nonprofit organizations within your community not only boosts your reputation but also your ability to engage employees.
Too few or poor partnerships can restrict the impact your corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs create. Plus, it limits the opportunities you can offer to employees looking to get involved in something bigger than themselves.
Establish meaningful partnerships that allow for collaboration and a real impact. Communicate the value of these partnerships to employees to show that their contributions do, indeed, matter.
Flexibility is crucial when it comes to engaging employees. Your initiatives should seek to accommodate the diverse interests and schedules of your team members. If the opportunities you present are limited to traditional, in-person activities or have rigid requirements, they’re not as likely to succeed.
To fix this challenge, try to diversify the ways that employees can get involved in your engagement efforts. Provide options for one-off volunteering, skills-based volunteering, remote volunteering, and other unique solutions that give everyone multiple ways to participate.
Having access to technology to help you keep all of your employee engagement activities together and track their metrics is a great idea. But a tool that’s too expensive, confusing, or convoluted to use regularly is unlikely to do anything for engagement rates.
Instead, you need a platform that integrates into existing workflows and is simple to access and understand. The more hoops workers have to jump through to use the technology they need to participate in engagement efforts, the less likely they are to do so.
A focus on strengths and the ability to grow are two crucial drivers of employee engagement. However, many initiatives fail to create a system to collect metrics that track participation. Without access to data and employee engagement scores, it’s all but impossible to track engagement and recognize employees for their contributions.
Surveys and conversations are one way to gauge how employees feel about your engagement programs, but they don’t always translate to actionable insights.
Groundswell allows you to create employee donor-advised funds for your team members. Our platform makes it simple to celebrate those who go above and beyond and make participating in your engagement efforts a genuine benefit of working for your organization.
As you bulk up your initiatives and think about how to inspire your teams, consider implementing one or more of the following suggestions for employee engagement into your strategy.
Whether you’re new to trying to improve employee engagement or have been around the block a time or two, there’s likely room for improvement in your strategy. Many employee engagement initiatives fall flat because they don’t consider the key drivers of engagement or fail to truly meet employees where they’re at.
Groundswell gives you everything you need to make your employee engagement initiatives a success. Our web and mobile-facing apps are quick and easy to use, allowing employees and leaders alike to create giving or volunteering campaigns in minutes, no matter where they spend their time.
Our goal is to make the logistics of planning and executing your engagement initiatives a breeze so that you can spend more time connecting with and celebrating your teams. Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo with us today to get started.
