Developing an employee engagement plan

As leaders, we should first evaluate whether ot not we've created an environment that inspires our employees. In order to spark motivation people must feel seen and valued.

Simon Sinek, best-selling author and speaker

Before you start your employee engagement plan…

Engagement comes from within your employees: it is how emotionally connected they feel to your business and how committed they are.

You can’t make your employees ‘feel’ a certain way or force them to be committed, but you can create an environment that is conducive to these feelings, thoughts and emotions.

Now that you have a vision in place, it is important to gauge the current levels of employee engagement in your business to begin to develop your engagement plan.

Your employees should sit at the very core of what any employee engagement initiative is striving to achieve and to lay the foundations for any improvements or changes – so the simplest way to understand how engaged your employees are is to ask them!

Create a survey to really understand current perceptions of employee engagement; use employee pulse feedback, focus groups or team meetings to find out how you are currently doing.

You may want to provide at least one method of collecting feedback that is 100% anonymous so employees feel comfortable and able to be 100% honest – warts and all – with no fear of repercussions.

1. Outline your vision

The first step in any employee engagement plan is to outline exactly what it is you want to achieve.

Each business is different, but your goals might include reducing absenteeism, improving retention rates, boosting productivity or developing a more positive culture.

You know your business better than anyone so take a look at recent trends in your people data, HR reports and figures that might help to inform the overall goal of your employee engagement programme.

Try not to give yourself too many goals to reach, it is better to decide on two or three goals to aim for to increase the chances of success. With too many goals, you risk spreading yourself (and your HR team) too thinly and your efforts are not making as much of an impact as you’d like.

There are four relatively straightforward steps to developing an employee engagement plan which we’ll take a look at now.

2. Evaluate your current situation

2. Evaluate your current situation (continued)

Find out what impacts engagement for your employees - is it belief in your business? Your culture? Their trust in your senior leadership team? Naturally, what drives engagement will vary entirely from business to business.

Before you develop any kind of plan to boost engagement levels, you need to understand what your people value most and what makes their connection with your business stronger. What makes them proud to work for you?

These kinds of research projects can throw up a wealth of valuable data that employees don’t typically verbalise. From trends across departments or sites to engagement levels with departments or seniorities; surveys can provide a holistic view of current engagement levels across your business.

3. Set targets and assign actions

After collating and analysing the data from your surveys and internal research, now is the time to set yourself some targets and assign tasks to those involved in executing your plan.

Remember to ensure that all of your targets are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, (sometimes agreed), realistic (or relevant) and time-bound, (or timely).

'Increase employee retention by 10% by March 2022’ is a clear objective. It’s specific, can be measured with data on retention, it’s likely achievable for many HR departments with sufficient resource, it’s a realistic percentage to increase retention rates by and it is time-bound.

‘Improve employee engagement’ is not a SMART objective. By when? By how much? How are you measuring engagement? How are you going to do this?

What action needs to take place to achieve Objective 1?
How will we achieve this (what are our actions)?
Who will take responsibility for it?
What is our deadline for this action to be implemented?

Take a look at the example action plan on the right. The aim of this action plan is to address employee recognition and you might find it helpful when creating your own for your business’ objectives.

Once you have decided upon your targets – and have avoided setting yourself too many – design an action plan that targets these areas for improvement.