Rethinking Employee Engagement Strategies for the Modern Workforce

When employees feel engaged with their work, everyone wins. Engaged employees are more productive, do higher-quality work, and deliver better business results. Engaged employees are also more likely to feel understood and appreciated, fostering a sense of purpose and fulfillment in their work and making them less likely to leave.

But employee engagement doesn’t just happen. It needs to be intentionally created, measured, and improved upon.

In this blog post, we’ll examine employee engagement in more detail, discuss the importance of developing an employee engagement strategy, identify some of the challenges organizations commonly encounter, and discuss the crucial role digital employee experience (DEX) plays in improving employee engagement.

• What is employee engagement?
• Why is an employee engagement strategy important?
• Key components of an effective employee engagement strategy
• Ways to increase employee engagement
  • The role managers play in improving employee engagement
  • How technology influences employee engagement
• How improving DEX is a crucial part of an effective employee engagement strategy
• The future of employee engagement is digital

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is the enthusiasm and commitment employees feel for their jobs, affecting their thoughts and actions. More engaged employees feel a deeper connection to the organization and its mission, perform better, and are less susceptible to burnout.

Employee engagement is a vital part of employee experience. How employees perceive their work encompasses all their work-related interactions, from the interviewing and onboarding process to their daily work and eventually leaving the organization. Employee experience also includes how they feel, or employee sentiment, about their work environments — whether in a traditional office, a home office, or some other setting — and their experience with the technology they use.

[Read also: Do you know how your employees feel about their digital employee experience?]

Why is an employee engagement strategy important?

Since employee engagement affects everything from productivity to absenteeism, business leaders must craft an effective employee engagement strategy. Employee engagement contributes directly to employee productivity, well-being, job satisfaction, and business outcomes.

When employee engagement is high, businesses perform better. Gallup found that highly engaged business units receive 10% better customer ratings and achieve 18% higher sales.

However, an effective employee engagement strategy needs to consider today’s hybrid workforce and increasing reliance on digital tools thanks to digital transformation efforts.

In recent years, a large portion of the workforce has shifted to working at home for at least some days. The Pew Research Center found that 35% of employees with jobs that can be done remotely are working from home all the time, and 41% of employees with jobs that can be done remotely are working hybrid schedules. Since hybrid and full-time remote workers spend so much time physically apart from their coworkers, organizations have to make an extra concerted effort to ensure employees feel valued and engaged, with the right supporting technology to streamline their efforts.

When employees feel engaged in their day-to-day work, their mental health improves. They feel aligned with the organization’s goals and sense of purpose and are less likely to suffer from burnout or disengagement. Engaged employees stay at their jobs longer, improving employee retention.

Business is more competitive than ever. When business leaders tune their organizational culture and technology to increase employee engagement, they take a bold step toward improving not only the personal lives of their employees but also business outcomes.
 

Key components of an effective employee engagement strategy

Several frameworks are commonly used when creating an employee engagement strategy. However, when you get into the meaning behind each of these clever monikers, you’ll realize they’re all very much aligned with what you might expect to be involved in supporting higher employee engagement.

Many of these employee engagement frameworks follow a similar formatting of a number, typically between 5 and 10, and then a letter used as an alliteration for the encompassing words. For example:

• The 5 Cs: Care, connect, coach, contribute, and congratulate
• The 5 Es: Enable, energy, empowerment, engage, encouragement, and expectations
• The 6 Cs: Context, clarity, credibility, caring, connection, and coaching
• The 10 Cs: Career, clarity, convey, congratulate, contribute, control, collaborate, credibility, and confidence

If you look at these frameworks side-by-side, it’s easy to see what they’re trying to capture at the highest level: For any employee engagement strategy to be effective, it’s important to genuinely understand how employees feel and actively work with them to improve the issues causing their dissatisfaction.

Ways to increase employee engagement

While all this guidance sounds feasible in theory, where is the best place for an organization to start putting this strategy into practice? To cast the widest net with some of the biggest returns, focusing on key aspects universal to every employee’s experience — such as understanding and improving common issues between managers and employees and between employees and their digital tools — can help organizations boost employee engagement.

The role managers play in improving employee engagement

No matter where employees are working, they need regular communication and guidance from their managers to feel engaged. In fact, Gallup research found that managers have a huge role in employee engagement, and when managers and employees can apply their strengths to their daily work and lives, they are six times more likely to be engaged at work.

Regular communication from managers plays an important role in promoting employee well-being by building an emotional connection that’s important for avoiding disengagement and alienation on the job.

For example, in weekly one-on-one check-ins, managers can:

• Discover what an employee is working on, any challenges the employee is experiencing, and any requests they have for help
• Discuss goal setting both for specific projects and for the employee’s long-term career, considering any new development opportunities that may have arisen
• Solicit employee feedback on assignments, organizational culture, and other important topics; when possible, foster two-way communication on everything from project status to work-life balance
• Provide mentorship so that employees can develop new skills or navigate specific challenges
• Give employee recognition, incentives, and perks so that employees know their work is appreciated
• Foster enthusiasm for the company’s mission and support for its core values
• Build trust through team-building activities and other activities so that employees can feel comfortable with the people they are working with

No single managerial style works for all team members across all organizations. What’s important, though, is recognizing the crucial role managers play in an effective employee engagement strategy, the importance of hiring and training managers who can succeed in this part of the job, and the need to provide managers with the insights they need to make informative decisions about improving engagement.

[Read also: Are Metaverse meetings the answer to better employee engagement?]

How technology influences employee engagement

However talented and empathetic, managers cannot address all aspects of employee engagement. In a digital workplace, the experiences employees have with technology also shape employee engagement.

When digital experiences fall short — when endpoints run sluggishly, applications are overly complex, or employees are forced to hunt for the information they need — employee experience suffers, and an employee’s emotional connection to their employer becomes fraught. Lagging employee engagement levels are only one result of poor digital experiences.

Other outcomes include:

• IT outages and potential vulnerabilities due to neglected IT performance issues
• Overwhelmed IT help desks, as employees submit a barrage of tickets about endpoints, applications, and other underperforming IT resources
• Lack of visibility and control, giving IT and business leaders no insights into digital experiences, their effects on employee experiences, and how to improve those experiences
• Discouraged employees who find themselves struggling with IT basics instead of working on professional development or projects that deliver strategic value to the organization
• Inefficiencies and potential security risks caused by employees seeking workarounds
• An inability to attract and retain top talent and onboard new hires as quickly and smoothly as possible

Organizations that are outpacing competitors are striding ahead on four priorities. They recognize that human-centric productivity requires attention to how work is evolving and the skills and motivations of those doing the work. They appreciate that trust is the true dialogue of work, fortified through transparency and equitable work practices. As risks become more connected and less predictable, they understand that a new level of risk awareness and mitigation is essential to building a ready and resilient workforce. They acknowledge that as work becomes more complex, it will be critical to simplify, engage, and inspire their workforce toward a digitally-infused future.

How improving DEX is a crucial part of an effective employee engagement strategy

With digital transformation initiatives, remote work, and reliance on digital tools to streamline workflows, technology continues to play a bigger role in an employee’s job experience.

Organizations looking to modernize their employee engagement strategies are embracing digital employee experience, or DEX, as a necessary solution to monitor, manage, and optimize employees’ experiences with the endpoints and applications they rely on daily to do their jobs, including:

• Fixing technology issues before they cause downtime

  A digital employee experience solution can provide real-time insights into performance issues on endpoints across your organization, including endpoint devices being used by remote employees.

  These metrics give IT teams the telemetry data, alerts, and insights they need to catch performance problems, identify security risks, and spot other issues before they jeopardize employee satisfaction and job performance. Organizations can proactively deploy patches and fix problems quickly and efficiently without interrupting the employee’s workday.

• Keeping employees engaged and satisfied

  Using pulse surveys and employee engagement surveys to collect metrics about employee experiences through a DEX solution, organizations can discover how employees feel about their work environments, endpoints and applications, the communication channels available, company culture, and more.

  Tracking these employee survey metrics over time and adjusting IT investments, human resources initiatives, and other factors can help your organization continually identify the greatest opportunities for improving employee sentiment and engagement.

• Taking the burden off your IT help desk

  When you monitor, manage, and optimize the digital employee experiences proactively, you reduce the need for employees to submit so many service tickets and reduce the workload of your IT help desk. With fewer tickets, help desk agents are available to work on more strategic projects and are less rushed when investigating difficult problems.

  Another way to reduce IT help desk workloads is to use automation to monitor and manage key business components, such as endpoints, in real time. Automating help desk processes accelerates and improves the quality of service the help desk delivers while lowering the risk of human error.

Employee experience matters more than ever, but organizations are often left in the dark. Investing in a digital employee experience solution can help an organization continuously monitor and improve the performance of endpoints and user sentiment, allowing for easier identification of problem areas and more informed decision-making around action plans.

[Read also: Mastering employee engagements surveys: From data to action]

The future of employee engagement is digital

With so many employees working remotely and ongoing digital transformation initiatives integrating technology into every facet of modern-day business operations, delivering a consistently great employee experience and its impact on engagement cannot be left to chance.

The key to unlocking a vibrant and productive workplace lies in effective employee engagement strategies. When employees are engaged, their work improves, and everyone benefits.

In this post, we’ve discussed the importance of employee engagement and improving digital experiences to increase productivity, motivation, well-being, and mental health and decrease workloads on IT help desks. Organizations that prioritize the digital employee experience can greatly influence how employees interact with their work and each other.

By embracing technology that streamlines communication, fosters collaboration, and simplifies processes, organizations can cultivate a culture of engagement that attracts top talent and inspires employees to thrive.

¹2024 Global Trends Report, Mercer

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Tanium’s Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solution provides a powerful, scalable, centralized platform for monitoring, managing, and optimizing employee experiences at every location for all types of authorized endpoints. Tanium DEX makes it easier to keep systems and applications performing well and remediate problems before they affect the employee experience.

Using Tanium, IT teams can provide self-service remediation actions so that employees can fix a wide variety of issues on their own, freeing up help desk bandwidth. Teams can also create trigger-based automated actions that self-heal issues or suggest relevant knowledge base articles to employees.

Managing employee experiences would be incomplete without surveys that measure employee sentiment — an important advance over earlier application performance management (APM) solutions that remove end users’ experience. Tanium DEX makes it easy to create and distribute surveys with multiple-choice or sliding-scale questions about sentiment. Surveys can also include links to other resources or actions to remediate a problem mentioned in the survey and can be scored to track and report on sentiment over time.

Tanium’s larger vision for Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM) — an architectural approach that applies AI and automation to streamline and improve IT operations — aims to use intelligent automation wherever possible to enable today’s overworked IT and security teams. The AEM framework will allow organizations to manage, monitor, secure, and optimize endpoints across their environment, improving employee experiences and business outcomes.

Learn more about how Tanium DEX helps your organization meet its strategic objectives for improving digital employee experiences.