Employee Engagement: Build & Improve Engaged Employees

Engagement is the story we tell ourselves about work, blending emotion, environment, and nature to drive emotional attachment, commitment, and discretionary effort.

Identify your sweet spot by listing your five best skills and the two you enjoy, then spend more than half your time there and model engaging leader qualities to inspire.

Explore how discretionary effort drives engagement, aligning effort with company culture to boost productivity and profits. Learn to model, acknowledge, and share discretionary effort to sustain balance and prevent burnout.

Attract engaged job prospects by creating an engaging hiring page with stories and testimonials, and clearly seeking motivated candidates; use substantive, procedural, and personality assessments to ensure fit.

Design an engaging first day by crafting a welcoming entry experience, preparing the workspace, and featuring executive messages and personal touches that boost new hire engagement.

Learn to engage new employees from day one by using entrance interviews and a 60-day survey to tap their outside perspective, invite ideas, and boost engagement.

Discover how starting pay and incentives drive employee engagement, retention, and a profitable bottom line. Use the cost-ease-impact test to tailor rewards, from written thanks to team activities.

Identify career paths for your team and put them in writing as a career ladder. Have proactive conversations about growth opportunities to keep top employees engaged and extend tenure.

Leaders are not responsible for employees; they are responsible to employees by creating a system that enables success and engagement, avoiding micromanagement and embracing management by engagement over control.

Define clear objectives, results, and benchmarks to align performance, track progress with KPIs or OKRs, and adjust course to keep employees engaged and on track toward shared goals.

Boost employee engagement by showing care through daily, tangible actions. Publicly acknowledge achievements, be present with your team, and remember birthdays, anniversaries, and family details.

Clarify each team member's three daily objectives and how others can support them to boost engagement. Use a collaborative whiteboard exercise to record results for orientation, training, and performance discussions.

Learn how emotional energy shapes engagement, avoid triggering fight or flight on the emotional stage, and tune to a 40/40 balance to co-create an engaged workforce.

Learn to move disengaged employees toward engagement by using coax, encourage, and inspire through safe steps, positive storytelling, and a clear vision of a desirable future.

Identify actively disengaged employees, assess if disengagement comes from circumstance or attitude. Use private coaching and documented warnings to address conduct, involve HR, and remove if no improvement.

Design employee surveys to reveal what inspires and engages staff by asking questions about management, opportunities, compensation, environment, and culture, and pursue 100 percent participation with transparent follow-ups.

Practice five minutes of presence with an employee to listen, boost engagement, remove distractions, and use clarifying questions to understand goals, aspirations, and challenges.

Assign staff to monitor third-party sites and use Google alerts to shape social media impressions; encourage positive employee engagement and respond to negativity with specific, positive messages.

Apply Maslow's hierarchy to employee engagement by ensuring basic needs—survival, security, belonging—are met, then address ego gratification and self-actualization to motivate and retain top performers.

Brand your internal space to boost engagement by displaying employee and customer visuals, posters, and financials so staff see the big picture and culture.

Develop a culture of fun to drive engagement, using the Fish Philosophy: be their play, make their day, choose your attitude, and ideas like fun committees, contests, and celebrations.

Commit to two concrete actions to become more engaged at work, then experiment with engagement strategies to boost productivity and inspire your employees.