5 Daily Strategies for Employee Engagement and Retention

Employee engagement is about so much more than just keeping people happy. Engagement affects everything in your company, including retention. 

Companies that are better at engaging their employees are also better at retaining them. Case in point: A full 47% of people actively seeking a new job cite company culture as their primary reason. When your team feels invested in their work and valued for their efforts, they are more likely to stick around. 

But here’s the thing: improving employee engagement isn’t a one-time deal. 

It’s something you have to work on every day, in big and small ways. On that note, we gathered five of our favorite employee engagement strategies. Work these into your daily routine, and you’ll be surprised at the difference it makes for engagement and, long-term, for retention.

1. Gather employee insights in multiple ways

Gathering employee insights is the first step to improving engagement. How else will you know what your people need if you don’t ask them?

To get the most diverse and complete set of responses, it’s important to gather feedback regularly. It’s also important to gather feedback in multiple ways, so you have a greater chance of reaching employees with their preferred method of feedback. 

Here are feedback ideas to consider: 

• Open-door policy: Encourage employees to come to you with their concerns, questions, and ideas. Make sure they know you’re available to listen.
• Suggestion box: Set up a suggestion box where people can anonymously submit their feedback.
• Online review monitoring: Keep an eye on what present and former employees are saying about your company on websites like Glassdoor or Indeed.
• Focus groups: Conduct focus groups to gather feedback from a group of employees.
• Pulse surveys: Use pulse surveys to gather quick, real-time feedback. These surveys are usually short and can be sent out weekly or biweekly.

2. Offer mentorship

Mentorship programs can be an excellent way to engage employees and help them grow in their careers. Pair up employees with mentors who can help them develop new skills and offer guidance. 

This is a win-win for both the mentor and mentee. The mentor can develop their leadership skills, and the mentee can learn from someone with more experience.

As with the other strategies on this list, mentorship programs are most successful when they are built into the day-to-day fabric of your company culture. Instead of creating a highly formal mentorship program, encourage mentors and mentees to meet informally and regularly, at times and in ways that work best for them. 

3. Create clear paths for advancing

Employees want to know that they have a future in your company. Create clear paths for advancing, and make sure employees know what they need to do to move up the ladder. For example, creating a structure of employee leveling helps both employees and their managers understand the available paths for advancement.  

However you go about it, creating clear paths for advancing helps employees feel invested in the company and gives them a sense of purpose. 

Finally, as you do this, it’s also important to have open and honest conversations with employees about their career goals. 

4. Create a culture that values recognition

Recognizing employees for their hard work is crucial for employee engagement and retention. When employees feel valued and appreciated, they’re more likely to stay with your company. Create a culture that values recognition by making it a daily practice. 

You can do this by thanking employees for their work, giving shoutouts in meetings (or digitally on Slack or Microsoft Teams), or by implementing a recognition program. A platform like Tap My Back can help make employee recognition a daily practice.

5. Give employees what they need before they know they need it

Sometimes, it’s hard to recognize when employees are becoming disengaged. The signs can be subtle at first. Using a talent intelligence platform is a great way to catch early signs of disengagement so you can fix the problems before they become bigger. 

This can involve monitoring employee data to identify trends and patterns in employee behavior. For example, if an employee is consistently missing deadlines, this could be a sign that they’re becoming disengaged.

With this information, managers and supervisors can proactively work to re-engage at-risk employees before it’s too late. 

Work employee recognition into your daily routine

Improving employee engagement and retention requires daily effort. By implementing the strategies above, you can create a workplace culture that values feedback, mentorship, career advancement, recognition, and early detection of disengagement. 

Make employee recognition a daily practice and work on improving engagement every day. By doing so, you’ll not only improve engagement and retention but also create a more productive and fulfilling work environment for everyone.