Article

November 6, 2024

10 Steps to Create a Strong Employee Engagement Action Plan

Milton Herman

11 minute read

Many companies want engaged employees, but may not be clear about how to achieve this goal. Introducing an effective employee engagement action plan into a company can be accomplished in a step-by-step manner. The steps listed here are easy to follow for companies interested in making this change in 2023.

What is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement can be defined as the level of emotional investment that employees have in their work. It encompasses the amount of passion they bring to their job and how motivated they are to do their work well. Best-selling author and speaker Simon Sinek described employee engagement in a nutshell as follows: “When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” This is the difference between engaged employees and those who aren’t engaged in their work.

The good news is that a company can take steps to re-engage employees who have become complacent, lack initiative, aren’t participating fully at work, and have high absentee rates. All of these things are signs that employees have become disengaged. The company can work to reverse these issues through an employee engagement plan.

What is an Employee Engagement Action Plan ?

An action plan for employee engagement lists the steps required at the individual, team, and company levels to solve problems identified during employee feedback sessions. The aim is to improve employee engagement. Investing in employee engagement is always a worthwhile exercise for your business.

Always keep track of the issues that are reported in employee engagement survey results. Are the same ones coming up repeatedly? Do employees complain that deadlines are too short, workloads are not being shared fairly, or there is a lack of training and development? If so, it may be time to create an action plan. The Human Resources (HR) department employees, managers and team leads can all participate in the action planning process.

— Employee Engagement Action Plan Example

If several employees working in different teams have reported that they can’t work independently on projects, this is a key area to address. The team leaders who are affected by the feedback can work with the HR department to create initiatives and a time frame for completion (with performance metrics included). Some initiatives could include:

Introducing a management training program
Writing and uploading a procedures manual to the company intranet

A procedures manual can be useful as everyone can access the information quickly and it would be readily available to all users.

Benefits of an Employee Engagement Action Plan

Why should a business create an employee engagement action plan? There are a number of benefits to taking this step:

They keep all employees committed to employee engagement: An action plan for employee engagement keeps executives, managers, and team members accountable for their respective roles in improving employee engagement. Everyone must be on board with the plan, or it simply won’t succeed.
The action plan is an effective tool for measuring employee engagement: Employee engagement action plans should include important drivers, benchmarks, and milestones. These elements allow executives and managers to track the effectiveness of the engagement action plan.
Action plans improve employee morale: When companies make changes based on how employees feel about their work, it shows workers that management cares about the people working there. The working environment improves, and employees feel less disillusioned about their place in the company. Workers are more likely to respond positively to employee engagement surveys presented throughout the year if they know that management will take their concerns seriously and make reasonable changes based on their answers.
It increases the company’s return on investment (ROI) of employee engagement: Engaged employees are more productive and resilient. They are less likely to leave their current employer. These workers have lower absenteeism rates than employees who are not engaged when at work.

Employee Engagement

Time to start or overhaul an engagement strategy? Capitalize on Employee Engagement Opportunities.

How to Create an Employee Engagement Action Plan

It’s crucial to follow a step-by-step approach when creating an effective action plan to improve employee engagement. The following strategy can help your company develop an effective engagement action plan.

1. Review Employee Engagement Survey Results

To create an effective plan for improving employee engagement, company executives and managers must have a clear understanding of what is working well and the areas of improvement. To achieve this, they must review the results of pulse surveys throughout the year.

If the initial engagement scores are lower than the company officials are hoping for, this is not a disaster. Keep in mind that these results are simply a starting point. The goal of gathering employee feedback is to help the company to do better moving forward.

Instead of focusing on the scores, consider employee feedback carefully. Look for recurring patterns in the results. Pay attention to employee comments to identify reasons that some areas scored lower than others. The feedback is a valuable blueprint for moving ahead.

2. Select Areas of Focus

Once the detailed reviews are complete, the next step is to decide where the company should focus its employee engagement initiatives. Carefully review the data that has been collected and make a list of the areas that should be explored further. These will be the starting points for discussing key items.

Start by selecting two or three focus areas. Rank them by priority based on the impact they will have on the company and how much effort it will take to implement them. When making your decision, consider these questions:

Which areas score the lowest?
Which survey questions have the greatest potential impact on employee engagement?
Can any of the answers be placed under a common theme?
Which employee engagement results can the company improve by making simple changes?

3. Identify the Company’s Employee Value Proposition

Along with determining what the company is already doing well and looking for areas to improve, take some time to consider the employer’s value proposition. The competition for talent is fierce and will remain so. High-quality candidates can pick and choose where they want to work. If a particular employer isn’t helping them advance in their career goals, the employees won’t stay for the long term.

What does the company have to offer top candidates who are looking for work?
How is the organisation different from the competition?
What can a new hire expect on the first day of work?

Engaged employees should feel connected to their employer’s values and mission statement without having to use buzzwords to communicate their passion for their work.

4. Determine What is Working Well in the Company

It would be highly unlikely that a company is doing poorly in all areas. When attempting to write an employee engagement action plan, look for areas where things are going well. When examining employee feedback, take the positive aspects and consider them as areas that the management and team members can build on. This is not the time for employers to rest on their laurels, so to speak, and decide that they have done everything possible to improve the working environment.

Instead, managers and executives can use the areas where employees are engaged to compliment them on their efforts and inspire them to continue their efforts.

5. Discuss Possible Solutions for Areas of Difficulty

Create focus groups for each target area identified. The focus groups will discuss what issues may be impacting the score for their assigned item. They will identify challenges in addressing issues and develop solutions.

This is a crucial step in the process. Focus group members should be encouraged to share their ideas openly, without fear of ridicule. Set ground rules for the focus groups that state there are no bad or wrong ideas during the discussions. This will ensure that everyone has a chance to participate.

Define why the company is having difficulty in the particular area under discussion. Then have the group identify what the company is doing that contributes to the problem. To wrap up, consider how the issue could be solved in an ideal situation.

Employee Engagement

Time to start or overhaul an engagement strategy? Capitalize on Employee Engagement Opportunities.

6. Commit to an Action Plan

Once the top solutions have been identified, it’s time for the company to commit to its employee engagement action plan ideas. Team members must be held accountable if the company is going to see long-term changes leading to a more positive employee experience.

Employees must commit to the action plan and be accountable. Without these elements, it’s easy for them to slip into old behaviour patterns as they lose motivation or become distracted by other priorities in the workplace. To avoid this type of outcome, the action plan must include the following:

Specific changes the company is committing to
Who is responsible for implementing them
Timelines and due dates for implementing the changes
Dates for submitting progress reports
Specific ways to measure success

7. Create a Template

Some companies prefer to use an employee engagement action plan template to help them formulate their action plan. The template can be changed to suit the needs of individual companies. One way to do it is to list the Areas for Improvement as a category, followed by what the team sees as Concrete Problems in a list, followed by specific Solutions and Success Metrics. The template should also include Owners (as in, who will be charged with dealing with a particular problem for the team) and a timeline for reviewing the matter.

The layout can be a list or a chart, whichever format the group finds the easiest to follow.

8. Set SMART Goals

Once the company has determined what it wants to achieve, it’s time to set SMART goals. To increase the likelihood of success, goals should have the following characteristics:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timely

If any of these elements are not present, it is less likely that the goal will be achieved. When implementing a plan for employee engagement, a company may fall flat by ignoring areas where goals need to be Measurable, Achievable, or Realistic. It can be tempting to try to make major changes to the way the company does things and ignore the fact that it is dealing with real people who may feel overwhelmed by too much change all at once. All the elements must be present for the goal to be a SMART one.

9. Communicate Progress Regularly

The most important aspect of creating an employee engagement action plan is discussing it with employees regularly. It’s important to share survey results and the final draft of the action plan with team members.

Managers should work with their teams to set up individualized goals for the actions the company has committed to implementing for making positive changes. Sharing these goals among employees is a great strategy for holding work teams accountable for achieving results. The teams are more likely to continue working toward the stated goals and share their successes with their fellow employees.

As the teams work toward their goals, executives should make a point of following up with managers and employees who have committed to taking specific actions. They should also share their progress with the company in team meetings and town halls so that employee engagement stays in the foreground of discussions throughout the year.

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10. Plan for Continuity as Business Grows

An effective employee engagement action plan should include specific strategies for preserving employee engagement rates as the company grows. These strategies include:

Developing a long-term employee engagement plan that includes more than employee surveys
Continuing to measure and optimize employee engagement until the desired numbers are reached
Pairing the employee engagement plan with the company’s business goals to ensure consistency
Company management and employees should continue working together to achieve the goal of keeping employees engaged

Employee Engagement

Time to start or overhaul an engagement strategy? Capitalize on Employee Engagement Opportunities.

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