Employee engagement and retention strategies are an ever-evolving beast. 

Creating a culture of engaged employees who are passionate about their work is a constant journey of refinement and improvement. But it’s a journey well worth taking. 

According to Gallup Workplace, companies with a high level of employee engagement have up to 43% better employee retention. Those same companies also excel at other important benchmarks, including increased productivity, profitability, and customer loyalty. 

Employee engagement is a daily practice. Embracing it is the key to an environment where your company and employees alike can flourish. 

In this short guide, we discuss seven tried-and-true employee engagement and retention strategies, as well as tips for using talent intelligence to proactively address employee disengagement before it’s too late.

What is employee engagement and retention?

It goes without saying that employee engagement and retention looks different in every company. Your company is made up of individuals; the strategies you use will reflect these individuals and their particular needs. 

But there are a few common ways to define employee engagement and retention, no matter the company or industry.

Employee engagement is an emotional investment in your organization's success and ownership over one's contributions. In companies where employees are engaged, there is an active sense of motivation, commitment, and involvement.

Employee retention is more straightforward: do your employees stick around? And if so, for how long?

At its core, employee engagement is what compels your employees to show up wholeheartedly to work — instead of checking the clock all day and bolting out the door at 4:59 pm. Many factors influence employee retention, but employee engagement is near the top of the list. 

How does employee engagement improve retention?

Engagement and retention are two sides of the same coin. Simply put, engaged employees likely want to stay. Disengaged employees likely don't. Engaged employees are more loyal and committed because they feel like their contributions are valued and impactful. 

When your employees are disenchanted with your organization and don't feel like their work means anything — to you, to them, or to anything greater — their job satisfaction, and the likelihood they’ll stick around long term, plummets. 

Remember the Gallup results we mentioned earlier? The folks at Gallup aren’t the only ones to recognize the link between employee engagement and retention. There are plenty of examples, including this one from SHRM: 

At one Caterpillar construction equipment plant, increased employee engagement resulted in $8.8 million in annual savings due to increased retention, decreased absenteeism, and a reduction in the amount of overtime typically needed to cover gaps in staffing. 

Learn more: Curious how your company’s employee retention numbers stack up? Read the latest data from Praisidio on turnover rates by industry, location, and roll. 

7 employee engagement and retention strategies

Evolution is happening whether we engage with it or not — in life, and in work. The Great Resignation has revolutionized what it means to be an employee, and in order to evolve alongside your employees, you need engagement and retention strategies that keep up.  

There are endless approaches you can take to improve engagement and retention, and your strategy won’t be one-size-fits all. It will be different from department to department, team to team, and person to person. 

But as you refine your approach, here are eight time-tested employee engagement and retention strategies to keep in mind.  

1. Gather feedback

Feedback is your most direct link to your employees. If you want to figure out how your employees are doing, what they need, or if they have any ideas — ask them!

As you look to improve employee engagement and retention, consider these options for gathering feedback: 

• Open-door policy: An ever-open line of communication between employees, their managers, and the talent department
• Suggestion box: Physical or online, for anonymous improvement suggestions
• Monitoring online reviews: Platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor may contain useful feedback about your company or your competitors  
• Employee surveys: Online, in person, or by phone 
• Focus groups: Small groups where feedback can be openly shared in a safe space
• Exit interviews: Find out why your employees are leaving and if they have any parting suggestions

Remember: the whole idea of feedback is that it should be used to make improvements. Collecting feedback is the first part of a multi-stage process: collect feedback, analyze feedback, implement feedback, monitor changes, collect more feedback... and repeat. 

If employees see you attempting to engage with their feedback, they will respond in kind. If you can't action their feedback for any reason, communicate why and try to provide other solutions. 

2. Leverage talent intelligence 

Feedback from surveys and exit interviews is crucial. But sometimes, even your employees themselves aren’t aware of the problems that exist — until it’s too late. Here’s where talent intelligence comes into play. 

Talent intelligence takes the employee data you already have on hand and mines it for real-time trends even the best HR team couldn’t find on their own. 

With a talent intelligence platform like Praisidio, you can identify employees most at risk. You’ll also get targeted strategies for engaging and retaining those at-risk employees. This allows you to make changes proactively, instead of reacting after a problem becomes big enough to show up on Glassdoor. 

3. Provide mentorship opportunities

The feeling of having someone in your corner dramatically increases engagement. Somebody else backing you, investing in you, and caring about what happens to you creates a sense of camaraderie and a shared journey.

Ideally, the mentor is someone in the mentee's dream role. This lends a tangibility to their goals, motivating and inspiring them. Plus, it breeds connection and teamwork (and employee engagement and retention).

Mentoring is also an excellent way to support people in marginalized groups who face more barriers to reaching higher positions. 

4. Offer flexible work options

People now have a taste of flexible work. If you're going to enforce the traditional 9-5 at the office, it needs to be justifiable. 

If there are more convenient alternatives you could be accommodating, it’s worth considering them in the name of employee engagement and retention. Enforcing rules and regulations for their own sake comes across as unreasonably controlling and inconsiderate. 

On the other hand, flexible work arrangements that take into consideration each person's individual circumstances will go a long way toward increasing satisfaction, and by extension, engagement.

5. Create clear paths to advancement

If you don't give your employees a future to strive for, why should they stick around? 

Stagnation creates frustration and disengagement. If work feels idle and pointless, people are going to look for exciting opportunities elsewhere. 

Engaging with your employees and figuring out what a meaningful future looks like to them. Where do they want to be in 6 months? In 5 years? How can you help them get there? 

Create clear paths to advancement using strategies like employee leveling. Provide opportunities for training and continuing education. All of this gives employees something concrete to hold onto as a reason to stay. 

6. Encourage recognition 

Employees who feel like their efforts are recognized and appreciated make for connected, engaged, and committed team members.   

Encourage a culture of regular, authentic recognition between managers and employees as well as between team members themselves. Employee recognition strategies like merit increases, bonuses, and employee of the month/year awards. 

Above and beyond this, you can also use talent intelligence to identify employees who might need extra recognition: employees who work hard but may be lacking acknowledgment for their efforts, or those showing high levels of potential who just need a nudge in the right direction. 

7. Prioritize creativity and innovation

A workplace where employees feel free to engage with their work as themselves leads to more innovative and creative output. You harness all your employees have to offer rather than just what they think you want to see. 

For example, your employees might have ideas for how the company can evolve or how their daily tasks could be better accomplished. Creating channels for workers to share their ideas with one another, up and down the hierarchy, is wonderful for morale and motivation. 

By celebrating and encouraging your employees' individual voices, expression and ideas, you engage all of them at work, leading to deeper involvement and fulfillment. 

Learn more: Retention strategies for high-risk industries

• Employee Retention in Retail
• Employee Retention in Healthcare
• How to Retain Sales Employees

Best practices for improving employee engagement and retention

It's one thing to have top-notch employee engagement and retention strategies. It's another thing to implement them effectively. 

The Great Resignation signaled a power shift. People want more than money; businesses don't call the shots anymore simply because they hold the paycheck. What you offer — and more importantly, how you offer it — determines whether you attract and retain top-tier employees. 

Quiet the ego

We know people seek more than a paycheck, but what do they want? The onus is on you as the employer to figure out the specifics for your own workforce.

Let go of the mindset that I'm paying you, so it's my way or the highway. These days, if you take that attitude, your employees will most likely choose the highway. Find out what your employees really want from their jobs. Ask questions — and be genuinely curious about the answers.  

Implement change from the top down 

Higher-ups need to initiate change. It's hard enough to be the first to change, and even harder if you're 'lower' on the hierarchy and feel expendable. 

Modeling behaviors like embracing work-life balance, flexible work options, and giving honest feedback need to come from the top down. This establishes a level of psychological safety in your employees. They know they’ll be appreciated rather than reprimanded for this behavior. 

Build adaptation into your day-to-day

Improving on feedback should be a daily endeavor. This way, updating your systems is not a matter of storing up copious amounts of feedback and making big, disruptive, resource-intensive changes each quarter. 

Instead, make incremental changes frequently. Ideally, streamline processes like feedback loops so that evolution is your baseline state. 

Reframe failure as learning

Discard the idea of failure. 

Experimenting with new ideas, systems and approaches isn't always going to go smoothly. When perpetually evolving and upgrading your systems, it’s essential to reframe 'failure' as valuable feedback and a chance for growth. 

Learn more: Engaging Your Remaining Employees After a Reduction-in-Force

What tools or platforms can help with employee engagement and retention?

There are many reasons employees become disengaged. It can be difficult to suss these reasons out through surface-level observation and direct feedback alone. This is where quantitative data comes into play. 

Surveys and direct feedback are important, but they have some major shortcomings. This is because you're working with incomplete and inconsistent information. 

As we mentioned earlier, your employees might not even realize they’re disengaged, let alone recognize the reasons for their disengagement. If they do have gripes, they might not be willing to give honest feedback for fear of negative repercussions. 

Additionally, if you're making assessments and decisions using a small sample size, chances are it inaccurately represents the rest of your workforce. All of this can impair decision-making. Plus, it's time and resource-heavy. 

Many HR professionals have begun to turn to talent intelligence to close this gap.

A talent intelligence platform like Praisidio helps you keep a pulse on the complete picture of everything going on beneath the surface. Praisidio takes the HR data you already have on hand and uses it to identify at-risk employees. 

Early signs of dissatisfaction become easy to spot, enabling you to act in a targeted, effective, and timely manner –- before people become disengaged and start looking elsewhere. 

Talent intelligence is the next generation of employee engagement and retention strategies. And it’s poised to save companies millions in employee attrition costs. In fact, Praisidio clients commonly reduce employee attrition costs by $10 million for every 2,000 employees. 

Book a demo to learn more.