5 Steps to Creating an Effective Employee Engagement Action Plan

A lot goes into making a business run, and one of the most important elements is the employees.

If your company isn’t a cohesive team that's able to work effectively towards a common goal, you'll struggle to achieve success. Keeping employees engaged can be challenging, and a lack of engagement leads to poor results. As such, it's vital to build a plan that will help improve employee engagement within your organization.

In this guide, we'll go over five key steps that you can take to build an effective employee engagement action plan.

1. Assess Current Engagement Levels

Before you can plan for the future, you need to know where you are now. An employee engagement survey is an effective way to get an idea of current engagement levels within your company.

Typically, these surveys are anonymous. This helps ensure genuine results and you can get clear insights into the sentiments of your workers. After analyzing the results, you'll be able to start working towards a suitable employee engagement action plan.

2. Identify Key Engagement Metrics and Objectives

When you have the relevant data, you can identify specific metrics and objectives that align with your business goals. For example, if you've determined there are issues with communication among your employees, you could set a goal based on increasing team meetings or response times.

Think about metrics that relate to overall business success. This will help you get the best results from employee engagement activities.

3. Involve Leadership

You need to ensure active leadership participation from the beginning. They are the first link in the chain that determines the degree of team engagement. If you fail to train leaders to be effective, they will likely not deliver the needed improvements. After all, what they are doing now is why the employees are not engaged already!

To achieve breakthrough results, retain a leadership coach to equip your entire leadership team, top to bottom (yes, that includes you, the owner), with proven ways to create trust and enjoy the benefits of having effective, engaged employees.

Regular leadership communication sessions can be helpful here. They provide the opportunity to share success stories that demonstrate the impact of engagement initiatives. This will help leaders see how pivotal prioritizing employee engagement can be.

4. Implement Targeted Strategies

Once you have your plan in place, you can execute it. Your strategies should align with SMART goals that you've been able to develop from the engagement metrics you identified earlier.

Using SMART goals helps keep things clear and easy to understand. This is an effective way to highlight the route to success.

5. Establish Ongoing Evaluation

No employee engagement action plan is perfect, so you should continuously monitor and evaluate yours. This will allow you to see where things are going well and where things can be improved.

Continuous evaluation will help you improve results over time. This will make it easier to achieve your goals in the long run.

Having open and honest employee feedback is essential. Make sure you're communicating that honesty and openness are encouraged and welcomed, and that no reprisals will result. Anything less will destroy trust and along with that, engagement.

The Importance of Your Employee Engagement Action Plan

Having an effective employee engagement action plan can help an organization in various ways. Ultimately, it will make it easier to achieve your long-term business goals, leading to further growth and success because your entire team is actively helping you achieve your vision for the future.

Keeping a business running is no small task, so it's important to follow the best practices. We are dedicated to helping business owners achieve their goals and get the best results. Take a look at some tips on how you can become a better business leader today.

Where to Start

We are experts at developing engaged organizations and can help you transform where you are to where you want your team to be with greater certainty than you can on your own. Want to explore further? Have any questions?