15 Employee Engagement Best Practices to Improve Productivity
Employee engagement is the degree to which your workforce feels involved in your goals. The less engaged, the less productive your employees become. Not to worry; we have 15 powerful ways you can strengthen employee engagement at your organization.

Employee engagement isn’t just a nice-to-have: it’s essential to productivity across all corners of your workforce. While employee turnover has leveled out across many industries, worker engagement has taken a sharp downturn, bringing productivity with it. Let’s dig into the best practices for employee engagement to reverse that trend and improve results at your organization.
Table of Contents
- What is Employee Engagement?
- Employee Engagement Best Practices
- 1. Create Leadership Buy-In
- 2. Build an Onboarding Strategy
- 3. Define & Unite Your Corporate Culture
- 4. Extend Your Culture to the Frontlines
- 5. Build a Communications Framework
- 6. Encourage Two-Way Communications
- 7. Personalize the Digital Employee Experience
- 8. Be Clear on Expectations
- 9. Connect Employees to Leadership Vision
- 10. Recognize Employee Achievements
- 11. Empower Your Workforce to Supports Each Other
- 12. Facilitate Continuous Training
- 13. Ensure Technology Meets Employee Needs
- 14. Set & Measure Engagement Metrics
- 15. Show Employees an Engaging Future
- Conclusion
What is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is the cumulative effect of job satisfaction, professional motivation, employee commitment, and general attachment to their work. Engaged employees aren’t just happier workers, they are team members who feel a greater sense of duty to offer their best work, support their colleagues, and build a career with your organization.
The Link Between Employee Engagement and Productivity
Engaged employees generate 21% higher profitability, according to research by Gallup. This isn’t surprising: employee engagement, at its core, is just a measure of how hard employees will work to achieve goals. When companies follow employee engagement best practices, they generate workforces that score higher across the many metrics that contribute to productivity. That same Gallup study found that organizations with highly engaged employees see 30% higher enterprise value growth, and 22% higher overall productivity.

Benefits of an Engaged Workforce
In addition to the general increases in productivity created by following best practices for employee engagement, other key areas see big benefits. Retention in particular is closely tied to employee engagement; ADP found that employees at inclusive organizations will work 12% harder, are 19% more likely to stay longer with the organization, and collaborate 57% more effectively with peers.
It boils down to this: when employees are happy and supported in their jobs, they put in the extra effort to achieve at a higher level. But the inverse is also true: when employees don’t have an incentive to engage, they feel no motivation to do good work, support each other, or work towards the corporate vision. So how can we ensure our employees are engaged?
Employee Engagement Best Practices
1. Create Leadership Buy-In
No organization-wide strategy can succeed without buy-in from the top-down. Leaders across the company need to be educated in the importance of employee engagement, and the specific role they will play in engaging their teams and departments.
2. Build an Onboarding Strategy
Employee engagement starts with onboarding, with research to suggest that 69% of employees are more likely to stay with the company for at least three years after a positive onboarding experience.
Not only is this your best opportunity to set employees up for success with the resources and knowledge they need for their specific roles, but it’s a fleeting chance to convince new hires of the importance of your corporate vision.
3. Define & Unite Your Corporate Culture
Speaking of corporate vision, it should be highly visible throughout your corporate culture. Culture is more than just the snacks available in the break room and the quarterly team-building activities you arrange; it’s the shared set of values and priorities among your workforce. Identify the core values you’d like all employees to share, and use those as your North Star in all future decisions.
4. Extend Your Culture to the Frontlines
However powerful your corporate culture, you’re not getting full value from it unless it reaches the frontlines of your workforce. After all, these are the employees responsible for the final stage in the execution of your corporate mission. Whether they’re assembling products or helping guests, your frontline workforce needs to feel connected to the culture in order to remain engaged.
How Igloo supports your frontline workers →
5. Build a Communications Framework
Your communications framework is the infrastructure that engaged employees with your culture and mission. Many companies rely primarily on email, and these communications consequently go ignored by office workers who have more important emails to read, and frontline workers who don’t bother with emails at all.
Ensure your communications engine is capable of engaging a modern workforce. Intranet solutions like Igloo Software offer sophisticated, easy-to-use multichannel communications workflows that fuel every member of your workforce with the information they need on the channel they’re most likely to engage with (including mobile).
How Igloo improves communications →
6. Encourage Two-Way Communications
It’s not enough just to communicate downwards—your organization should allow employees to make their voices heard. This not only allows greater transparency into employee sentiment and feedback, but it makes your workforce feel valued and heard, giving them a greater sense of involvement in the organization.
7. Personalize the Digital Employee Experience
Every function in your organization works differently, so the way they interact with your organization’s tech stack should reflect that. The right intranet vendor can offer each employee type a different way to interface with the corporate intranet, including frontline-focused mobile apps for workers in factories or hotels, and a powerful desktop intranet for office workers.
These different experiences surface apps, resources, and knowledge according to the unique priorities of each role, ensuring that every worker has instant access to the tools they need to feel valued, engaged, and productive.
8. Be Clear on Expectations
One of the easiest ways to lose employee engagement and trust is by sending mixed messages. When employees don’t know what’s expected of them, they become disconnected to feelings of frustration and neglect. Show your employees that you value them by ensuring you communicate consistently and clearly about the expectations, and any changes that might occur.
9. Connect Employees to Leadership Vision
Leadership vision should already be a strong part of the corporate culture you’re building, but sometimes the details of that vision can shift. Use the multichannel communications tools build into your intranet to give your executive team a direct line to your workforce, keeping them apprised not only of leadership expectations, but of the valuable roles each team plays in achieving those goals.
In doing so, you’re giving your employees a personal stake in high-level business outcomes, and showing them the value of their daily work.
10. Recognize Employee Achievements
Showing employees the value of their work is important, but it’s often best to reinforce that pride with direct feedback. Formalize a structure that ensures no accomplishment goes overlooked by recognizing work anniversaries, project milestones, personal achievements, and other goals.
By celebrating these things as teams or as an organization, you can engage employees by making them feel valued for their hard work.
11. Empower Your Workforce to Supports Each Other
Culture isn’t just the connection between a company and its employees. Critically, it’s the connection between employees and their peers. This facet of corporate culture facilitates strong employee engagement by turning a workforce into a community that supports each other, both emotionally and practically.
Give your employees ways to connect beyond Slack and Teams by encouraging interactions both through team-building events and more regularly through intranet “rooms” where employees can share tips, celebrate project milestones, and even chat about weekend plans.
12. Facilitate Continuous Training
An engaged workforce can fall back into disengagement if they don’t evolve. Maintain a high level of employee engagement by continuously training employees on the tools they need to succeed every day, but also on the broader skills they need to advance in their careers and take on greater responsibility—and ownership.
13. Ensure Technology Meets Employee Needs
Employee engagement can also wane if the tools they need simply don’t address their needs. It’s important to audit your tech stack periodically, ensuring that the various tools are appropriate, up-to-date, well integrated, and aligned with the needs of your workforce.
Frontline employees overwhelmingly report that they lack the digital tools to work effectively. Desked workers have the opposite problem: too many tools is just as bad as too few, creating its own management burden. The Igloo Digital Assistant and Intelligent Search features both leverage AI to integrate your entire tech stack, offering every type of employee a simple way to get more value out of your tools and the knowledge contained within.
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14. Set & Measure Engagement Metrics
The best way to know if all of your employe engagement best practices are working is to leverage the analytics suite built into leading intranet platforms like Igloo. These analytics make it possible to set specific metrics, identify areas of concern, and find new tactics to solve the challenges that limit employee engagement.
15. Show Employees an Engaging Future
As these best practices help you create a stronger corporate culture and a more engaged workforce, start thinking long-term. By helping employees see the opportunities for career growth, and by linking those opportunities to concrete steps employees can take day-to-day, you can incentivize workers to engage more enthusiastically with their work in the long term.
Conclusion
Employee engagement is a complicated topic that requires commitment and finesse, but by implementing these employee engagement best practices in a structured, visible manner, you can build an engaged workforce that works harder, generating greater productivity for years to come.
Ready to learn more about how you can implement an employee engagement strategy?