How engaged are your employees?

Managers are occasionally evaluated by their team’s occupational wellness — the sometimes-hazy calculation that rates employees’ professional and personal contentment. What may not be as commonly tested is the connected concept of employee engagement, which measures how committed employees are to helping their company succeed. While 71% of executives cite employee engagement as essential to their success, a mere 15% of U.S. employees consider themselves engaged.

Unfortunately for employers, when we look through either the contentment or engagement lens, we see a workforce in crisis — upward of 70% of U.S. workers are so unhappy in their roles that they are thinking about and/or actively looking for a new job.

What’s behind all this? Developmental stagnation at work and the opportunity for a better role elsewhere, often defined not merely as one with more pay, but as one presenting a pathway toward personal and professional growth and upward mobility.

The pandemic has only exacerbated the dissatisfaction of many employees — at varied levels — who feel stuck in unfulfilling jobs, with little guidance on how to advance or pivot in their careers and achieve the dignity of meaningful, impactful work.

This piece aims to deliver a simple action plan for assessing your employees’ engagement level and taking targeted steps to build the kind of committed and reliable workforce necessary to survive and thrive in today’s marketplace.

Common failures in corporate career development efforts

While researching employee retention when building our startup, we identified a number of common and recurring shortcomings in career-development practices — ones that are likely to be familiar to most Fortune 500 companies, as well as scaling, high-growth startups.

We focused on the activities and strategies companies use to align their skills needs with workers’ capabilities and aspirations — specifically, their approach to advancing staff toward jobs deemed both desirable to employees and essential to employers.

We found significant behavioral-design failure points across three main areas: Their strategic framework for employee engagement and advancement; implementation process and templates; and goal setting and rewards.

To understand the companies’ strategic framework, we examined upskilling and tuition reimbursement policies and spend; individualized employee future-fit assessments; tools for employee career pathway modeling and advancement; and early-in-career and diverse-hire career-progression programs.

For implementation processes and templates, we examined onboarding; employee performance and development cycle; manager feedback; and succession planning.

For goal setting and rewards, we examined manager and VP-level goals and rewards connected directly to their activities and performance in developing and advancing employee careers.

Take this employee development survey

Let’s gauge your company’s employee development and engagement efforts. How many of the following can you answer with a “yes”?

1. Has your company run a process to define skills or talent-gaps across organizations in the past two years?
2. As part of such a process, did your company define a role taxonomy for essential roles?
3. Do you have a process and the tools for mapping existing personnel to that taxonomy, whether from within or outside the relevant organization?
4. Do you track the career progression of your employees (by performance ratings, wage increases, promotion velocity, etc.)?
5. If two people joined the company five years ago and one was performing significantly better than the other, do you have a process — used consistently across the company — for identifying appropriate next roles for the better performer?
6. Have you set a per-employee budget allotment for career training? If so, is it universally known to both managers and employees? Are employees spending it?
7. Is your rewards system (as a performance management accountability for managers/VPs/execs) connected to employee satisfaction with management’s efforts toward employee recognition and career advancement?
8. Do you track — and hold managers accountable for — employee absenteeism, productivity and attrition?
9. Are you tracking the accrued costs and ROI of filling essential roles as a comparison between internal and external recruitment?
10.  Have you defined, and do you measure your company execs by, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that connect employee engagement with productivity and performance?

As these and related questions will uncover, a disengaged organization will have certain defining attributes and consequences. Pay attention to the following red flags when comparing yourself to industry benchmarks of similar companies:

• Higher rates of burnout, absenteeism and bad attrition.
• Lower morale and culture scores in employee surveys (47% of active job seekers point to poor company culture as the main motivation for leaving).
• Lower employee productivity, efficiency and revenue performance (companies with an engaged workforce found to increase revenue by 4x over companies without one).
• Employee dissatisfaction over management support and investments in employee career advancement and development. (A recent survey shows 94% of employees would stay longer with a company if it invested in their learning).

Action plan for building an engaged, dedicated workforce

The good news is that creating a culture of employee engagement is entirely within your control. Whether you’re part of a small and growing company or a large enterprise, there are steps every organization can take to develop a workforce that’s committed to company success.

Your plan should start with the following:

Transparency is key, and cash is nice

Workers feel far more engaged and connected when communication from upstairs is open and frequent. This applies to leadership articulating its purpose and vision for the organization or when navigating employees through a challenging, anxious period or event.

It’s particularly impactful and notable when managers open up the lines of communication as part of recognizing employees for a job well done both through formal rewards programs and small but timely gestures of appreciation. So break out those gold star cash or stock rewards, “kudos” mentions and in-person drive-bys or video messages virtually thanking your employees for a job well done. They matter.

Invest in your employees’ careers

Employees being able to visualize a developing career path within a company is perhaps the most critical precondition to their willingness to dedicate themselves to the success of that organization. This is especially true of early-in-career employees, with 87% of millennials rating career development as very important to job satisfaction.

Whether you’re adding it to an existing enterprise HR framework or building it as part of the scaling phase of early-stage companies, career advancement should be front and center across an organization’s entire structure of employee evaluations. Consider focusing on these areas:

1. Strategic framework: It starts with a communicated commitment by the CEO toward employee career development, including budget transparency and support of employee training and upskilling programs; investment in career advancement tools, such as career and skills-mapping technology and career-planning apps; and employee recognition programs.
2. Implementation process and templates: Ensure all key employer-employee touch points and templates include relevant career-advancement and employee engagement content and measurables. These include performance review processes and forms; manager feedback surveys; organizational health surveys (employee evaluations of VP/business-unit lead); succession-planning templates; and off-boarding documentation.
3. Goal setting and rewards programs: Develop and cascade clear metrics and KPIs for evaluating and rewarding executive leadership, VPs/business-unit leads, and managers for their support and effectiveness at employee development and engagement. Unless your organization measures and rewards a desired behavior or outcome, it will never achieve it.

Make the shift from boss to coach

After spending most of my career managing employees and leading organizations, perhaps the biggest mistake I’ve observed — and been prone to myself — within corporate America is manager fixation on their employees’ near-term job performance, often at the expense and to the exclusion of their mid- to long-term career development.

The most significant relationship within the workplace — and certainly the one that bears most heavily on employee engagement — is that of manager and employee. It stands to reason, then, that a shift to an employee-centric orientation is imperative to any strategy aimed at nurturing employee development and engagement.

Important lessons can be taken from the example of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was widely credited for favorably transforming the culture of the company from that of a product company to a people company, in no small measure by inspiring the “growth mindset” of its employees. That inspiration must be embraced sincerely, confidently and competently by every manager within the organization in supporting their employees to pursue, and perhaps realize, their full potential.

Preparing early-stage and mid-level managers for such a task begins with air cover from leadership that employee career advancement is a valuable function of their role. Not only is it essential to instilling purpose and commitment in employees in search of a career, but investing in your most vital corporate asset — your employees — is also the most effective and efficient way to bridge your organizational skills and talent gaps.

Don’t wait until your best talent walks out the door to ring the alarm. Focusing on employee engagement is the ultimate win-win for employers who can tap into the potential of their most valuable human resources. Today is the day to start putting in place the foundation for an engaged and committed workforce by equipping your people with the aspiration, skills and capabilities needed to succeed in the rapidly evolving marketplace of tomorrow.