Want to Improve Employee Engagement? Focus on These 3 Relationships

A decade-long decline in employee engagement has reached a critical boiling point. According to Gallup, it’s in large part due to a drop in connection to company mission and purpose among employees.

High levels of engagement are correlated to exceptional business results. Companies with high engagement are 23% more profitable and outperform their competitors financially by 147%. 

Companies can largely control waning engagement, but many organizations continue to miss the mark by trying to over-architect solutions or, worse, by blaming it on the employees themselves.

At its most foundational, engagement is about building relationships. But focusing on the right relationships makes all the difference. 

What is causing disengagement?

The workplace has fundamentally changed. Not only did companies go through a radical shift in where and how we work, but it’s also harder than ever to create connections and a sense of community within companies.

Factors like unclear expectations, lack of opportunities to utilize strengths, and a reduced feeling of appreciation at work are driving this decrease in engagement. 

According to the US Career Institute, 95% of employees want remote or hybrid work. This move to distributed work has increased pressure on companies and managers to establish a sense of connection with employees. It also complicates how employees build connections with their colleagues and teams.

What’s more: the shift to remote work has increased a sense of isolation and loneliness among the workforce. Gallup reported that 20% of the world’s employees experience daily loneliness, with loneliness highest among remote workers.

But our new way of work has also impacted a manager’s ability to set clear expectations and understand the full scope of each employee’s contributions, strengths, and opportunities for development. This lack of visibility negatively affects how managers can invest in their team members, focus on professional development, and coach them to be high performers. 

Along with the shift in where we work, there's a generational shift in the workforce. Zurich Insurance Group reported that by 2025, 27% of the workforce will be Gen Z. Today, the workplace consists of five generations, all with different expectations and needs. Gen Z is known for demanding flexibility, opportunities for growth and development, and open communication. 

What can companies do to build a high-performing, thriving culture despite the tectonic shifts at work?

At Bonusly, we believe that people, working on teams, are the primary drivers of business success. Many companies express this sentiment in different ways, so let’s assume we all have unwavering faith in the impact of talent on a company's success.

It’s imperative that we, as leaders, foster the right kind of culture, collaboration, and connection to unlock our team's full engagement and performance. Doing so requires a strategic focus on three foundational relationships:

• The company with its employees
• Employees with each other
• Managers and their teams

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Deploying engagement programs without strong relationships and trust across these three critical relationships is futile. It may generate short-term wins, but it will not achieve sustained engagement or performance.

How to build trust between the employee and the organization 

Let’s start with the relationship between the employee and the organization. For companies to build trust, it’s crucial that employees feel seen and valued as humans. It's just as critical for employees to understand expectations, so they know the standards they need to meet.  

Employees realize they're hired for a role and are expected to achieve relevant impact and outcomes. But now, more than ever, employees want to feel a part of something bigger than themselves and to align with a company’s mission and values. Employees want to feel valued as humans as well as workers. As such, celebrating personal events and being supportive during personal challenges are critical to building that bond. Awards for performance and incentives for important contributions also strengthen the bond between employees and companies. 

These are foundational efforts to help build a real sense of belonging. But most companies still get them wrong. They miss key milestones because they manually track millions of start dates and anniversaries. They give out gift cards to steakhouses for their vegetarian team members. 

We're a quarter of the way into the 21st century. It's time to invest in modern tools and automation to build a way to celebrate teams that's predictable, consistent, and fair. And in a way that employees actually value.

But this relationship between an employee and their employer isn’t just strengthened by warm fuzzies. Open, transparent, and frequent communication about values and expectations is critical for employees to understand how they’re expected to show up at a company. Public recognition that highlights exceptional behavior or progress on key priorities makes it easy to positively reinforce the work that matters most and highlight core values in action.

How to build better connections between employees and teams 

Now, let’s talk about building better bridges between employees. 

In the modern, distributed workplace, employees move from one virtual meeting to the next without the benefit of hallway, watercooler, and break room conversations. It’s isolating. And it’s really hard for employees to build organic relationships. 

Employees need new ways to engage—and companies need a way for people to communicate about what matters in ways that are effective, meaningful, and culturally additive. Employees need better ways to celebrate individual and team wins, show appreciation, and identify and amplify the right type of behaviors and mindsets. 

One way companies can enable this relationship building is by giving team members the space and tools to learn about the teams they work with and the projects they are working on. When you empower your employees to openly share recognition and wins with each other, and celebrate the great work or impact of their teammates, it creates a culture of appreciation—a culture with a shared sense of purpose and pride. People feel a part of something bigger than themselves.  

Openly sharing stories of great work and outcomes in action has multiple benefits, not only for the company in reinforcing the their core values, but also in building bonds between team members who work across the organization to overcome challenges, deliver on expectations, and drive a thriving, high-performing culture. 

Building effective relationships between managers and their reports

Then, there’s the ever-important relationship between an employee and their manager. This relationship is perhaps the most critical; it’s a truth universally acknowledged that people usually leave an organization because of bad bosses. 

This critical relationship is successful when managers are empowered with tools that allow them to manage in the flow of work and provide a holistic understanding of their direct report’s contributions.

When managers mobilize their teams to engage in public recognition and share stories of their peers in action, these managers have a much broader understanding of individual contributions, strengths, and opportunities for growth. That understanding makes it more feasible for managers to have meaningful check-ins with their team members and coach them to their highest potential. 

When you bring out the best in your managers, you make it possible for them to bring out the best in their team. There’s a cascading benefit of investing in managers and empowering them to be coaches. 

Managers are the linchpin of team and team member success. A supportive manager can more than double employee engagement, and managers account for more than 70% of the variance in engagement rates.

When employees are fully engaged, they give more discretionary effort to help their organization achieve its goals. In a way, engagement is a shortcut to innovation, impact, and business success. This discretionary effort has a tangible business impact: moving from low to high engagement can result in a performance improvement of 20 percentile points. 

Building high-performing teams is hard. But it’s not impossible.

When these three critical relationships are strategically cultivated (and valued by companies, managers, and team members alike), the result is a highly engaged, high-performing culture that drives business outcomes and delivers outsized impact.

All three relationships are needed to achieve a thriving culture and a foundation of transparency and trust. Only when both recognition and performance enablement are intentionally developed in each of these relationships will people and companies achieve their full potential. 

Want to learn more? Schedule a chat with our team today!