Improve Employee Engagement

Hands up if you’ve got an eNPS-survey or full-blown Employee Engagement Survey coming up in the next 6 months? Yes, we see you 🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏾‍♂️. Fun fact: 80% of organizations regularly use some form of employee feedback mechanism…but only 17% rate them as "very effective".

We agree with the remaining 83% who question their value, and have seen engagement surveys do more harm than good.

How come? Well, being data-driven is great. But if you’re a HR professional tasked with the goal of ‘increasing employee engagement’...good luck! Unless it’s for your own department, you have very little power to influence the results 👀.

💡 Tip: Engagement, like employee turnover or absenteeism, cannot be ‘improved’ solely by HR. We can report on it, and provide advice. We can make people better, stay and give a higher eNPS rating. Agree instead to provide actionable insights, options for increasing employee engagement, and to support the leadership in executing these.

Why standalone eNPS scores say very little about engagement

Relying on eNPs metrics alone is outdated - they’re oversimplified and lack actionable insights:

Scores are often temporary snapshots heavily influenced by contextual events (e.g. lay-offs or losing an important client).

Engaged employees might score an 8, but this doesn’t count towards the end result, as an 8 is seen as ‘neutral’. A score of 1 is counted equal to a 6 - which makes no sense as they require a very different approach.

The score indicates whether people would ‘recommend the company as a place to work for someone else’, but nothing about if they’re actually happy, engaged or satisfied with their job or manager. It’s pretty much a waste of time, unless you add better questions.

So we need…more comprehensive surveys?

Sure more questions can help, but don’t go overboard. Make sure each answer is actionable.

Because the biggest issue with surveys is the very limited follow-up.

Surveys can easily become a passive-aggressive channel for employee complaints, leaving HR and management with endless to-do lists, without having meaningful conversations.

Meanwhile, employees lean back, wait for everything to be magically fixed, then get disappointed when nothing happens (and add this to their next complaints list).

It’s reasonable for employees to expect action, when they’re being constantly chased to complete a survey. Problem is, the results are often only shared weeks later, with vague promises to ‘review’ or ‘look into’ things, rather than significant action.

🪄 Of course, what they don’t see is that real change requires bold leadership decisions. Not just HR waving a magic wand to make big changes overnight (we wish!).

We can’t just hand out new roles and promotions to people wanting more growth opportunities. And more flexibility requires careful policy change review processes, and we definitely can’t ‘fix’ trust in leadership.

So you have this cycle of employee scepticism about actionable changes, declining response rates and survey fatigue… one we’re looking to break.  

This might all sound a bit negative, but it emphasizes our key point:

Line-managers and overall leadership are the real drivers of employee engagement, NOT HR. Without them committing to changes, you can’t increase engagement.

5 key engagement drivers
and how you can contribute to them, without needing a survey

1) Strong Leadership

Employees with supportive managers are 67% more engaged. Transparent leadership fosters trust and aligns teams with organizational goals.

👉🏼 What you can do: Ensure all leaders in the organization are fit for their job. Get involved in leadership hiring and promotions, proactively challenge poor behaviours and offer coaching/training. Leadership development programs also help a bit.

2) Recognition & Feedback

Regular manager recognition increases discretionary effort by 60%, while regular feedback makes employees 3.5x more likely to stay. And feedback is easy and free to give!

👉🏼 What you can do: Make regular feedback mandatory for managers, and train them to deliver it well. For example, help outline different ways to give recognition, including options to reward employees for going above and beyond.

3) Professional Growth Opportunities

78% of employees prioritize learning opportunities over salary increases, and helping employees upskill can boost retention by 34%.

👉🏼 What you can do: Pro-actively help managers upskill their teams. Offer both individual, team and company-wide training budgets - to make learning easily accessible for everyone. Employees who are participating in a studies or intense learning program are often highly engaged and least likely to resign.

4) Meaningful Work

Employees who connect their tasks to the company mission show 2.1x more engagement, and 50% longer tenure. Job crafting can significantly enhance engagement.

👉🏼 What you can do:

You can’t create jobs…but you can help managers communicate the ‘meaningfulness’ of jobs to their team members. As for creating better fitting roles, you could consider working more strenghts-based.

5) Work-Life Balance

Offering hybrid options see 28% lower burnout rates, while mental health programs increase engagement by 41%.

👉🏼 What you can do: Keep advocating for flexible work. Lots of inspiration on Flexa’s content hub on how this can look in different companies!

+ 2 alternatives to regular surveys

Ask the no-BS questions

Employees know exactly what they want to change. Skip the long forms and just ask them straight up:

• ‘What would have to change, for you to be able to do your best work ever?’
• ‘If you were the CEO, what is the 1st thing you would change?’
• ‘What would make your job here infinitely more interesting?’

Questions like these uncover what really matters. We prefer having actual conversations, but if you ask this survey style… all the results together pretty much give you an indication of engagement and very actionable ideas. Add them to your eNPS if you like ;).

Empower teams to make changes

Ask teams what they want to see changed - then give them the autonomy to implement their own solutions. It stimulates an ownership mentality - and works brilliantly.

You map within a team what’s working and what’s not. The team-members then come up with an action plan to fix the most important issues…themselves. Like a survey, but with results that can be put into action immediately. We often use a tool called ‘TeamBooster’ for this. (It’s free to trial.)

🔥 When you are starting up the next survey cycle - make the most of that effort in 2025!

Let’s build irresistible organizations, where employee engagement is inevitable!

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