Feature
Gallup's 2024 State of the Global Workforce Report, released in June, first and foremost tackled the worldwide mental health crisis and the role workplaces play in both exacerbating and relieving it. But buried within the report’s suggestions was an equally important topic to address: employee engagement.
Gallup’s survey of more than 183,000 business units across 90 countries found that organizations with the strongest cultures integrated engagement “across the employee and manager lifecycle.”
Specifically, “They make engagement a business strategy that informs how they hire, onboard, coach and develop talent. They also integrate it into performance management, goal setting, team meetings and manager-employee conversations.”
And Gallup says, this means putting managers at the center of your strategy.
Managers Are the Linchpin
The key to a highly engaged organization, according to the report, lies with managers. The survey found 70% of the variance in team engagement can be attributed to the manager. But does that mean the onus lies on them to fully own engagement initiatives?
Andy Pirruccello, senior director of employee experience at The E.W. Scripps Company, said the broader business “really does have a lot of stake in the game” and that an overhaul of engagement strategies needs to happen on multiple levels.
“You should look at it at the enterprise level and track the large sets of data over time to see what you need to do to move the needle from a programmatic or large-scale perspective,” he said. “You should also put engagement data directly into the hands of managers so that they can really impact the culture kind of at the local level within their teams.”
That’s exactly what Pirruccello and his team are doing at Scripps, where they have foregone traditional surveying in favor of 3 to 5-question pulse surveys each month.
“We're putting that data directly in the hands of our managers and asking them to sit down with their teams once per month and have a conversation on that data,” Pirruccello said.
Rachel Happe, founder of Engaged Organizations, said managers are, indeed, more of a leverage point for organizations.
“I think some of the challenges that big organizations have with engagement is when HR is trying to do something that scales. People don't scale,” Happe said.
She said engagement often looks very different from one team to another — some employees may thrive working late hours while others have different obligations. Managers can best understand how to keep their direct reports engaged.
In addition, she recommends employers look at managers more like coaches and give them the necessary community management training to create healthy cultures. This is in line with a Gallup finding that shows the highest performing organizations in their survey hired and trained managers to be leadership coaches who can deliver meaningful feedback.
Related Article: Sustaining Employee Engagement in the Hybrid Workplace
Means of Employee Engagement Measurement
Pirruccello and Happe both agree that because engagement can look different across teams — and is often a lagging indicator — finding the right philosophy around measurement is critical.
Pirrucello said he’s seen companies that take a very light approach, where their key measures are based on net promoter scores or self-evaluations. Others opt to use far more comprehensive assessments, such as Workday’s PEAKON, which looks at a series of engagement drivers and sub-drivers.
“I think using [engagement] as a piece of measurement along with other pieces like turnover or absenteeism, or connecting engagement to like financial metrics into different business outcomes, can help us get a fuller picture of things,” he said.
Likewise, Happe said the most solid way to measure engagement is by looking at its realized impact.
“If I look at somebody's behavior over time, a more engaged person is going to do things quicker, look at more places, ask more questions — you're gonna see it in the behavior,” she said.
Gallup’s research found that there are plenty of positive outcomes that tie directly to engagement, including increased productivity, work quality, profitability and organizational citizenship behaviors.
While looking at this at the individual level might be both misleading and invasive, Happe said, grouping employees with similar jobs or workflows can give managers actionable data on what high engagement is generating — or what disengagement is costing them.
Related Article: Where Generative AI Could Enhance Employee Engagement
Conference
Oct
20
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
How to Keep Employee Engagement Efforts on Track
Even the best-laid engagement initiatives can fall to the wayside amid conflicting priorities or challenging conditions, which is why engagement has to be a business strategy, not just an HR one.
“It has to be baked into who you are as an organization,” Pirruccello said. “A lot of [our focus] is on getting senior leader alignment that this is who we are and how we operate. These pulses that we're pushing out now are just part of our operating rhythm. It's not just something new that we're trying.”
Employers also need to deal with manager burnout in order to make engagement possible, Happe said. The work of a manager is emotionally taxing, with the number of direct reports going up, and many feel they lack the training and resources to be effective. Gallup even found that despite the perks of a managerial role, they are more likely to be stressed, angry, sad and lonely than non-managers.
Finally, leaders also have to acknowledge that moving the needle on engagement takes a long time. In many cases, data is often used punitively on managers who aren’t meeting engagement benchmarks, which Pirruccello said is the wrong approach.
“It’s about a continuous conversation,” he said. “ It's not about having to create an action plan every month when you meet, but just monitoring those ebbs and flows over time. When we do notice issues with engagement on any given team or function, don’t make it a punitive effort. We sit down with that leader to figure out how we can help them.”
