Employee Engagement Strategies to Prevent Quiet Quitting

Worried that your employees are mentally checking out? Workplace trends like quiet quitting and the Great Resignation are making it harder to build a high-performing workplace. The popularity of these social media movements shows that employees with low motivation are more likely to pull back from their work and do just enough to get paid.

In some ways, this pullback makes sense. Employees around the world are feeling the pressure.

According to recent research from Gallup, 44% of employees worldwide say they're stressed, holding at the record level reached in 2021. Stress levels rose steadily over the previous decade before hitting this point. Gallup's findings show that engaged employees are less likely to feel stressed than their less engaged coworkers. That means leaders and organizations should focus on employee satisfaction to bring stress down.

Employee engagement strategies

So what can you do to push back against these trends, lower stress and raise engagement? Here are strategies and tips from Gallup to boost employee engagement and commitment:

Support your managers

Only 48% of managers agree they have the skills they need to excel at their jobs.

Managers are at higher risk of burnout and disengagement than their teams. Consider these tips to help your managers get off to a strong start:

• Start by listening. Gallup says identifying the listening points that matter to managers helps you understand their needs and support their growth as effective team leaders.
• Improve leadership communication. Only a third of managers say their own bosses keep them informed about what's going on in the organization. When managers get clear, regular communication about company goals and policies, they can pass those priorities on to their teams more effectively.
• Train and develop managers. Organizations should teach managers how to have meaningful conversations with their teams and offer more training on employee engagement and performance development. Managers also need more support in identifying their team members' strengths and guiding them based on those strengths.
• Offer coaching to prevent burnout. Gallup recommends meaningful weekly conversations with every team member. If you really want to support your managers, spend more time with them. Managers should feel that their leaders care about them and help them keep growing in their careers while protecting their well-being.
• Build a community of shared responsibility. The most rewarding parts of being a manager often come from strong partnerships and friendships. But busy schedules and remote work can get in the way of these supportive, informal moments. Leaders should build a manager community that encourages peer relationships and mentoring.

Prepare managers to have meaningful conversations with employees

Gallup researchers identified five common traits of meaningful conversations:

• Recognition or appreciation for recent work
• Collaboration and relationships
• Current goals and priorities at work
• Length: 15 to 30 minutes is enough for a meaningful conversation, but only if these conversations happen often.
• Employees' strengths, or what they do well: When conversations build on each person's strengths, managers can have more meaningful discussions about how work gets done.

In short, when managers focus on recognition, collaboration, goals and strengths, feedback becomes meaningful to employees. If these conversations happen weekly, they can be short. Of course, problems and challenges will come up and need to be discussed too. But to raise engagement, managers need to have conversations that inspire each person.

Make mission and purpose a priority

Remote employees are starting to lose their connection to their organization's mission and purpose. The drop is especially clear among fully remote employees.

Only 28% of employees say they feel a strong connection to their organization's mission and purpose.

This doesn't mean remote work can't work, but it does take exceptional managers. Managers should communicate the organization's mission and purpose clearly by building them into each team member's daily work.

Measure engagement

Measuring engagement shows your employees that you care about their feedback and want to know how they feel. Whether you already have a tried-and-true method or need to build a way to gauge how your people feel, measuring engagement is essential to understanding your workforce and what they need.

The goal here is to start a conversation between managers and employees. An engagement survey helps employees share their needs and helps managers know which needs to prioritize.

Act on survey results

An engagement survey isn't the finish line for motivating employees. It's the starting point. You have to act on the results you collect, or you may do more harm than good. If you run a survey and do nothing else, engagement will likely fall and turnover will likely rise. Ask employees for feedback about their workplace or engagement and then ignore it, and resentment builds fast. But asking for feedback, acting on it and sharing the positive results is one of the most effective ways to raise engagement.

Some steps you can take in response to a survey:

• Create accountability. Once you've collected data through a survey or other channels, managers should lead action-planning sessions at every team level. These sessions should encourage a culture of engagement where every employee takes responsibility for making the workplace great.
• Run effective action-planning sessions. The environment a manager creates for action planning matters a lot. These sessions should give employees a safe space to share ideas for making the workplace better, more productive and more successful.
• Assign action item owners. Once the team agrees on an important SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) action, assign an owner to it. This person makes sure the action item gets done on time and well. If a team has more than one action goal, give each goal its own owner.

By following these steps, you can help your employees become more motivated, engaged and mission-driven.

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