If you want your business to succeed, you need an engaged and committed workforce. When you fail to engage your staff, it’s easy for entire teams to become disenfranchised, leading to poor performance and low retention rates. Things are even more challenging for remote organizations that can’t inspire employees with face-to-face interactions. 

However, the good news is that you can increase your odds of success by implementing an action plan for employee engagement. Never created one before? Read on for everything you need to know. 

What is an Employee Engagement Action Plan?

Employee engagement action plans are simply an outline of the steps required to overcome problems and deliver desirable results. They can be geared toward individual employees, whole departments, or an entire company. Problems are typically identified through extensive feedback. This feedback can arise during all-hands meetings or come from a series of surveys dispatched to everyone within your organization. 

Action plans can be as focused or as general as you wish. Use them to fine-tune employee training to get new hires off to the best start possible. Considering a more radical reshuffle? You can use an employee engagement action plan to rethink the fundamentals of the way you do business. 

10 Steps to Create a Comprehensive Employee Engagement Action Plan

If you want to create an effective employee engagement action plan, taking it one step at a time is the best way to go. Need some help? Below are 10 essential steps you’ll want to follow.

1. What Do You Hope to Get Out of It?

Before an employee engagement can take shape, you need to have a handle on what’s working within your organization and what isn’t. Once you’ve honed in on areas that need improving, you can start getting to work. A simple way to establish your goals is to look at employee engagement survey data. 

Don’t be disheartened if the first batch of survey results aren’t the glowing employee responses you’d hoped for. The majority of companies encounter similar feedback at first, so don’t focus on issues raised as an opportunity for growth. Hard figures aren’t all that useful, so instead delve deep into feedback from your employees and really consider the comments that your employees have left. 

2. Find Your Focus Areas 

Reviewing survey results takes time, but it’s essential not to skip this step. When it’s finally finished, you can determine what exactly your employee engagement action plan should focus on. Struggling to pinpoint something? For quick gains, look for things you can improve with relatively little effort. Looking at survey results, what areas score the lowest? These demand the most attention, so give them priority if possible. 

Securing the best talent is difficult at the best of times. If your business sector is saturated with competitors, it’s even more challenging. As an employer, what sets you apart from the competition? What can you offer to premium candidates that other businesses can’t? Answering these questions will solidify your employee value proposition.

3. Collect Ongoing Feedback

If you want your employee engagement plan to succeed, it needs to be engineered with your employees in mind. Along with your preliminary engagement survey, you should be using pulse surveys to generate fresh feedback throughout the year. This feedback can be useful in measuring responses to any initiatives you’ve recently introduced. 

4. Assess Company Strengths

By now, you should have already determined the areas where your company is performing well. However, these positive points need to be nurtured. Once you’ve recognized your company’s key strengths, you can work to improve them further. 

5. Identify Solutions

Now you’ve found your pain points, it’s time to discuss how you’ll resolve them. You can turn to your teams to generate potential solutions by assigning focus groups to the target areas you’ve singled out. These groups can look into the reasons behind the problem and spotlight potential challenges in remedying them. 

However, the main goal of these focus groups will be to brainstorm solutions. Encourage everyone to participate and be upfront with suggestions, reminding people that there’s no such thing as a wrong answer as everyone strives to create a workable solution.

6. Commit to Action

Now you’re armed with a stockpile of solutions, you’re ready to put your employee engagement action plan into practice. However, getting the ball rolling isn’t enough. Your employees need to commit to your action plan if it’s going to succeed. 

This means making clear the changes that your business is making and who will be in charge of actually implementing them. It’s also crucial that you include timelines and important milestones, along with key dates where progress reports will need to be submitted. To encourage accountability, also mention how success will be measured. 

7. Create a Framework

To make life easier, use a template when creating your employee engagement action plan. For a user-friendly framework, include areas for improvement, along with key problems in a list format. After that, you can include solutions that are going to be implemented and metrics for measuring success. It’s also important to include a project timeline and identify who’s in charge of doing what. 

8. Set Goals

You can increase your odds of success, by using Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) goals. If your action plan for employee engagement doesn’t include any one of these characteristics, it’s unlikely that you’ll meet your objectives. Avoid the urge to constantly prioritize one element over another, even if that seems like a sensible decision at the time. 

9. Monitor Progress

Constant progress updates are a pivotal part of any employee engagement plan. Different teams will have different goals, and you’ll need to define and communicate all of them openly. In doing so, you’re making your employees more accountable and encouraging them to strive to deliver desirable results. 

Commit to a culture of transparency by sharing progress updates during team meetings, whether it’s a get-together with a single department, a quarterly review, or an all-hands meeting where everybody is invited. In doing so, you’ll help maintain high engagement levels. 

10. Plan for Long-Term Success

Effective action planning requires you to have an eye on the bigger picture. As your organization expands, it can be hard to maintain high engagement rates. However, you can offset any problems and guarantee long-term success by planning for continuity.

Along with continuous monitoring and optimization, make sure you’re exploring other engagement avenues other than pulse surveys. Eventually, you may find that key points of your engagement plan heavily correlate with business goals. Merging the two will ensure more consistent results.

Looking for an effective employee engagement calendar? Check out what activities you need to include in 2024.

FAQs

What are the benefits of creating an employee engagement plan?

With a robust plan in place, everyone from new hires to long-serving managers is encouraged to commit to employee engagement. What’s more, a plan provides you with one of the most useful ways of actually measuring employee engagement. 

What are the most common challenges?

Many businesses struggle to find the time and resources to commit to an action plan, while a lack of prioritization is another barrier. Other organizations make the mistake of assigning action planning to HR departments, failing to include managers and company leaders. Furthermore, a lack of communication can pose a problem.

Who is responsible for employee engagement action planning?

While action planning is a collective responsibility, everyone within an organization should be involved in the process. Managers, supervisors, and HR leaders all play important roles in action planning, but every employee needs to feel as though they have a voice in the process. 

Use Gloww to Deliver Employee Engagement 

An employee engagement action plan will only deliver desirable results if you’ve readied yourself with the right tools. With Gloww, you have a complete online meeting and engagement platform to increase your odds of success. Create tailored meetings in moments with a huge selection of ready-made themes. 

Want to fine-tune your sessions to target specific groups or business topics? Thanks to a user-friendly interface, customization couldn’t be simpler. Once you’ve engaged your employees, make sure they stay that way by making use of Gloww’s full suite of interactive features for team building and professional development. 

Looking for more HR topics? Here are some virtual employee appreciation ideas to get you started. Make sure to also check out our daily huddle ideas, as well as the learning and development tools you need in 2024.

If you’re ready to get going, you can get started with Gloww today. Interested in more advanced features? Take a look at our pricing tiers to learn ways this premium platform can help you achieve your goals. Got a question? Get in touch and our team will be happy to reply.