10 Employee Engagement Strategies for 2025

Rachel Gordon

November 1, 2024

6 min read

Employee engagement is vital to the success of your workplace and should not be underestimated. Engaged employees feel valued, have higher productivity rates and lower absenteeism. These employees are actively invested in the success of your business and remain positive and motivated to give their best everyday.

This article will define employee engagement, explore why it is important and provide you with 10 employee engagement strategies to utilise in 2025.

What is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement refers to an employees’ emotional investment in, and enthusiasm for, their work and workplace. It is a broad concept that encompasses many different aspects of an employee’s working life. The more engaged an employee, the higher their morale, productivity and investment in your business’ success.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2024 Report found that businesses with highly engaged employees greatly outperformed those with disengaged teams.

Those with highly engaged employees experienced:

78% decrease in absenteeism.
18% increase in sales productivity.
23% increase in profitability.

Employee engagement has an undeniable impact on the success of a business. As such, it is important to understand and recognise the different levels of employee engagement in order to identify areas for improvement.

Gallup identifies three levels of employee engagement:

Actively Engaged: These star employees are the backbone of your business. They are passionate about their work and are dedicated to you and your goals. They feel valued and appreciated and therefore motivated to work hard to help your business grow.

Actively engaged employees will:

Take the initiative and actively seek out new challenges.
Demonstrate positive behaviours to the rest of the team thereby inspiring others.
Feel comfortable expressing concerns and proposing solutions.

Not Engaged: These employees see your business in a relatively neutral way. Whilst they care about their work, they are unlikely to go above and beyond expectations and lack the motivation to seek out further opportunities or challenges.

Not engaged employees will:

Rarely do more than is required.
Show little interest in personal or professional development.
Keep concerns to themselves in order to ‘save face.’

Actively Disengaged: These employees are unhappy, unmotivated and unsatisfied. As such they are emotionally disconnected from their work and by extension your business. They are resentful and their negative attitude can be infectious, spreading discontent across the team.

Actively disengaged employees will:

Do the bare minimum.
Ensure that their discontent is known across the business.
Highlight concerns without proposing solutions.

Businesses can often overlook the corrosive potential of actively disengaged or not engaged employees. However, these employees can slowly erode your company culture, leading to issues such as high turnover, presenteeism and low morale.

Types of Employee Engagement

In 1990, psychologist William Kahn identified three principal aspects of employee engagement; cognitive, emotional and physical. Kahn argued that by engaging employees in these ways they feel supported in their role, like their work is worthwhile and that they are valued. These three aspects remain an important part of employee engagement theory today.

Cognitive Engagement

This refers to how an employee perceives their job and workplace. Cognitive engagement focuses on how an employee views their workplaces’ values, ethos and goals. A cognitively engaged employee will be onboard with your business’ goals and have a strong awareness of what they have to do in order to help achieve them.

Emotional Engagement

Physical Engagement

This refers to an employee’s physical and mental attitude towards their work. Physical engagement reflects the amount of physical and mental effort an employee is willing to expend. A physically engaged employee is physically and mentally enthusiastic about their work.

The Importance of Employee Engagement

Engaged employees are integral to your business’ growth and productivity. They are happier in the workplace and consistently go above and beyond to actualise your business’ goals. They are productive and take pride in their work and your business naturally benefits from this mindset. Simply put, employee engagement can make or break your business and so its importance cannot be overstated.

Benefits of high employee engagement include:

Greater job satisfaction.
Increased creativity.
Improved resilience.
Improved performance.
Increased productivity.
Higher retention rates.
Collaborative teamwork.
Decreased absenteeism.
Better customer service.
Higher profitability.

Looking to Learn More?

Our wide range of Business Essentials Courses covers the fundamentals that every business needs to be successful. Our courses such as Communication Skills and Leadership and Management will teach you the skills to foster a supportive work environment thereby improving employee engagement.

10 Employee Engagement Strategies

Your workplace cannot function without your employees and so it is vital that you get employee engagement right. An employee engagement strategy enables you to be deliberate about engaging your employees. A successful strategy will utilise a wide range of practices and should have a multi-pronged approach that encompasses practices across your entire business.

Here are 10 employee engagement strategies that you can implement in 2025:

Measure current engagement levels.

Before you can improve employee engagement, you need to know how engaged your employees actually are. Whilst there are recognisable traits of the different levels of employee engagement, it is important to get this information directly from your employees. You might think that your hard worker who always comes in on time is actively engaged, but a simple survey or informal 1-2-1 might reveal that they are not engaged at all and are biding their time till something better comes along.

Encourage employee feedback.

After gathering the necessary information from your employees, keep that channel open. Feedback isn’t a one way street and by asking your employees for their feedback you are showing that their opinion matters. This feedback could by gathered by using a 360 degree feedback template, an anonymous feedback box, or a monthly ‘town hall’; regardless of how you do it, listen to your employees, engage with their feedback sincerely and utilise what you learn to make a positive difference.

Foster clear communication.

Employees can often feel like their concerns won’t be heard or acted upon and so keep issues to themselves. This silence can quickly become resentment that spreads across your business. Encourage clear communication that lets your employees openly voice their concerns. Clear communication also ensures that your employees understand their role, what is expected of them and how that aligns with your business’ goals.

Provide opportunities for growth.

A clear path for professional development shows your employees that there is room for growth within your business and that their hard work will lead somewhere. By investing in their growth, your employees will feel like valued members of your business. Take the time to consider what training would be best for their individual professional and personal development with a training needs analysis. There can be serious consequences of a lack of training, so take the time to invest in training and by extension your employees’ future.

Recognise and appreciate accomplishments.

Recognition boosts self-esteem and feelings of personal competency. When your employees feel that their hard work is being noticed and appreciated, they are more willing to continue that hard work. Recognise your employees accomplishments with day-to-day ‘shoutouts’ or company-wide recognition schemes. However, not all of your employees will want to be recognised in the same way so diversify your recognition systems to ensure that appreciation remains genuine and meaningful to each employee.

Encourage a good work-life balance.

Juggling home life and work life is a universal struggle, however actively encouraging a good work-life balance shows your employees that you care about their personal well being both inside and outside of the office.

Encourage a good work-life balance by:

Setting realistic goals that reflect your employees’ workload and resources.
Offering flexible and remote working options so that your employees’ feel empowered to manage their own time.
Reminding your employees to take regular breaks throughout the day and to utilise their annual leave throughout the year to rest and recharge.

Provide incentives.

Motivate your employees to go above and beyond by rewarding their extra effort. Employee incentives encourage your employees to push themselves harder to reach a specific goal. This boosts morale when they achieve the goal and creates a sense of satisfaction at a job well done. Incentives can range from a one-off bonus to additional annual leave, however it is important to take the time to personalise the incentives where possible. If your sales team aren’t interested in rugby, tickets to Six Nations probably aren’t the best incentive for them to reach those quarterly targets.

Show respect.

Everyone wants to feel respected in the workplace and as a key driving force behind your business’ success, so too do your employees. A respectful workplace is a positive workplace and one in which your employees feel comfortable and confident presenting creative and innovative ideas. Show respect at all times, lead by example and create a culture of mutual respect amongst your employees.

Foster a sense of purpose.

When employees have a sense of purpose they feel that their work is important. Ensuring your employees have a ‘why’ enables them to find their work meaningful and clearly see how it supports your business’ goals. Creating a sense of shared purpose across your team further increases employee engagement as colleagues come together to work towards a common goal.

Set SMART goals.

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. If goals are too vague and unrealistic, then your employees can quickly become demotivated and therefore disengaged. Setting SMART goals fosters a growth mindset and helps your employees feel better prepared and capable to face future challenges. To learn more, read our article on how to write SMART goals for your employees.

Employee engagement is not a new concept and as working life continues to shift and adapt to modern needs, it only continues to grow in importance. By investing in employee engagement you are investing in your business’ future success. Your employees are one of your greatest assets and by proactively focusing on employee engagement you will improve morale, productivity and profitability.