5 Strategies for Increasing Employee Engagement in the Engineering Sector

Converting disengaged employees is one of the best long-term strategies an organisation can take for improving financial performance and productivity, whatever your sector.

Our latest Employee Satisfaction Benchmark bulletin shows that the UK engineering falls behind on employee engagement and satisfaction. As experienced employee research specialists we help organisations across all sectors transform low staff engagement.

Here are five strategies organisations can take to start improving engagement:

1. Measure employee engagement

An effective employee engagement strategy begins by finding out exactly how engaged your workers currently are. Professional, bespoke staff engagement surveys, such as our Employee Engagement Quality Analysis framework, provide organisations with an accurate baseline of workforce engagement levels to act as a benchmark to measure change by.

2. Regular employee surveys and communication of findings

If only conducted once in a blue moon, an employee engagement survey likely won’t yield significant results in order to move forward or garner trust. To bring about significant and meaningful change for the better, employee engagement surveys should be carried out at regular intervals to ensure adequate, relevant insights. It is also crucial in finding out what works for a particular organisation.

Engineering companies are often large corporations, with large, full-time workforces which respond well to regular in-depth surveys every six months, alongside shorter employee pulse surveys. Pulse questionnaires involve qualitative questions, which are particularly effective when measuring employee responses to improvement actions and identifying what is working and what isn’t.

To promote collaboration and foster trust, it is important to ensure survey processes are transparent and user-friendly.

3. Increase focus on engagement

This might sound obvious but improving engagement must start with company leaders. It is critical to take ownership to galvanise action from senior leaders and show workers that change is afoot. In addition to communicating your intention to improve employee engagement, managers need to make it a visible thread that runs right to the very heart of your company ethos and operations. Key steps include:

• Developing a strategic engagement plan supported by regular employee surveys to measure success.
• Being ‘present’ in the conversation — establishing channels by which to listen and respond to employee feedback, either via line managers or an engagement taskforce to demonstrate that staff engagement matters at the highest level.

4. Training and development opportunities

Our latest Employee Engagement Benchmark Report indicates that engineers desire more development opportunities, with ‘being encouraged to take on new challenges’ receiving the lowest employee satisfaction score (7.1/10) by Engineering workers.

Finding out what workers really want and developing individuall training and development plans helps drive motivation and engagement. Developing an employee’s skillset also helps them perform better and be more productive in their role, taking on tasks in progressive or managerial areas, which is mutually beneficial for both them, and your organisation as a whole.

5. Retain and attract the best performers

The Engineering sector in the UK faces a big challenge when it comes to recruiting talented people with the right skills. Identifying the engagement attributes that Engineering employees want — and ensuring that they are being met — help organisations to retain talented performers while also attracting new ones.

Top performers are attracted to companies with a strong track record for valuing and developing its people. Actively working to improve employee engagement, rather than making passive ‘our people are our best asset’ statements, will help secure a reputation as a good employer and attract a high calibre of candidates.

Find out more…

For more insights from our Employee Satisfaction Benchmark bulletin or to commission your own benchmarking report, visit tti-global-research.co.uk.