Employee Engagement Trends: how to spot & adapt to them

The world is constantly changing. Your organisation is constantly changing. Two truths can be hard to come to terms with, but accepting that reality is crucial – as it means understanding that your employee engagement strategy can’t be static. 

Started or spurred on by the global pandemic, there’s been a seismic shift in the world of work. The rules are different, expectations have reformed – but not everything has changed. And trends come and go. So to know how to make sure you have engaged employees, you’ll need a two-pronged approach.

1. Find employee engagement ideas from trends outside of your organisation

Your company doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Whatever’s going on in the world to impact employee engagement, it’s likely to be affecting you too. So keeping your ear to the ground, and checking for those trends in your own employees’ feedback, is key. 

Employee engagement trends: current examples

• Changing employee preferences: Deloitte predicted one future direction could be ‘work as fashion’, where employers react to changing demands – like they are to flexible work now. 
• Perks are back on the agenda: Added benefits matter to employees, from bigger gestures, like generous parental leave, to making the work environment more appealing – bring back ping pong!
• Purpose & CSR really matters to staff: Another predicted direction is ‘purpose unleashed’, with the desire for meaningful work stronger than ever. People want to feel their work matters.
• Employee recognition needs a boost: According to research, employees have felt their efforts are less recognised since the pandemic – driving discontentment and disengagement.
• Professional development opportunities: After a couple of years ‘on pause’, the hunger for career growth is stronger than ever – and employees want their organisation to recognise this.

Use our employee engagement survey tool & see which trends to follow

These are just five examples of many… and adapting your entire engagement strategy to address them all simply isn’t possible. So how do you know which to pay attention to? This is where employee engagement software can help. It means you can listen out to what employees say, and identify where they’ve referenced any of these new trends. 

With an engagement survey, you get feedback on what’s driving happiness levels – and with our advanced language analysis, thousands of comments can be summarised in the top themes that crop up. That’s where you spot if topics like ‘rewards & recognition’ or ‘remote working’ come up a lot. 

2. Look at trends within your organisation for improving employee engagement

It’s easy to focus on what’s going on in the world. But don’t forget: your organisation will have its own tensions and troubles, and shifts and swings. Look at employee feedback with an open mind, and you’ll spot your own trends to track.  

How to identify key drivers of employee engagement

What do we mean by ‘engagement drivers’? We’re talking about the most important aspects of working life that either boost or drag down engagement. There is a handful that often gets referenced but, as we’ve discussed, your employees’ specific drivers of engagement may be different – as it even varies between different industries.  

Employee engagement tools can help you identify your specific drivers. And our platform – containing the best employee engagement software, in our opinion! – makes that easy. 

All it means is sending an engagement survey, looking at engagement levels in different groups, and looking at the automatically analysed language insights to spot drivers. Easy! 

Measure changing trends with our employee engagement platform

Once you’ve identified your engagement drivers, you can make an action plan. If you spot that everyone’s talking about a lack of workplace flexibility, review your policies. If ‘career progression’ comes up a lot, send out comms about your development process – whatever it is, then you repeat the process:

1. Send an employee engagement survey 
2. Review your scores, and identify reasons for lower scores in specific areas  
3. Adapt your engagement strategy accordingly 
4. Repeat the process in a few months, and spot any trends or changes 

The only ‘employee engagement best practices’ you really need to worry about is the importance of listening. From following wider global trends, to spotting changes within your own teams, it all comes back to one thing: employee feedback.

Use our employee engagement survey tool – for free!

Our Employee Feedback Platform covers a lot more than engagement – but we’re pretty proud of how we measure that too. Our engagement survey is based on industry expertise and extensive research – and proven to be linked to key business results, like NPS scores!

It’s also backed up by advanced language analysis tech. That means 1000s of employee comments can be summarised into common topics, so it’s easy to see what your team cares about. 

Want to try it? Sign up for free today, and investigate how our engagement survey could help you: