Effective employee engagement strategies separate thriving workforces from struggling ones. According to Gallup, organizations with highly engaged employees see multiple improvements:
18% higher productivity
23% higher profitability
78% lower absenteeism
21% less turnover
So, what do the most engaged organizations do differently?
In this article, we’ll share the employee engagement strategies behind companies known for award-winning cultures. Plus, how to implement them within your own team.
Key takeaways
Employee engagement has a measurable impact on productivity, profitability, retention, and customer loyalty.
The strongest engagement programs treat connection, onboarding, recognition, learning, flexibility, and well-being as deliberate investments rather than nice-to-haves.
Recognition matters more than most employers realize. Well-chosen rewards, such as extra PTO or monetary incentives, can boost workplace happiness and satisfaction.
Consistent measurement through eNPS, pulse surveys, voluntary turnover, and absenteeism turns good intentions into an actual feedback loop.
Why is it important to keep your employees engaged?
Productivity, profitability, absenteeism, and retention gains are just the start. Engagement compounds across the entire organization.
Highly-engaged teams see 10% higher customer loyalty and engagement than the least engaged teams. There’s also evidence that engagement drives innovation and helps attract job candidates.
In short, engaged employees build more competitive companies. They’re a moat that companies with disengaged workforces struggle to replicate.
6 strategies for improving employee engagement
Below are a few proven strategies for boosting employee engagement across every stage of the employee lifecycle.
1. Build a memorable onboarding experience
Companies with the happiest workforces prioritize engagement at every step of the lifecycle, starting with new team members' first day. BambooHR research found that 70% of new hires decide whether a job is the right fit within their first month, with 29% making that decision within the first week.
Eyewear retailer Warby Parker understands this. The company, which has earned multiple awards for being a top workplace, has a thoughtful onboarding process that includes:
A welcome packet with a copy of Jack Kerouac's novel “The Dharma Bums,” from which the name Warby Parker originated
A custom balloon at the new hire’s desk so team members can introduce themselves
An introduction at the all-hands meeting
C-suite involvement in new hire onboarding
Warby Parker’s unique twist on the standard onboarding process allows the company’s culture to shine through and signal to new hires that they are valued.
2. Prioritize peer connection and culture-building
Engagement doesn't happen in a vacuum. Employees who feel genuinely connected to their colleagues are more invested in their work. According to Gallup research, employees who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged.
Building relationships at work can be hard, so create structured opportunities for connection to intentionally foster this kind of culture.
Offsites
Getting distributed teams in the same room, even once or twice a year, can do more for connection than months of Zoom calls. According to one report, 57% of fully remote companies say offsites are essential to success.
Offsites have become a cornerstone of culture-building for remote and hybrid teams, with companies increasingly treating them as a deliberate investment rather than a perk. Use them to build alignment, celebrate wins, and give employees the face time that remote work doesn't naturally provide.
Bonding events
Don’t wait for an annual retreat to build connection. Regular low-lift events (virtual trivia, happy hours, cooking classes, game nights) keep relationships warm between bigger gatherings. These work for remote and in-person teams alike, and they signal that the company values people beyond their output.
Competitions and hackathons
Hackathons, innovation challenges, and team competitions all work the same way: they create shared energy, build relationships across org chart lines, and drive innovation. Slack has run company-wide hackathons every year since 2016, generating 287 projects and counting.
These events promote cross-team collaboration and give employees a chance to flex their skills outside their day-to-day roles.
Interest-specific digital gathering spaces
Not everything needs to be a scheduled event. GitLab's public handbook documents dozens of employee-created Slack channels organized around shared interests (pets, hobbies, identity groups) as a deliberate belonging strategy for their fully remote team.
Encouraging employees to create and join these spaces gives them a place to connect over something other than work, which strengthens work relationships, too.
3. Create a formal employee recognition program
Rewarding your employees for their contributions really does boost engagement. And 82% of employees say recognition contributes to their happiness at work.
Some examples of recognition include:
Peer-to-peer recognition: Atlassian's Kudos program lets any employee recognize a colleague for living a company value, reinforcing culture at scale across a global, distributed workforce.
Incentive programs: Host an end-of-year award ceremony to recognize top performers or offer quarterly bonuses to motivate employees throughout the year.
More paid time off: Recognize your top performers with additional PTO. It’s the next best thing to money, according to Tremendous research.
4. Invest in learning and development
Learning opportunities are much more than a nice-to-have. In a recent survey, more than half of employees (59%) said they believe they're on their own when it comes to career development, and 25% are likely to quit within the next six months because their company doesn't offer growth opportunities.
Allianz Life, one of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to work for in 2026, promotes career growth among its employees through a well-thought-out L&D program that includes:
Tuition reimbursement
A global objective of 43 learning hours per employee
Personal career development plans
Investing in L&D pays off. According to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report, providing learning opportunities is the No. 1 retention strategy among modern organizations.
5. Offer flexibility
While return-to-office mandates have sparked debates over the effectiveness of remote work, the research is clear: employees value flexibility, with 49% saying they’d trade pay for it. On top of that, recent Gallup research shows that on-site employees with no remote options have the lowest engagement.
Just how you offer flexibility as an employer can vary widely. Deltek, a company that's consistently named a top place to work, credits this honor partly to the flexibility it offers its employees:
Remote and hybrid work options
The freedom to take a half-day every other Friday
Volunteer time off (VTO)
Not every role can be fully remote, but nearly every employee can enjoy some flexibility, whether that's choosing their work hours or having certain days off. Some employers provide remote work stipends to help employees set up a home office or join a coworking space.
6. Provide support for employee well-being
Companies with the most engaged employees support their staff's physical, mental, and financial well-being. Hilton, which boasts a 93% engagement rate, launched Thrive at Hilton, offering financial literacy webinars, free mental health counseling, and access to caregiving resources. The company also has its DailyPay initiative, which lets employees access their earnings early if they need to.
Regions Bank also gets this right with its Well app, which gives employees personalized health tips and rewards them with gift cards when they've earned enough points.
How to measure employee engagement
Before you can judge whether your engagement strategies are working, you need a baseline to compare against. These four metrics give you a clear, ongoing picture of where your workforce stands.
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
eNPS measures how likely employees are to recommend your company as a place to work. The core question is simple: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend working here?"
Respondents fall into three buckets: Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), or Detractors (0-6). Your eNPS is the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors. A positive score is good; above 20 is strong.
Because eNPS is a single question, it's easy to run frequently and track over time. Use it as a quick temperature check between more comprehensive surveys.
Pulse surveys
Pulse surveys are short, frequent check-ins (typically monthly or quarterly) that should take employees under 5 minutes to complete. Unlike annual engagement surveys, they catch shifts in sentiment in real time, so you're not waiting a year to find out morale dropped after a policy change.
Instead of asking a vague question like, "Do you feel engaged at work?", target more specific factors that influence engagement. For example, Buffer asks whether employees have energy left for friends and family after work to measure burnout.
Whatever you learn, act on it. Publish anonymized results to your teams and spell out the changes you're making in response to the feedback.
Voluntary turnover rate
Voluntary turnover rate is the percentage of employees who choose to leave, as opposed to those who are laid off or let go. It's a lagging indicator, meaning by the time it rises, disengagement has likely been building for months.
Still, it's worth monitoring closely. A spike in voluntary departures from a specific team or tenure group often points to a fixable issue: a difficult manager, a lack of growth, or a compensation gap.
Absenteeism rate
Absenteeism rate measures the percentage of scheduled work time lost to unplanned absences, like illness and personal emergencies. Absenteeism can spike when employees are burned out or simply less motivated to come to work.
Elevated absenteeism can surface disengagement before it becomes turnover. Track it at the team level, not just company-wide, so patterns don't get buried in the aggregate.
The key to building an engaged workforce
There's no single fix for employee engagement. The companies in this article stand out because they treat connection, onboarding, recognition, learning, flexibility, and well-being as deliberate investments, not just nice-to-have perks.
Identify where your organization has the most room to grow, test different strategies, and measure the impact. Small, consistent changes are the key to improving engagement over time.
