Employee engagement is key to the success of the organization. This is why it is increasingly common to hear managers worry about improving this dimension. The first step to achieving this is to conduct an employee engagement survey to see the status of the teams and discover areas for improvement. And then? Well, surveys aren’t about showing how well (or poorly) your organization is doing. To make your strategies to boost employee engagement become true, you need to design a good action plan.
An effective action plan must be well thought out, precise, strategic, and flexible. Only then will we be able to achieve the goal of keeping employees engaged and with a high dose of loyalty, motivation, and performance rates.
But, a poor one results in dissatisfied, unmotivated, and frustrated employees who will end up going to other companies. Or worse, driving the fall of the entire organization.
So, if you want to develop an employee engagement and loyalty strategy… but you’re not very clear about what steps you have to take to draw up an action plan, you have come to the right place.
Through the next lines, we detail everything you need to take into account to go from data and ideas to actual facts.
What is an action plan?
An action plan is a document where we register all the initiatives that we are going to launch to achieve our goals o purposes.
For team leaders, it’s a roadmap that helps them focus on tasks, manage time and resources, and make better decisions that will have a positive impact on the organization as a whole.
Creating a work engagement improvement action plan helps managers to:
- Identify and understand what motivates employee loyalty.
- Establish the appropriate measures to respond to the feedback obtained.
- Keep alive the interest of employees in the continuous improvement processes of the organization.
In short, a good action plan implies great results. And this is how you can get it.
Building the Action Plan
Step 1: Analyze the results of your engagement survey
Analyzing the results involves deeping into the data to discover what is working and what is not, and what are the strengths and areas for improvement.
Comparing results on different dates will also help you contextualize the data and find patterns of behavior that make it easier for you to understand the scores.
Pay attention to the comments that employees leave you in the sections enabled for anonymous feedback since this is where you will be able to extract the greatest insights and the highest quality information.
And of course, don’t analyze the data by yourself. Two minds are better than one, so involve managers and team leaders as well: the time they spend with employees will provide a much more accurate view of results.
Step 2: Choose what you are going to focus on
This step, like the previous one, should be done in collaboration with all those responsible for talent management, including section managers, team leaders, and HR.
When these types of decisions are made in consensus, it is easier for everyone to row in one direction, which facilitates the achievement of objectives.
Don’t try to cover everything at once. Instead, decide between one or two areas of focus and focus all your resources and efforts there.
To make this task easier, you can ask yourself the following questions:
- What areas of improvement have a higher risk for work engagement?
- Are there any results that we can improve by making small adjustments? What areas had a low score? How much investment do they need to improve them?
- Can several areas be improved at the same time?
Once you have your priorities clear, set yourself some goals. These must be SMART :
- Specifics. The objectives must be very specific.
- Measurable. They have to be measurable to know if our goal is met or not.
- Achievable. The resources you have available must be able to serve to achieve the goal.
- Realistic. All goals must be able to be realized.
- Placed in a time. The objectives must be framed in a specific period of time.
For example, a SMART goal would be: Increase participation in Team Building activities by 3% for the next 6 months.
Step 3: Look for solutions
Once again, teamwork is essential. Organize regular meetings with both managers and representative members of your workforce and use brainstorming to find effective solutions that will lead you to improve employee engagement.
You may be in a hurry yet, this phase takes time. It is necessary to be very exhaustive since the success of our goals will depend on the solutions that we find.
Think about each of the goals you have set and answer the questions:
- What tasks will lead me to achieve that goal?
- What financial and material resources will I need?
- How long will it take?
- Do we need any knowledge or skills to be able to meet expectations?
Write down all the contributions and discuss them with your classmates until the brainstorming turns into solutions.
Step 4: Take action
Now that you have identified the best solutions, the moment of truth arrives: put the plan into action!
When it comes to taking action, all managers must commit and remain united putting into practice all the measures.
This is essential because otherwise, the plan will begin to crack down, making it impossible to achieve the objectives and throw away all the effort made in the previous phases.
As time goes by, progress must be assessed. Use the KPIs that you designed when setting SMART goals and find out if you are on the right track or if you need to make small calibrations.
Step 5: Share the progress
And last but not least, share your progress!
This is the most important step of all and yet many companies overlook it.
Making public the results of the surveys and the successes achieved is a very simple act and still tremendously powerful to keep the entire organization committed.
And to make sure progress continues, don’t forget to take your employees ‘ pulse. This will help you not only to find out how their engagement has evolved, but also to know how well your managers are doing in implementing the Action Plan.
And remember, employee engagement is a long-distance race. If you need help, you can start using Team Insights, it’s free!
