This sponsored post is produced by TriNet. 

Can you prove the ROI of employee engagement? According to a Gallup survey, companies with world-class engagement have 3.9 times the earnings per share growth rate compared to their competitors with lower engagement. The challenge is planning a route to get employees engaged.

“Our research has shown that there are three buckets: the engaged group, the disengaged group and the people in the middle. Ideally, we want all employees to be engaged. The first step is to move the disengaged group to the middle bucket,” says Kelly Pacatte, senior human capital consultant at TriNet.

Here are some strategies to help move workers forward to become those coveted engaged employees.

Moving disengaged employees toward that middle bucket

There are four basic tips to follow:

  • Pay according to market value. It may be obvious but many executives don’t like to hear it -- and would rather offer training or other alternatives to increasing salaries. But paying accordingly is critical in moving disengaged employees up. Avoiding this reality will just translate into a different cost: employees who are disgruntled and underperform.
  • Limit organizational reductions in force. While hard to do, it’s impossible for employees to become engaged if they fear losing their jobs. It's important to recognize the power of instilling a sense of security so employees can focus on their jobs rather than being undermined by fear of a pink slip.
  • Manage organizational changes. If your company experiences market or leadership change, proactively communicate it to move disengaged workers into the middle. Employees need to feel that they matter enough for change to be managed with their welfare in mind.
  • Increase trust. Make sure all employees see the value in their company and believe in the brand. Executives must be visible and accountable. Transparency in an organization takes effort and time, but will result in employees who feel committed and engaged.
Remember: while paying accordingly is important, pay isn’t necessarily a motivating factor. It’s just baseline. Employee motivation is like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People need to be taken care of, have the supplies needed to do the job, know what their job is, and be paid accordingly. Once those baseline needs have been met, you can move employees to becoming truly engaged.

Does engagement strategy differ by company?

No matter the nature of its business, or the size of it, every company needs to deliver key components in order to have an engaged workforce:

  • Leadership that clearly communicates goals and where the organization is headed
  • Leadership that connects with employees
  • The jobs employees are doing must provide meaningful work
Implementation will vary by company, but those are factors that all companies require to increase engagement. Sometimes, that may mean increasing employee development or focusing on mentoring opportunities; the ways these are done differ by company and industry.

Which programs will accomplish these goals?

It's best to start with an employee engagement survey to determine what areas need work. The survey will provide a baseline for how engaged the workforce is. For best results, develop the survey with experts from a third party who understand what really motivates employees. In addition, if a third-party is on board, employees are more likely to respond because there’s no fear of retaliation. Frank and honest answers are critical.

Once you have the results, company management needs to realize you can’t change everything. The key is prioritizing. Develop a plan for areas that require immediate attention. If there’s something that can be changed and improved, work on a plan to accomplish it. If not -- and this is key -- explain why. It’s important for employees to know that action is taken regarding a survey. Maybe there was overwhelming feedback that more training is needed, but you don’t have the ability to do that right away. Senior leadership needs to let employees know they were heard. While leadership can’t work on a development strategy immediately, it will take specific steps to deliver on the request.

Action is important. If you’re going to conduct a survey, it's important to understand some changes do have to be made. Employees don’t want to spend time filling out a survey only to find nothing has changed.

After you implement changes, it's important to know if they had an impact. You'll want to measure if there's been an increase in revenue or productivity. Remember -- to evaluate effectively, it's best to take a baseline measurement before the survey and six months to a year later to see if those factors increased once any changes were implemented.

Engagement takes a long time. But if you are genuinely trying to increase employee engagement, you will get a return on your investment.

Learn more about TriNet by calling 888.874.6388 or go to TriNet.com/incredible.   It’s time to start achieving some incredible results of your own.

Kelly Pacatte is senior human capital consultant at TriNet.

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