Employee engagement strategies: what actually drives engagement

Keeping members of staff engaged at work is tricky. It requires thought, perseverance, and a certain amount of trust. And it’s not just about throwing in the odd team-building event or away day occasionally, thinking that will suffice. What’s needed are employee engagement strategies. 

The strongest strategies focus on the conditions that workers experience on a day-to-day basis, such as the trust they have in their leaders, whether they feel supported by managers, if they have a say in decisions that affect them, and whether they understand how their work contributes to the organisation as a whole and can see opportunities to grow and develop.

On a positive note, the 2025 Good Work Index from the CIPD found that nearly half of employees regularly felt enthusiastic about or immersed in their work. However nearly a quarter experienced exhaustion and excessive pressure on a regular basis. Not surprisingly, the workers that experience more positive emotions at work were less likely to say they intend to leave and more likely to report going the extra mile. 

There is no universally agreed definition of employee engagement, according to the CIPD. It mainly concerns the relationship between people and their work, including motivation, positive feelings, and the willingness to put in the effort. High quality roles and effective people management are central.

The most important drivers of employee engagement are:

• Trust in leadership – people need to feel confident that leaders are credible, honest, and consistent.
• Good line management – the relationship with a direct manager greatly influences the everyday experience of work. 
• Meaning and contribution – employees need to understand why their work matters and how it relates to organisational goals.
• Growth and career development – people are more likely to engage when they can see opportunities to learn and progress, such as structured development programmes, mentoring, coaching, skills training, or clear career pathways. A strong talent pipeline supports this by helping organisations to identify and develop people with the skills they’ll need in the future.
• Employee voice – engagement requires people to feel that their views are being heard and could potentially influence decisions.
• Manageable workloads and wellbeing support – sustained pressure makes it difficult to maintain energy and enthusiasm.
• Recognition and fairness – people need to know that their contribution is being noticed and that they are being treated fairly.

All of these drivers reinforce one another. So, a company might have excellent development opportunities, but if employees don’t trust their manager those career pathways will probably have little impact on engagement. 

Many of these drivers come together within the line management space, so the role of managers deserves particular attention. Back to the CIPD’s Good Work Index in 2025 again, which found employee engagement improvements in a range of positive manager behaviour:

• 81% of employees said their manager respected them.
• 79% said their manager treated them fairly.
• 79% said their manager was supportive when they had a problem.

But only 65% said they could rely on their manager to keep their promises. Employee engagement can be damaged when the person that employees interact with every day isn’t equipped, supported, or given the time to manage people well. CIPD research revealed that only around 66% of managers received the correct training and time needed to manage staff effectively. 

For business and HR leaders, that suggests that an important change in approach is needed – don’t just train managers on engagement, but give them the conditions to create it. 

The 5 Cs of employee engagement are Care, Connect, Coach, Contribute, and Congratulate, and they provide a useful framework for looking at how everyday behaviours support engagement.

• Care means showing genuine concern for the wellbeing, workload, and experience of employees while they’re at work. It’s not about solving every personal problem, but noticing when someone’s heading for burnout and creating the right environment to enable them to raise concerns.
• Connect is all about building meaningful relationships between employees, managers, teams, and the wider organisation. This becomes particularly important in hybrid and distributed workplaces, where relationships don’t always develop organically.
• Coach is giving workers regular feedback, support, and opportunities to develop, and shouldn’t just be reserved for annual reviews or for those employees who have been identified as future leaders.
• Contribute means helping employees to understand how their work makes a difference. People are more likely to put in that extra effort when they can see the connection between what they do every day and the company’s wider purpose.
• Congratulate employees and recognise good work and contributions – which doesn’t necessarily culminate in massive bonuses. A timely acknowledgement from a credible manager can work wonders as part of an employee engagement strategy.

The value of these 5 Cs is using them as a test of everyday management. If an organisation claims to value engagement, it’s up to the employees to evidence these behaviours in their working day.

When things become difficult, employee engagement can really be tested to the core. We’re talking about restructures, redundancies and offboarding, leadership changes, increased workloads, or organisational uncertainty, as these can reveal whether employees genuinely trust their employer. 

Research from Careerminds in the US found that 53% of workers who stayed after major change said their trust in the company had decreased following poor communication regarding redundancies. While this is US data, it provides a useful illustration of a wider issue – that employees judge organisational culture by what leaders do when circumstances are difficult, not just by what they do or say when everything’s going swimmingly.

Communication becomes an engagement strategy in its own right. During periods of change, employees want clarity about what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what it means for them. Silence creates uncertainty while inconsistent messages create suspicion, so Acas recommends having consultations as a two-way process, giving employees an opportunity to express their views, which helps to improve employee engagement and job satisfaction. 

Employee engagement can’t be separated from working conditions. An estimated 22.1 million working days were lost in 2024 / 2025 across the UK, according to Health and Safety Executive (HSE) figures, with 964,000 workers experiencing work-related stress, depression, or anxiety. Of course, that doesn’t mean that every case of work-related stress relates to disengagement, but it does show the scale of the working conditions that employers are asking people to operate within.

If your employee engagement strategies are just expecting employees to be more enthusiastic without looking at their workload, job design, management, or working conditions, you’re missing an important point.

Employee engagement surveys can be useful, but collecting feedback isn’t the same as actually listening. The danger here is creating a cycle where staff are repeatedly asked how they feel only to see little change happening, which then makes the next survey less credible. 

Previous CIPD research highlighted a gap between the data that organisations collect and the data they actually use. Employee engagement surveys are one of the most common ways in which organisations gather employee voice, but collecting information without a clear purpose can leave companies with large amounts of data yet little insight.

Therefore, effective employee engagement strategies need a clear loop:

• Ask → listen and understand → act → communicate what changed.

That final step is the one that matters. If action is taken, employees should know about it. If an employee raises an issue but the organisation can’t enact it, the employee should be given an explanation as to why. The goal isn’t to make every employee happy with every decision, but to demonstrate that their contribution has been heard and considered.

Measuring different areas informs leaders where engagement is strong, where it’s weak, and what is driving the difference. One overall engagement score isn’t enough, and further investigation needs to be carried out. For example, an organisation may have an apparently healthy engagement score, but one department may be suffering with a huge workload, or employees going through organisational change may feel disconnected from the leadership team.

A more useful engagement measurement approach combines:

Measure how employees feel, including questions around motivation, enthusiasm, pride in their work, advocacy, and a willingness to recommend the company.

Measure the conditions likely to influence engagement, such as:

• Trust in senior leadership and confidence in managers.
• Workload and wellbeing.
• Autonomy.
• Recognition.
• Development opportunities.
• Employee voice.
• Clarity of organisational purpose.
• Relationships with colleagues.

Look beyond the norm by comparing results by team, function, location, tenure, management level, or other meaningful employee groups.

Spotting trends is more useful than a snapshot survey. Look for persistent changes and identify what happened around the time that employee engagement shifted.

Not every engagement initiative will necessarily improve engagement. The problem often isn’t because the activity is poor, it’s that the organisation is using an activity to mask a deeper issue. 

• Pizzas delivered to the office won’t rebuild trust after a lack of leadership communication. 
• A wellbeing app won’t solve an unmanageable workload. 
• A recognition platform won’t compensate for a manager who never gives meaningful feedback. 
• A survey won’t boost engagement if workers are adamant that nothing will happen as a result.

That’s the difference between decoration and drivers. While decorative initiatives can still have value, such as social events, benefits, or recognition schemes to reinforce positive behaviour, they should be there to support the fundamentals rather than used as a substitute for them.

So ask yourself this about any new initiative – what underlying driver will this improve? If the answer isn’t obvious, reconsider the initiative.

The strongest employee engagement strategies are often found in the quiet or ordinary moments – a manager truly listening to a concern, an employee being trusted to make a decision, a leader explaining why a difficult change is happening, someone being given the chance to develop, or an employee seeing that their feedback led to positive action.

They also really matter during transition points – an employee joining the organisation, moving into a new role, experiencing a restructure, returning after a long absence, or leaving the business, as these form strong impressions about how the organisation treats its people, whatever stage they are at in the career lifecycle.

For an organisation providing career transition support, it’s particularly important. Engagement isn’t about keeping every employee in the same role forever, but creating an environment where staff can contribute, develop, and navigate change with confidence and trust.

It’s also reflected in client experience. Careerminds boasts a 99% client retention rate; a useful reminder that relationships are built through consistent delivery, not one-off gestures.

Before launching the next raft of employee engagement programmes, ask “what are we doing that makes it harder for people to engage, and what is happening in our organisation now that makes people want to give their best?”

Start with data-based evidence, finding out where trust, management, workload, development, employee voice, or purpose are breaking down. Then fix the conditions that are getting in the way.