This fall, HR leaders from around the country came together to talk about employee engagement. Specifically, we discussed proven strategies to boost employee engagement without asking managers to do additional work. For those of you who weren’t able to join, here are our five key takeaways from the summit.

• But first, we need to address the basic safety needs of frontline staff.
  
  The statistics on burnout are sobering, yet shouldn’t come as a surprise: 70 percent of nurses report feeling burned out. 66 percent of non-physician clinicians experience at least one symptom of burnout. And 44 percent of physicians report feeling burned out.
  It’s difficult to increase staff engagement—let alone partner with frontline staff to drive engagement—if their basic safety needs aren’t being met. That’s why tackling burnout is a prerequisite to a successful engagement strategy.
  Next steps: Download our infographic to learn which cracks in the care environment leaders must repair to rebuild the foundation for a resilient workforce.
  A good first step is to audit your existing emotional support resources and make them “opt out” only. For example, Advocate Children’s Hospital created an emotional support bundle for frontline staff. This bundle provides multiple options to help frontline staff manage work-related stress—even when they don’t ask for help.
  Next steps: Learn more about how Advocate Children's embedded a variety of emotional support resources on the unit.

   

• Drive engagement from the bottom-up.
  
  Frontline staff are often viewed as being on the receiving end of engagement efforts. This is a missed opportunity to empower frontline staff to champion their own engagement. You can leverage employee-driven groups (EDGs) to inform and execute on parts of your engagement strategy. When well supported and scoped, EDGs can drive your engagement strategy and other business outcomes. For example, Northwell Health partners with BRIDGES, one of their Business Employee Resource Groups, to help achieve their primary strategic focus on care quality and health equity. Recognizing that language barriers often contribute to health care disparities, BRIDGES helped update Northwell’s website to make sure patients can search for their preferred language and that providers’ languages are up-to-date.
  Next steps: Learn more from organizations with highly effective employee resource groups

   

• Encourage managers to make daily microshifts, not action plans.
  
  Driving engagement doesn’t have to be death-by-action plan. Not only are action plans often poorly executed (if executed at all), they aren’t sustainable. The good news is: you can help your managers improve their teams’ engagement without adding more work to their plate. The secret is the "microshift"—a small change to one’s default approach to a common situation that yields big results over time. For example, if a manager wants to recognize staff, they might kick off the morning huddle with a shout out to a team member for a specific behavior or accomplishment instead of giving an operational update. Or, if a manager wants to support the career development of their staff, they might ask an individual on their team to own a piece of the agenda instead of leading the meeting themselves.

  Regardless of the situation, a microshift should:

  • Shift an existing management habit or approach in a way that supports engagement (e.g., improves communication, supports career development, provides recognition, etc.);
  • Take no more than five minutes to do;
  • Impact many members of the team when repeated over time.

  Next steps: Share our tool to help your managers plan a microshift that supports their team’s engagement

• Help senior leaders see missed opportunities to engage frontline staff.
  
  When we asked your peers what their senior leaders do to drive engagement, much of the conversation revolved around delivering engagement survey results, hosting annual awards banquets, or participating in monthly rounds. If we want senior leaders to truly be a force in driving staff engagement, then we need to think more expansively about where these meaningful staff interactions could occur—and what opportunities they might be overlooking.
  For example, senior leaders at one organization commit to keeping their phones away while in the hallway, elevator, or other public spaces where they might run into frontline staff. This simple switch encourages senior leaders to make eye contact and greet staff in passing.
  Next steps: Learn how executives from top-performing organizations differentiate themselves in driving engagement across the organization

   

• Embed engagement tactics into your existing strategic initiatives.
  
  Ask yourself: do we need a standalone engagement action plan, or can we embed engagement tactics into action plans for other strategic priorities? If we want to make engagement an ongoing commitment, we have to show leaders how common engagement tactics can help them tackle the priorities already on their plate. For example, if your Chief Financial Officer is focused on reducing costs, encourage him or her to use recognition tactics to spotlight teams that are successfully cutting costs (instead of creating a separate engagement action plan).
  Next steps: Learn how to create an integrated executive action plan across multiple strategic priorities.