Employee experience, well-being and engagement – your guide to steps leaders can take to enable their employees to flourish.

The term “employee engagement” has been a staple of human resource practice for decades.

The concept is widely thought to have originated in a 1990 paper by Professor William Kahn, whose opening statement of the premise was:

People occupy roles at work; they are the occupants of the houses that roles provide… People can use varying degrees of their selves, physically, cognitively and emotionally in the roles they perform, even as they maintain the integrity of the boundaries between who they are and the roles they occupy. Presumably, the more people draw on their selves to perform their roles within those boundaries, the more stirring their performances and the more content they are with the fit of the costumes they don.

From that early beginning, the concept of employee engagement has grown and expanded. A current definition by the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) goes like this: “In academic research, employee engagement is usually a psychological state – a state of being that an individual is (or isn’t) in.  Definitions vary, but the most common is work engagement – an employee’s ‘vigour’ towards their work, dedication to their work, and absorption in their work.”

There’s been a lot of investment in the idea over the years. In 2002, Gallup launched its engagement survey, the Gallup Q12, which is now a major annual report (the 2024 version is here). In 2009, the UK government commissioned the Engaging for Success report, authored by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke. The report cited evidence of a positive correlation between an engaged workforce and improved performance, which is widely understood to mean better performance as a business. [Accor]ding to Quantum Workplace](https://www.quantumworkplace.com/future-of-work/what-is-employee-engagement-definition) (which sells employee engagement software): “Employees who feel connected to their organisation work harder, stay longer, and motivate others to do the same… research shows that 92% of business executives believe engaged employees perform better, boosting the success of their teams and the outcomes of their organisations.”

Little wonder then that the employee engagement market is projected to be worth US$803 million in 2024.

Scepticism about employee engagement

Not everyone, however, is convinced that measuring employee engagement is a useful exercise. Mark Crowley, leadership consultant, speaker and author, recently summed up the doubts in a Fast Company article. He says that while organisations say that they care about employee engagement, they don’t, in fact, take it seriously. He cites as evidence that while employee engagement has been a leadership preoccupation for years, there’s been no real progress made. In 2013, the Gallup State of the American Workplace study found that only 30% of U.S. workers were fully engaged in their jobs, Crowley says. In 2024, that figure is now 32%, hardly a big improvement.

How measuring employee engagement can go wrong:

The issues with employee engagement start with confusing it with other concepts. Culture Amp, which makes employee experience software, provides this primer:

• employee experience (EX) encapsulates what people encounter and observe throughout their stay at an organisation.

• employee engagement (EE) is the measure of the relationship between an employee and an organisation (one of the range of feelings that can result from the employee experience).

• employee well-being (EW) is the measure of an employee’s health, including their physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual states. It’s connected with the sustainability of employee engagement and is linked to whether employees maintain engagement over an extended period.

As the CIPD points out, this nuance and complexity can get lost if there’s a temptation to find a single metric that can be tracked over time. “When we take a broad measure of several concepts and add them up to make one measure, you don’t have any way to identify what is impacting what. This is particularly an issue with employee engagement when we know that so many of the interrelated topics, including motivation, satisfaction, well-being, and commitment to work, directly affect each other.”

The same desire for a single metric can be a distraction – tracking one thing can make leadership feel that they are doing something positive when they may be failing to address underlying issues.

In addition, Crowley points out that employees might only be surveyed once or twice a year, and results might take months to be distributed. If accountability for poor results is not assigned to specific people, then nothing will be done to improve things. In those circumstances, workers tend to view engagement surveys as meaningless and conclude that employers don’t care about them.

What leadership should be doing instead

Culture Amp notes that employee engagement and well-being can be affected by outside factors. An employee may have a stressful home life, or an engaged employee may love their job and be extremely engaged but then be disillusioned (and less engaged) if their company does something that conflicts with their personal values.

Their advice is to focus on what organisations do have a lot of control over, namely employee experience: “The objective facts of an employee’s experience include promotions, whether their manager asks about their weekend on Monday morning, whether their opinion is heard and taken into consideration during meetings, and more.”

Leadership can create engaged employees by starting with employee experience. They can address structural issues like pay scales and job security. Giving employees flexibility and control over their work schedules and providing opportunities for upskilling and mentoring are important, as are minimising pointless bureaucratic procedures (and cutting back on meetings).

Addressing employee well-being is more complex, but there are things that leadership can do. A 2023 Deloitte Insights survey of 1,274 US workers across a wide range of industries, regions, education, income levels, and demographics found that anyone who has responsibility for others can be a steward of well-being. “Their behaviours and interactions with their teams can set the tone for the team and the workplace culture.”

Survey respondents identified three areas as the most detrimental leadership behaviours to their well-being:

Micro- and undermanagement: Both were listed as pain points. Micro-management doesn’t build trust, and under-management leaves people feeling unsupported.

Recognition: Being recognised for their work and achievements was important across nearly all demographics and industries, and even more so for older employees.

Empathy and psychological safety: Empathy and psychological safety can be the building blocks of trust, which can be foundational to high-performing teams. The survey ranked a manager’s emotional intelligence and empathy as the most critical elements in fostering stronger ways of working in a hybrid environment.

Deloitte lists the following opportunities to help improve well-being through leadership development.

• Consider team well-being as a core competency to be embedded in leaders’ performance reviews.

• Encourage open, transparent conversations at all levels so that individual workers can share what they need with their managers and teams.

• Offer empathy and psychological safety training to help managers become better leaders. Emotional intelligence is not innate; it can be a learned skill.

• Think outside of the box when it comes to creating a culture of recognition at work. Recognition does not always have to be monetary. Small behaviours such as incorporating shout-outs at the start of meetings or encouraging managers to write gratitude notes to team members can make a big impact.

In the end, employee engagement and well-being can be enabled by focusing on what really matters to employees. Crowley says: “There are many ways workplace managers can actively help elevate employee well-being. But their first step should be to simply ask people how they can help them flourish at work. This one question is likely to identify many meaningful solutions.”