The 3 Levels of Employee Engagement: Move Your Workforce from Low to High Engagement

Are your employees performing at their best? Or are they just phoning it in?

If you don't know how to answer, it might be time to examine how engaged they are.

Employee engagement is one of the most critical drivers of productive organizations. It's a measure of how driven your people are to do their best work.

But what is employee engagement, exactly? And why does it matter? 

This article will discuss the three levels of employee engagement and how you can measure it within your company. We'll also explain how you can take action, moving your workforce from low to high engagement.

👩‍💼 What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is the level of connection someone has with their work.

It's about the extent to which they're committed and involved with their responsibilities and company.

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Engagement is the difference between someone just going through the motions and someone that gives a damn. 

Engaging work can be the reason why employees choose to work for your organization, other than the paycheck.

❗️ Why is it meaningful?

People who care about their work do better work.

When employees are engaged, they're passionate about their work and feel a sense of ownership in your company's success. Engaged employees are also more productive, creative, and loyal.

🎚️ What are the 3 levels of employee engagement?

While human beings are complex, and you can't always boil down an emotional state into a simple category, we can distinguish between 3 levels of employee engagement.

🤠 Actively engaged

Active engagement is the one type to strive for. 

A well-run, optimized organization would ideally have every single employee in this state.

If someone's actively engaged, they feel positively connected to their work. 

This doesn't necessarily mean they're an evangelist for your company, preaching its merits to anyone who'll listen. 

Some workers, though, like to express themselves by sharing their work in their outside network.

And it doesn't mean they'll stay late at the office each day, stressing themselves and overworking. 

It just means that when they're at work, actively engaged employees are happy to give it their all because they believe it's worth investing their effort in. 

They believe in the company's future and are happy to contribute. 

Plus, being actively engaged means they see their future in the company, presenting a lower turnover risk.

😐 Not engaged

Manager/HR: "So, how's work going?" 

Employee: "Meh. It's alright. Can't complain."  

This medium ground is where someone turns up to work and does their job. And that's about it.

Going through the motions would be one way of putting it; it's not that they're particularly dissatisfied with what they're doing.

There might not be any significant problems. But they aren't feeling that connection.

They're turning up each day for the paycheck and not much else. They don't get out of bed each morning excited about their work's impact on their team or the business.

They might not be thinking about leaving the company, but if another job opportunity came up, they'd definitely consider it.

😒 Actively disengaged

Actively disengaged is the zone of discomfort. 

Actively disengaged employees have a problem with their job: 

• They either don't care about it, or 
• They dislike it.

They do not believe in their team, management, role, organization, etc. 

Actively disengaged employees present some critical risks for your business:

• Retention risk: they'll probably want to leave soon);
• Performance risk: they'll put in the minimum possible effort in their responsibilities. 
• Cultural risk: their attitude might be contagious – negative energy can spread throughout a team, and they might even misbehave intentionally to sow discontent.

You don't want this sort of person on your team. 

Thankfully, a sensible plan can move employees from disengaged to actively engaged.

📈 How the levels of engagement are evolving

The business world is ever-changing, and the best ways to keep your employees engaged are evolving with the times, too. 

Here are three current ways in which organizations are changing their strategy to increase engagement.

1. Employer branding in the social age

With social networking becoming increasingly important in business, the staff themselves are driving their employer branding. And it's becoming equally as important as traditional branding.

This new discipline changes what we might consider active engagement, with brand evangelists taking it to the next level. They act as ambassadors for the company as well as highly-achieving employees.

You must have seen it for yourself on LinkedIn. You'll notice these thought leaders posting multimedia content throughout the week about their industry and the work they've been doing.

This "organic form" of employer branding can broaden the reach of your company brand and generate leads for new business. It can also improve your ability to recruit the best talent.

Of course, there's a flipside: it builds their personal brand, too. This can make them attractive to other companies, so don't be surprised if they get poached as a result.

2. Stronger focus on remote and hybrid engagement

Improving worker engagement is different when everyone's working remotely.

That lack of face-to-face time can impact people's ability to communicate honestly and build meaningful relationships.

Many businesses have worked on overcoming this challenge, and a range of new tech and cultural shifts have made it a more straightforward proposition.

Frequent video call check-ins, a renewed focus on well-being and mental health, and more ingenious ways to keep people connected are the focus points of many HR managers.

Apart from the psychological side of maintaining a connection with employees, there's also the practical aspect of employee enablement: providing employees with the tools and support network for doing their best work.

3. More empowerment of people

Those with an "internal locus of control" generally thrive when given autonomy. People who feel in control of their decisions will feel more satisfied with life.

Companies are beginning to recognize this need for self-direction and are structuring more autonomy into their employees' work in a bid to fire them up.

Intrapreneurship is one way to describe it: allowing employees to take the initiative and drive change from within rather than waiting for permission from management. 

It's about allowing people to be creative, experiment, and solve problems independently. And it's about trusting them to do their jobs without constant supervision. 

One obvious way of empowering workers is to let them change things up once in a while. 

One HBR report suggests job rotation programs to boost motivation and spark inspiration:

"[You should] offer employees the flexibility to try new work tasks to discover their intrinsic interests. Whether activities are intrinsically interesting likely depends on the individual employee. In other words, the same activity might spark intrinsic motivation for one employee but not for another.


To provide employees the opportunity to determine what sparks their intrinsic interest, consider a job rotation program in which employees move through several positions within a company in a relatively short period of time."

A change of routine, especially driven by employees, can offer a real boost and stop people from getting burnt out with repetitive work. It will also help them broaden their skillset and enhance their career mobility. 

What's not to like?

🔍 The 3 types of employee engagement

Employee engagement comes in many different flavors. 

First, we've looked at levels – a vertical stack concept that goes from bottom (worst) to top (best). 

But it's also vital to consider the types of engagement, a descriptive measurement of the different ways to engage people.

Spoiler: it's all about knowing, feeling, and doing.

🧠 Cognitive engagement

What do they know about their work?

This is the extent to which someone knows the purpose behind what they do. 

It's how well they understand the values and goals of the company and, therefore, what their contribution to the mission is.

With a high level of cognitive engagement, employees will focus and commit more to their jobs. 

They'll be able to get through challenging times because they know it's meaningful work for a worthy cause. It's what gets them out of bed in the morning.

🎭 Emotional engagement

How do they feel about work?

Emotional engagement is all about how someone feels about their work. Do your employees enjoy their jobs? 

Do they feel like they're part of a team? 

Are they appreciated?

Happiness is, of course, one of the most desirable feelings for someone to experience. But there's also satisfaction, fun, belonging, safety, peace, and freedom. Many of these you cannot target directly. However, you can still enhance them over time as part of healthy and well-functioning workplace culture.

The result? Emotionally engaged people channel their feelings into their work.

🏃‍♂️ Physical engagement

How do they do things at work?

Physical engagement is how someone's body language, health, and behaviors show that they're invested in their work.

Simply put, physically healthier people can put more energy into their work. 

Those who turn up every day with a spring in their step will usually perform better, both in cognitively-demanding work and more physically laborious work. They'll also inspire others around them to perform better, too.

Nurturing physical engagement is a shared responsibility. While employees must care for themselves throughout their general lifestyle, employers can also support them through employee assistance programs and health benefits.

📏 How do you measure employee engagement?

Measuring engagement is the first step to managing it. 

So you'll have to understand how everyone feels about their work before you develop your strategy to improve things.

There are a few different metrics for measuring employee engagement. One of the most useful is the eNPS – the Employee Net Promoter Score. eNPS helps gauge employee satisfaction through surveys.

It starts with a simple question: "How likely are you to recommend [your company] as a great place to work?" 

Employees answer on a numbered scale and are then placed in one of three categories:

• Promoters: highly motivated brand evangelists;
• ‍Passives: neutral, content employees that perform well but aren't super committed;
• ‍Detractors: unhappy workers that will not recommend you as an employer.

You can see the obvious similarities here, going from highly engaged to actively disengaged. 

eNPS surveys usually follow the first question with a more open-ended one that allows participants to expand on their answers. This way, you'll get a more rounded view of how people really feel.

Employee pulse surveys are another handy listening method. Pulse surveys are made up of short sets of questions sent out regularly through software tools.

Pulse surveys ask about job satisfaction, motivation levels, and whether employees feel they have the opportunity to improve their skills. 

As with eNPS surveys, they'll also ask an open-ended question or two to encourage employees to share their thoughts and feelings. 

Short and simple, pulse surveys should only take a few minutes at a time to answer, so participating isn't a massive burden on your staff. 

➡️ If you're looking for inspiration, try our free pulse survey template.

You can also implement recurring engagement surveys and include various questions focusing, for example, on workplace culture, job satisfaction, and meaningful work. 

➡️ Are you intrigued? Check out our sample 50 employee engagement survey questions.

Finally, another way to measure employee engagement is to look at retention rates.

Engaged employees are less likely to leave their job, and if more people than usual are leaving your company, it's a sign that something needs to change.

➡️ Go from engagement to enablement with Zavvy

The first step in this empowering cultural change is to understand the state of everyone's engagement. So you'll do well to employ the methods above to achieve this.

Once you've understood how everyone's feeling, it's time to take corrective action.

Don't fall into the trap of measuring just for having some numbers at hand but not using them in any way. 

While a team of highly-engaged employees is something to aspire to, we believe employee enablement is a more relevant goal in 2022. 

Enabling your employees means motivating them and providing the systems and structures that allow them to thrive at work.

Here is how Zavvy will help you drive changes that'll have a lasting impact on engaging and enabling your workforce:

✈️ Onboarding: Create outstanding experiences from day one. The most critical part of their journey is how you bring in new hires. First, you have to make them feel welcomed and part of a caring organization. Plus, you have to carefully manage their learning, bringing them up to speed as quickly and effectively as possible. All while providing engaging experiences and opportunities for connection.

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🌱 Development: Support people in their growth. Many workers will become bored and disengage without the opportunity to learn and face new challenges. Planning and tracking their development over time ensures everyone knows where they're at and where they're heading.

🔄 360 Feedback: Build an open feedback culture. Using a 360-degree feedback approach, your employees will gain a bigger-picture understanding of how they fit into the organization. It's a way of gaining feedback from every hierarchical direction (up, down, across, etc.) rather than just direct managers, and it helps avoid feedback bias and increase the accuracy of feedback.

👥 Connection: Create meaningful bonds between employees. If you increase people's feeling of belonging at work, they'll have better performance, well-being, and professional relationships. That connection with their peers also helps them feel connected with their actual work.

💪 Training: Implement efficient training methods. An extensive and robust employee training program is essential for getting the best out of your workers. If someone feels out of their depth or overly reliant on others to do their job, they won't connect with their work as much. Excellent performance relies on self-reliance, and you must train people properly to achieve that.

Are you craving a highly engaged workforce? Then, reach out to our specialists and find the best methods for your organization.
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Book a free 30 minutes demo.

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