Employee engagement is a complex, challenging thing to influence.
There’s no single initiative, programme or perk that will suddenly make everyone more motivated and enthusiastic about their work.
Responsibility for creating an engaged workforce certainly doesn’t rest solely with the Learning & Development team.
But they can have a big influence.
There are some very practical areas where L&D can quickly help people feel more confident, more supported and more invested in their future with your organisation.
So, if you’re thinking about how your L&D strategy can support employee engagement, here are three areas worth focusing on.
Showing people you see their value and potential
People are more likely to feel engaged when they can see that their organisation is investing in their development.
But this doesn’t have to mean setting them up for promotion or changing their career path. Sometimes, it’s about giving people the opportunity to broaden their skills, take on new challenges and contribute in different ways.
For example, someone might develop coaching skills that allow them to support colleagues more effectively. Someone else might start framing important pieces of work as projects, and build invaluable project delivery skills to help, without moving into a named project management role.
These opportunities can give people something new to work towards and, importantly, demonstrate that their organisation sees potential in them.
This is particularly valuable when development is connected to real opportunities to use those skills. Learning becomes much more engaging when people can immediately see how it applies to their work and how it can help them make a difference.
L&D can therefore think beyond traditional career progression and ask…
“How can we help people expand what they’re capable of doing?”
Develop great managers – that people remember
It’s impossible to overstate the influence that managers and leaders have on the everyday experience of work.
For many employees, their manager is the person who impacts how supported they feel, how (and how often) they receive feedback and how comfortable they are raising concerns or asking for help.
In the scale of importance to employee engagement, that slots managers and leaders in right at the top.
The good news – this represents an impactful place to provide support. The right development programme helps managers build practical skills around areas such as feedback, performance management, communication, motivation and delegation.
There’s another benefit, too: consistency.
Developing managers around a common set of principles and expectations helps create a clearer standard for what good management looks like across the organisation. It also prevents employees having completely different experiences depending on who they report to.
It also creates a shared standard for what good management looks like – rather than leaving individual managers to develop their own approaches through trial and error.
For L&D, that makes management development about more than improving individual managers. It’s also an opportunity to influence the consistency of the employee experience across the organisation.
Build a working environment people want to stay in
Engagement is embedded in the people employees work alongside and the culture they experience every day.
People are more likely to feel engaged when they feel that they belong, that their contribution is valued and that they can work effectively with the people around them.
This is where development around inclusive teamwork and interpersonal skills can have a practical impact.
Teams don’t automatically become effective simply because talented people are placed together. They need to understand how to communicate with different people, navigate different perspectives, handle disagreements constructively and create an environment where everyone feels able to contribute.
An inclusive teamwork session, for example, can give people a chance to explore how assumptions, communication styles and different perspectives can affect peoples’ everyday working experiences.
The learning space is also a perfect place to introduce the idea of psychological safety, and what it means to create an environment in which everyone feels comfortable to share ideas, ask questions, admit mistakes and challenge thinking without fear of judgement.
These can sound like relatively small interventions, but their impact can be cumulative and powerful.
When people communicate a little better, listen a little more carefully and feel more comfortable contributing, the everyday experience of work can change. Over time, those behaviours help shape the culture people experience across the organisation.
What’s the common thread?
Engagement isn’t something L&D can solve on its own.
Workload, reward, organisational culture, job design and many other factors all play their part. But that doesn’t mean L&D is powerless to influence it.
The right development strategy can give people more reasons to feel capable, supported, valued and positive about their future with your organisation.
It can give employees opportunities to learn and grow, give managers the skills to support their teams effectively, and help create stronger, more inclusive working relationships. And those are all key ingredients in an engaged workforce.
So rather than asking “What can L&D do about employee engagement?”, it may be more useful to ask:
“What can we help people do, feel and experience differently?”
That question can open up some much more practical opportunities for L&D to make a difference.
If you’re looking at how learning and development could support motivation, performance and retention in your organisation, we’d love to arrange an informal, exploratory conversation about your needs.