Employee engagement is the responsibility of leaders and managers. They are in charge of ensuring that employees know what work needs to be done, supporting and advocating for them when necessary, and explaining how their work connects to organizational success.

Employees make decisions and take actions every day that can affect the workforce and the organization. And the way leaders and managers treat employees and how employees treat one another affects their actions – thus place the organization at risk.

Without employee engagement, there is no team engagement, making it more difficult to improve organization outcomes. But nearly 85% of employees worldwide are still not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, despite effort from leaders and managers.

The greatest cause of a workplace engagement program's failure? It is largely because employee engagement is widely considered “an HR thing”. It is not owned by leaders, expected of managers, nor understood by front-line employees.

The apparent failure of employee engagement efforts is likely due to the way workplace employee engagement programs are executed. Some common mistakes –

TOO COMPLICATED

Leaders and managers make engagement metrics far too complicated by focusing on predictors that often are outside of managers' control and typically don't relate to meeting employees' core psychological needs at work.

INCORRECT METRICS

Leaders and managers use a low-bar "percent favorable" metric that inflates scores and creates blind spots, resulting in the appearance of high engagement without strong organization outcomes.

RELIANCE ON SURVEYS

Leaders and managers overuse pulse surveys to get immediate feedback and rarely take action on the results.

The result is that some organizations believe they have exhausted "engagement" as a performance lever before they truly explore its full potential to change and impact the organization. As such, leaders consistently experience low engagement, or they plateau and eventually decline.

To improve employee engagement, leaders and managers must be on the ground. They must project the ideals and characteristics that are tied to engagement drivers, such as being supportive, and providing a vision to the employees .

Engagement is a complex process and organizations must take time to fully develop it. Organizations must begin utilizing all the tools available to them in order to increase the engagement level of their employees.