Models of Employee Engagement

The Deloitte Model

Engage employees by creating a culture where people are involved, respected, and challenged.

The premise of the Deloitte employee engagement model is to create a workplace that’s “irresistible” to workers somewhere they want to work every day.

The key to following this model, according to Deloitte, is culture. There are five core elements to this culture, each with its own accompanying actions.

As in Zinger’s model, the foundational element of engagement is work that employees find meaningful. Deloitte identifies four key elements that are necessary to help employees find meaning in their work:

• Autonomy: People thrive when given greater independence and control over their work. Give employees ownership in order to make their work more meaningful.
• Cultural hires: Academic accolades and impressive job histories won’t tell you whether or not someone will connect to your organization’s goals and purpose. Prioritize hires who fit your culture and are interested in the work itself.
• Small, empowered teams: Small teams encourage camaraderie, autonomy, and fast decision-making in a way that large teams simply can’t. Follow Jeff Bezos’s “two-pizza rule” to keep your team at the most productive size.
• Time for slacking: Employees who are run ragged are likely to face burnout. Create room for rest, whether it’s something like Google’s 20% rule (providing company-sponsored time for passion projects) or simply enforcing time off and providing personal days.

Hands-on management

Managers make or break an employee’s experience at your company. Align and empower management to engage your employees with these actions:

• Setting clear, transparent goals: The goals that managers set for teams and employees must be simple and regularly revisited. Otherwise, employees and managers can quickly become misaligned and frustrated. Consider a goal-setting process like objectives and key results (OKRs), championed by companies like Google and Intel.
• Coaching: Managers who work alongside their employees and provide regular feedback will likely see improvements in performance and engagement. Equip managers with the employee engagement tools and training they need to coach their teams.
• Investing in management development: Given the importance of managers to employee engagement, organizations should prioritize creating the best leaders possible. This starts by hiring the right managers. But don’t stop there; provide mentorship for first-time managers, and prioritize ongoing learning and development for management.
• Managing performance: Traditional performance reviews are too infrequent and formal to really help managers and employees develop. Rethink performance management to emphasize growth opportunity over “grades.”

Positive work environment

If you want employees to look forward to coming to the (virtual or physical) office every day, you need to create an environment where they feel comfortable, respected, and appreciated. To create this kind of workplace, you’ll need the following:

• A flexible, humanistic work environment: Your employees aren’t robots, and their personal lives don’t disappear at the office door. Respect the fact that your employees are human that they sometimes have bad days, too much on their plate, or work/life conflicts. Offer policies (such as working from home or flexible schedules) that allow people to work in the way that’s most productive for them.
• A culture of recognition: Develop a peer-to-peer recognition program to foster a culture that continually celebrates progress and accomplishments.
• An inclusive, diverse work environment: Create a culture where everyone feels more empowered to share their ideas, knowledge, and skills. Take steps to build a more inclusive workplace, and everyone will reap the rewards.

Trust in leadership

The final, critical element is leadership that is committed to their employees. This commitment breaks down into four factors:

• Mission and purpose: Leaders must clearly understand—and clearly communicate—the company’s purpose. Deloitte’s research shows that “mission-driven companies have 30 percent higher levels of innovation and 40 percent higher levels of retention, and they tend to be first or second in their market segment.”
• Continuous investment in people: Leaders must invest time and resources in their people. We already mentioned the importance of learning and development, but time is just as important. Executives in high engagement companies take the time to get to know individuals, offer feedback, and involve themselves in the life of the company.
• Transparency: Modern employees aren’t content to be a cog in the wheel. A culture of transparency helps employees feel involved in the company and fosters trust.
• Inspiration: Leaders set the tone for the organization. Their words, actions, and vision for the company drive employee morale.

Growth opportunities

Employees who stagnate at work lose the drive to do their job. Avoid this scenario by providing the following:

• Training and support on the job: Comprehensive employee onboarding processes, continual peer and managerial support, and adequate training are all essential to growth for both employees and the company.
• Facilitated talent mobility: Employees need to know their career is going somewhere with your company otherwise, they’ll likely look for opportunities with other employers to move forward. Emphasize internal hiring, and be transparent with employees about growth opportunities.
• High-impact learning culture: Give employees resources (an education stipend, for example) and cultural support to independently build their knowledge. Provide opportunities to learn from other teams, try new tasks, and build new skill sets.

Zinger Model of Employee Engagement

David Zinger, a well-known global management consultant, introduced the Zinger Model of Employee Engagement.

With over 25 years of experience in this field, Zinger’s work focuses on improving employee engagement by building meaningful workplace relationships.

The David Zinger model illustrates the modern workplace’s various features, including employee experience, motivation, and commitment. In addition, the Zinger model provides leaders with 14 critical strategies that have the potential to enhance the employee experience.

This model balances three inputs:

1. Organizational

Organizational input is the development of a culture where employee engagement is valued, prioritized and shared amongst all employees.

Recognition and appreciation are key aspects of this. At the top levels of management, support should be given, as well as investment in organizational resources and education, to increase engagement.

2. Leadership

Leadership input is the development of leaders who are themselves engaged.

Zinger’s model states that employees will not become engaged if their leaders are not, so this is a key step.

Leaders must engage authentically with their employees, paying close attention and working enthusiastically to develop their team’s strengths and helping them overcome weaknesses.

3. Individual

Individual input is the employee’s own engagement contributions.

Employees should work to focus on the positive aspects of engagement, channeling their energy in the correct direction while making space to include fun in their work life. Ownership of one’s own work and contributions to the organization are key factors here.

Zinger’s model posits that when those three inputs are developed, employee engagement will increase.

The Zinger engaged model is arranged like a pyramid, with the bottom four blocks representing the leveraging of employee strengths, making meaning in work, leveraging employee energy, and employee well being. The next level consists of three blocks that represent living in the moment, fostering a strong workplace community, and proper recognition of employee effort. The third level is two blocks, representing the path of career development and excelling at a performance. The final level, which is the culmination of all the levels below it, is the achievement of results.

Uniting the company

The second row of the pyramid builds upon the essentials to connect individuals with the larger organization. The key actions here are to build relationships, foster recognition, and master moments.

• Build relationships. We all know good teamwork is essential to achieving outcomes, but generic team-building and platitudes aren’t enough for engagement. Leaders need to create and encourage opportunities for employees to develop connections at work through in-person or virtual team building exercises. People who make friends at work are more than twice as likely to be engaged as those who don’t make friends.
• Foster recognition. This tactic doesn’t mean giving an occasional promotion or a good performance review; it means creating a culture where both employees and managers contribute positive employee recognition ideas to keep employee engagement high.
• Master moments. To be engaged, employees must be mentally and emotionally present in their work. Managers can facilitate this by using daily interactions to enhance connection, solicit input, and understand challenges. The point is to keep employees present by creating meaningful, useful touchpoints throughout the workday.

The necessities

The bottom of the Zinger pyramid focuses on the essentials that every human needs in order to do good work. The key actions at this stage are to enhance well-being, leverage strengths, make meaning, and enliven energy. Here are some employee engagement ideas that you should implement:

• Enhance well-being. Employees can’t do their best work if they’re sacrificing their physical and mental well-being for the job. Building a culture around psychological safety (not fearing harassment or discrimination), respectful managers, ample vacation time, and provisions for sick leave all improve employee engagement setting the stage for success.
• Enliven energy. The goal here is to seek to create a work environment where employees bring energy to their work and gain energy from their work. The first is largely tied to well-being. The second is up to managers. Regularly check in with employees to monitor energy levels. Then, look for patterns to identify barriers and energy drains.
• Make meaning. To stay engaged long-term, employees must find purpose in their work. In fact, 90% of people rank meaningful work as more important than the size of their paycheck. Leadership must help their employees understand the why behind their work how their role contributes to the larger company and its impact on the world to keep them motivated.
• Leverage strengths. Leadership must create an environment where employees can exercise and grow in their individual strengths. This fosters engagement and makes your organization stronger by enhancing the existing strengths of your workforce.

Boosting performance

The third pyramid row turns building blocks of individual and communal engagement into practical ways to reach results. The focus here is on tracking progress and maximizing performance.

• Maximize performance. Employees get frustrated when they feel like management blocks their ability to do their best work. Sometimes, this is in the form of processes and tools that create barriers for employees. Often, the problem is that management poorly communicates performance targets (if they communicate at all). To keep employees engaged, provide them with a goal and clear reasoning behind that objective.
• Mark progress. We all like recognition and success, but sometimes success is a long haul. To keep employees engaged, even between promotions and achieved goals, you must create a system for tracking and communicating progress. A focus on progression helps employees develop their skills and creates a sense of movement and purpose.

The AON Hewitt Model

Track the relationship between engagement drivers and business outcomes in order to create more holistic employee engagement strategies.

The Aon Hewitt employee engagement model brings business outcomes into the equation. It recognizes that employee engagement directly affects metrics across the organization from customer satisfaction to profits and beyond. The research makes this connection very clear, but it’s still too easy to get lost in the weeds of engagement initiatives and forget the big picture.

The Aon Hewitt model connects the dots between business targets and engagement drivers by adding a middleman: engagement outcomes. These are essentially goalposts to help leaders gauge the level of engagement.

There are three engagement outcomes, summed up in the catchy shorthand of “say, stay, and strive.” Each details a characteristic of the engaged employee:

• An engaged employee says positive things about the organization—be it to their coworkers, network, or customers.
• The employee also wants to stay with the company. They’re not just there for the paycheck—they feel loyal to the organization, connected to the people, and satisfied with the work.
• Last but not least, engaged employees strive to do their best work. They are motivated and inspired and tend to contribute above and beyond what’s required of them.

The foundational engagement drivers focus on core company infrastructure. These are core, make-or-break elements you need for engagement:

• Employees won’t engage with your company if you don’t provide for their basic needs. Job security, competitive compensation, safety, and a good work/life balance are essential to happy employees.
• Company practices, like communication, staffing, tools, and inclusion efforts, provide a great opportunity to support your employees. Evaluate and update these with a mind toward what is best for your people.
• Last but not least, the work itself must be tailored to drive engagement. Encourage collaboration and autonomy, and provide employees with mentally stimulating tasks.