Boosting Employee Engagement with Axios HR's Shannon Burkel

As the labor market continues to evolve in 2024, organizations continue to grapple with shifts in remote work policies, work-life balance, and employee expectations. In almost every industry, business leaders are working to reimagine strategies for attracting, retaining, and developing talent.

We spoke with our Chief Client Officer, Shannon Burkel, to explore why she believes some thoughtful, intentional employee engagement strategies can help businesses and organizations isolate themselves by some of the post-pandemic issues that are affecting employee retention.

Why is employee engagement such a relevant topic at the beginning of 2024?

Burkel: I think that, in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of movement within the marketplace and a lot of employers have had some struggles as a result of that. And I think here's an opportunity right now to reset. So the pandemic was a really confusing time, and coming out of the pandemic has been a confusing time for job seekers and companies. And so I really see 2024 as being the reset year. And there's some things that organizations can do in the upcoming 12 months that really will set them apart from other organizations as they seek to attract, retain, and develop the talent that they need. 

How would you personally define ‘employee engagement’?

Burkel: I believe that it's a strategy. So to me, it's not really just culture. It's not a check the box type of thing that a team is working through. It needs to be part of your overall strategy. So often businesses will develop an entire people strategy and it includes all the different components of employee engagement. And a few of those could be quarterly conversations with a manager and the employee. Maybe it means volunteer opportunities out in the community that the organization coordinates. It could be just fun office days.

One effective tool is asking employees for feedback on a quarterly basis. So taking the pulse of how things are going, taking their feedback seriously, and developing their feedback into action. So those are several components that I would see as a part of a people strategy. And the execution of your people strategy is just as important as your sales strategy, or your marketing strategy, or your growth strategy.

How have feedback systems and processes evolved to increase employee engagement?

Burkel: It was many years ago, probably 10 years ago, when I personally was really struggling with the annual employee review process. So I found that just really archaic and didn't work for job seekers and employees today. That old-school approach is just something that wasn’t going to work for us. I mean, think about it, you're waiting 12 months to receive feedback, whether it's positive or negative, and then you can't adjust. 

You build up to the pressure of this annual moment. It just all around isn't healthy for the company,  it's not healthy for the manager, and it's not healthy for the employee. So I was fortunate to uncover a company here that happens to be local and their focus was on just having frequent quarterly conversations with employees focusing on not just feedback and the things that maybe they need to improve on,  but also focus on their life, their integration 

with work, their development plan, and make those more quarterly conversations than large annual daunting moments that were often tied to compensation increases. And it's been a much healthier situation for our company and much healthier situation for some of our clients that adopted the same strategy. 

Do employee surveys play a part in this feedback strategy?

Burkel: Yeah, I kind of view that the same way too. Quarterly pulse surveys. There's companies who use a kind of archaic way of thinking about it. They would do annual surveys and ask all the employees their opinion and combine all the data and come out with an action plan. We did the same thing. We decided to approach it on a quarterly basis. We asked a couple key questions. Would you refer Axios HR to a friend or family member to work here? One out of 10 scale. And would you refer the services of Axios HR to a company, one out of 10 scale. And then we ask for what's something we could start doing or stop doing. And then we actually poll too for our owner of the quarter. So one, it's quarterly. So it's constantly getting people an opportunity to give feedback. And two, it takes five minutes. It's five questions. It's five minutes. You can do it right on your mobile device. You can do it from anywhere. And that's been super helpful. Because what's the point of stale one-year-old feedback from your employees? Why not get a ton of little feedback every couple months? That's much more valuable.

How does employee engagement relate to post-pandemic buzzwords like ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘The Great Recession’

Burkel: There's no doubt that quiet quitting and the Great Resignation affected employment, right? I mean, people were moving around in the marketplace, they were looking at new opportunities, and organizations were losing talent. So it definitely had an effect on it. 

But I just kind of think about it a little bit differently. I thinkif you have an employee engagement strategy and it's really part of your pillar plan to prioritize it,  then you can kind of start to isolate yourself from some of those things.

Now, you can't prevent it from never ever happening from your organization, but you definitely can isolate yourself if you create a company culture that emphasizes employee engagement., it's going to be really hard for an individual that's not engaged or going through a quiet quitting or having two jobs and not being transparent about it, they're not going to be able to hide. Because everyone else in the organization is so highly motivated and highly engaged, that hiding would become really challenging. So you can isolate yourself from becoming the cause of disengagement. 

What are some ways companies need to shift their thinking to increase employee engagement?

Burkel: To really have a successful employee engagement strategy, everyone has to buy in. I know that sounds really simple, but if you only have one or two people in the organization leading the charge and you don't have all of your executives bought in and all of your managers bought in, it's not going to be successful, right? It's kind of doomed from the very beginning. So full buy -in, full transparency, buy-in to every part of your people strategy is the starting point for the the success of the strategy. 

The companies that I've seen handle employee engagement really, really well, start with transparency. So if you're a company that's not very transparent, you don't communicate a lot, you're not sharing the why behind things, you're maybe not sharing any financials so people know how they're doing, that's not going to be a great company culture that can easily adapt employee engagement. 

That type of company is going to have to do some work before they can get to a people strategy. So I always say to companies, the best thing you can do is to be transparent, communicate often, up, down, all around the organization. Share financials, keep score, and that right there will engage an employee. And then you have a good base to actually start developing a full on employee engagement strategy.

Are there any resources you would suggest to measure employee engagement?

Burkel: How we measure it, and one that I recommend to a lot of our clients, is the Employee Net Promoter Score. So basically, as employees are filling out questions, they're selecting one out of 10 on various questions asked. And that will come up with an overall score. Now, you can't get caught up in what your score is. All you can focus on is if your score over time slowly increases. And then you can say, “Ok, this employee engagement strategy clearly has had some positive effect because our employee net promoter score continues to go up over time.” That is, to me,  one of the best indicators and the system we use here at Axios HR.

What are some of the high-level business cases for enacting an employee engagement strategy?

Burkel: A highly engaged workforce has increased productivity, right? I mean, I could end there.. But what does increased productivity do? It helps your organization grow and gain efficiencies. And so it's hard because each industry has different ways that they can measure productivity. But in our industry, for example, I would start to measure things like recruiting placements or activity. 

Those are the type of things that you can measure just to see if productivity is there. And often if productivity starts to go down in a certain area, to me the first thing I think of is, “Huh, these are good people. doing good work every single day, how come their productivity is going down?”

What I’ve often found in my experience is that a decrease in productivity would indicate them struggling as a team or something's going on. Their employee engagement might be suffering a little bit, and it's time to lean in and help everyone on that team figure out how to be really productive together. 

Another big business case is retention. That’s obviously a key thing that all HR people and all business owners are looking at. I think the key when you look at employee retention is that sometimes losing an employee is okay. It doesn't always have to be viewed as negative.

I know we're all striving for that 80% or that 90% Employer retention rate and that is important, but sometimes saying goodbye to someone isn't a bad thing. What if I have the most talented person, they've worked with a company for many many years, but their family has to move across the country and the job doesn't accommodate. That's a happy goodbye. 

So I think it's important when you look at your employer retention rate to kind of say: “What was employee retention that we could have controlled? Where do we need to have some lessons learned here because we lost a really talented person and it felt like it could have been under our control.” and compare that to what percentage of employee retention just might not be under our control.  I always say to segment it out that way and talk about the things you could have done to maybe prevent turnover that was within your control. 

Burkel: Yeah, I think the number one thing that you'll view is you'll start seeing them not come around a lot.

Maybe they come to a meeting, but not contribute to the meeting in their usual way. Because everyone typically wants their voice to be heard and everyone has opinions, no matter what you're meeting about. 

So it's usually in a meeting setting when you can really get tipped off to maybe someone not being happy or being a little bit disengaged because you're going to see them not contribute or maybe they have not been prepared in spaces they usually are. And then in some extreme cases, you might start seeing them miss some of the meetings. So meetings are a great space to gauge employee engagement. Because no one showed up on their first day of work already highly disengaged.

It’s more about the change, and saying to yourself “I should lean in. Something may be going on here. And I want to make sure that I understand why and see if it's something that we can resolve so that I can help this employee be more engaged.”

Burkel: I always think about it like this: I come to work and I spend, well, I won't say how many hours I spend at work, but one of the most important relationships I have is with my manager, right? That is who I made commitments to when I decided to join that organization. That is the number one person that I need to trust. It's the number one person that I need to be able to go to when things go a little sideways. And so number one, the relationship in general, the manager-employee relationship is so important. Absolutely. 

But two, a manager has to be equipped with the tools and the resources to be an effective manager. And a challenge that we've had over the last several years as a community is we have promoted great people, people that got stuff done during the pandemic. Loyal, loyal employees who showed up every day and did everything to keep the company going during the pandemic. And we promoted them into management roles. That's great. That's a great win for them. That's a great win for their families and the community. 

But what a lot of companies fail to do is give that new manager the tools, the resources, the coaching, the training that you need to be a successful manager. So if you want to move the needle on employee retention, one of the main components that should be in your people strategy is providing your managers all those tools and resources to be successful and coming up with a few different sub-strategies that help enhance that management-employee relationship. We all hear that people quit jobs for compensation or people quit jobs because they don't like flexibility or they don't like the benefits being offered by the company and that's true. 

But the number one reason that people leave companies is because they don't have the right manager relationship that they need. And they don't see that they're getting the right coaching and developing for their manager. So they start looking somewhere else where they can get the right coaching and training and development they need from a manager or a mentor. And so if I'm going to invest any dollars into my employee engagement strategy, it's going to be making the management team the best management team that they can be because that affects everyone in the organization.

How would you recommend employers work through employee engagement with hybrid and remote employees?

Burkel: Yeah, there's a lot of conversation about that right now. And there's a lot of change in policies happening right now. First, I just want to talk about the company side. 

I'm going to give companies a little bit of empathy here because companies didn't spend a year strategically thinking through how to allow work from home opportunities. That's not what happened. And in big business and trends historically, when there's major changes in the workforce, they're well thought out decisions. This wasn't it. This was a pendulum swinging and saying  “We all have to work remotely.” 

So I will give companies some empathy that they were forced to do this. Not many of them had plans. There was some remote work before, but it wasn't at this type of high volume and level. And then now the pendulum is starting to swing back a little bit. And I get why. We went from one extreme to the other almost. And the answer to sometimes is somewhere in the middle, right? And every business is different, and every industry is different. So when I'm advising our small businesses about return to work, I just advise them that it doesn't need to be a rigid policy. It doesn't always have to be this detailed, scheduled out. 

Maybe your policy is more about just giving flexibility and a little bit more freedom and on a snowy day let's not all get in our cars and drive to work and put ourselves in danger or waste time or if you're not feeling well absolutely work from home. 

So, to me, some businesses are going to have to implement rigid policies, but most businesses can probably just come up with a generic basic policy and then really operate with more flexibility, trust in their employee base, empower them, and that right there could contribute to a really rich employee engagement environment. So I know that's not for everyone, but the more you can just be flexible with it, the better your all employees will probably receive it.