Your employee engagement strategy shouldn’t focus solely on compensation and benefits

If employee engagement was a pie, compensation and benefits would just be a pinch of salt.

Company culture alignment, career investment, and professional development, on the other hand, would be the flour, butter, and sugar. After all, they’re the top three drivers of employee engagement, according to a recent report from ManpowerGroup’s talent solutions company, Right Management.

For employees, five major factors impact engagement: The report found company culture alignment (33.9%) has the most influence, while career investment (31.4%), professional development (20%), compensation and benefits (8.3%), and job logistics (6.4%) trail behind. While leaders also view culture alignment (32.4%) as most influential to engagement, they put compensation and benefits (21.2%) in second place.

While compensation and benefits are important, leaders may be overestimating how important it is to employees, according to Beth Linderbaum, SVP of delivery at Right Management. “What this data is telling us is we really have to look at other things, like how do you hire for fit? How do we support people’s careers and invest in their development?” she told HR Brew.

Linderbaum, and Karel van der Mandele, SVP of North America at Right Management, shared with HR Brew how people leaders can rethink employee engagement.

What needs changing. People pros should think of compensation and benefits as a “hygiene factor,” van der Mandele told HR Brew. Employees should be paid fairly, and be engaged in ways beyond compensation.

“Think instead about where do I invest in terms of making sure that people feel that we’re supporting their career, that we’re helping them build new skills, have new experiences, to actually keep feeding their appetite to learn?” van der Mandele said.

Rather than focusing solely on compensation and benefits, HR can focus more on culture alignment, starting as early as the interview process, Linderbaum said. She suggested giving candidates a realistic preview of the role and screening candidates for core values and competencies that align with the company’s.

“When you’re building [the] screening criteria for any job, you have to look at what does it take to be successful in this job, and in this organizational culture?” she said. “When you identify those things, then you can build both the interview questions and the assessment tools that map back to those key competencies and vet core values.”

Break the illusion. Not only is there a disconnect between managers and employees in terms of engagement drivers, but there’s also a misunderstanding around actual engagement levels, van der Mandele said. He described it as an “engagement illusion.” In another Right Management report from earlier this year, 83% of leaders reported having a fully engaged workforce; just 48% employees agreed.

When it comes to reengagement, van der Mandele suggested HR pros focus on employees at the midpoint of the average company tenure. New hires, he said, are typically excited and senior employees are often established, but those in between may feel like “middle children.”

“[A] middle child often feels a little bit overlooked…and those are the ones that actually have the lowest engagement scores,” van der Mandele said. “So, it’s really important for managers not to just look at an overall engagement number, but really to drill down into the different populations within the organization and focus their efforts accordingly.”

HR can also promote engagement, Linderbaum said, by helping to guide employees’ career trajectories. She said HR teams often have a talent management strategy, but not a “career management strategy.”

“All of this fits into what we believe is a one-size-fits-one approach to development…it really comes down to each individual and their career goals are different,” she said.