Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel motivated and committed to your company. But in today’s organizations — especially in those with a frontline presence — employee engagement is too often overlooked.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace for 2024, just 23% of people are engaged at work. And organizations with low levels of employee engagement are more likely to experience the following:
- High employee turnover
- Reduced productivity
- Poor team performance
- Poor customer experience
For frontline leaders, engagement is a particular challenge. It can be hard to even reach, let alone engage, employees who spend their days traveling, out in the field, or working across multiple sites.
So what can a company do to motivate and inspire its workforce? As we’ll see in a moment, improving employee engagement requires a holistic approach — one that encompasses all areas of the employee experience.
Here, we look at employee engagement strategy — and the employee engagement best practices — that every company should adopt.
Employee engagement: understanding the challenge
Employee disengagement is a widespread issue in both desk-based and frontline businesses. Employee engagement scores are low because of:
- Poor internal communication. A lack of transparency and communication within a business leaves employees feeling disconnected from their teams and leaders. Internal communication suffers when leaders and managers are overworked, when internal comms are not made a priority, and when the right communication tools aren’t in place.
- Inadequate tech. Technology plays a significant role in employee engagement. You can use it to keep employees engaged, by giving them access to the tools and connection opportunities they need to succeed in their roles. You can also use it to measure employee engagement. A lack of adequate technology tends to be a bigger problem in frontline businesses because most tools are designed around desk-based teams.
- Leaders not leading by example. Employee engagement is the outcome of a positive employee experience. And positive employee experience is the responsibility of every leader and manager in your organization. 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager. So team leaders need training and support to understand their role in boosting engagement.
- Poor work-life balance. Stress is a huge issue in many industries. According to O.C. Tanner research, nearly a third of employees are living in survival mode. They’re on the verge of burnout with many of their basic needs unmet. When employees aren’t happy and healthy, they’re unlikely to be engaged in their work.
Employee engagement challenges in frontline organizations
Any business looking to get the most from its workforce has to stay up-to-date with employee engagement best practices. But for leaders in frontline organizations, the stakes are particularly high.
Frontline teams already experience a high rate of employee turnover. It’s fair to say that frontline employees are dissatisfied with their employee experience… and for several different reasons.
McKinsey’s EX Factor framework breaks this employee experience down into nine elements across three categories: social experience, work experience, and organization experience.
- Organization experience. Technology is arguably the biggest challenge to resolve in the frontline organization experience. Frontline workers waste significant amounts of time jumping from one not-fit-for-purpose platform to another, and logging in and out of multiple systems in a single shift. It’s no surprise that 52% of frontline workers say they’d leave their jobs because of the poor quality tech tools provided.
- Social experience. Frontline workers don’t spend much time at HQ, if any. And the nature of their work means they spend their days in different locations, often working in isolation. This makes it hard to maintain a sense of community and engagement, and it risks frontline employees feeling on the margins of your organization, particularly in comparison to their desk-based peers.
- Work experience. The frontline work experience can be less flexible and rewarding compared to desk-based employees. Few frontline employees are given development opportunities (despite wanting them) and many fail to get the recognition they deserve. On a more practical level, basic tasks like swapping shifts are inefficient at best — and impossible at worst.
Employee disengagement can have serious consequences in frontline sectors. It can lead to health and safety risks, poor customer care, and compliance issues, as well as employee dissatisfaction and churn.
So how can frontline businesses turn it around? Let’s dive into the employee engagement best practices that will help you improve the employee experience at your organization.
6 best practices for employee engagement in 2025
Employee engagement is a priority in high-performing businesses. These employee engagement best practices are ingrained in company culture and operations.
Five of the best practice recommendations we’ve included here are based on the 5 C’s of employee engagement:
- Care — show employees you care about their wellbeing as well as the company’s bottom line
- Connect — build relationships and foster a sense of togetherness
- Coach — guide your employees to be the best they can be
- Contribute — encourage employees to contribute their thoughts and ideas
- Congratulate — celebrate employees for the great work they do
We’ve also added a bonus best practice – analyze and optimize — as this is key to evaluating your performance and improving employee engagement going forward.
So, read on to discover how to implement the 5 C’s and adopt these best practices for employee engagement within your organization.
1. Care: create a supportive environment
When you show genuine care for your employees and their wellbeing, you foster loyalty and trust, and develop a positive work environment. This works wonders for your employee engagement metrics.
44% of employees experience a lot of stress at work. In supportive environments, employers know how to recognize and respond to stress and burnout in frontline workers. But they also do their best to prevent stress and burnout from occurring in the first place.
Supportive employers offer health and wellness programs, mental health support, and flexible work arrangements. They communicate empathetically and show employees that they value their work and input. Employees know who to turn to if they have a problem or need help.
In 2025, the way companies care for their employees is evolving. And digital tools are becoming a more important part of the picture.
With an employee app like Blink, you can send important communications straight to every worker’s smartphone. You can point them in the direction of health and wellbeing resources — and reinforce company culture with clear and consistent communication.
You also reduce employee stress by improving the digital employee experience.
Today’s employees expect their workplace tech solutions to be of the same quality as the tools they use in their personal lives. Using technology at work should be as simple as sending a direct message or scrolling a news feed for company announcements.
When workplace systems aren’t intuitive and familiar, it can add stress to the working day and cause employees to feel burdened and disengaged.
So by adopting a digital approach, companies can use technology to ensure all workers — including those who don’t sit at a desk all day — feel cared for and supported by the company.
2. Connect: foster meaningful relationships
Humans are naturally social. Neuroscientists have found that we crave social connection in the same way we crave food when we’re hungry.
The best workplaces satisfy this craving. They support employees to create a network of strong and meaningful workplace relationships.
Connections like these help employees feel like part of the company team. They bring business benefits too. Employees who feel that they belong within an organization are 5.3 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.
Other advantages? You improve team-building and collaboration. And employees are more connected to the wider aims of your organization, which makes it easier for you to get everyone pulling in the same direction.
Types of workplace connection
When adopting employee engagement best practices, you have to consider and facilitate two different types of connections within your workplace.
Employee–employee connection
What stops a worker from moving from one hospital to another? Or from one bus company to another? More often than not, a company’s values, culture, and sense of community play an important role in people choosing to stay — or to leave.
Dispersed workers need regular connection with their co-workers. They should be able to share their knowledge and connect with like-minded co-workers in workplace communities. Leaders need to provide tools that help team members from across the organization feel part of company culture.
Employee–leader connection
Meaningful relationships are built on two-way communication and they involve people from all levels of an organization. Employees should hear from their leaders and vice versa.
For dispersed teams, achieving open communication across the company hierarchy requires a tailored approach. You need to find tools that allow the conversation to continue, even when a worker is on the road or based over multiple sites.
Tools for employee connection
In today’s modern workplace, reaching frontline, hybrid, and office-based employees is easier when you have the right communication tools.
A modern intranet
The traditional company intranet doesn’t facilitate the type of communication the modern workforce wants and needs. But upgrade to a modern intranet and you move beyond top-down news and one-way conversations.
With a modern intranet, you can develop internal communication channels that support top-down, bottom-up, and peer-to-peer connections.
An employee app
A mobile-first employee app takes intranet features and puts them into the palm of every employee. It provides a user-friendly interface and integrations with lots of other workplace software.
An app is particularly useful for organizations with a frontline workforce. These employees rarely have access to a desktop device, which means they can’t send and receive important workplace communications.
If you’re still sending paper pay stubs, posting out a paper newsletter, or pinning notices to memo boards, then going mobile could be the best thing you do for employee engagement.
An all-in-one platform
Emails from leadership. WhatsApp messages from co-workers. A noticeboard crowded with posters. When employees have to look in lots of different places for company communications, things get confusing.
An all-in-one platform provides a range of communication channels, including private chat, a content hub, and a social-media-style news feed. These channels are available on desktop and mobile devices.
Pick a platform like Blink and you also get tools for employee recognition and feedback. You can even integrate the app with your other workplace tools, turning Blink into a digital front door for your organization.
With an all-in-one platform, you give employees the connection they need and streamline the communication process.
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3. Coach: invest in employee development
According to LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report:
- 7 in 10 people say learning improves their sense of connection to their organization
- 8 in 10 people say learning adds purpose to their work
This is why employee development is another of our employee engagement best practices.
Employee development makes staff more invested in their work and loyal to your organization. And it’s not just for office-based teams. Frontline employees want the chance to learn new skills and earn promotions, too.
70% of frontline workers surveyed by McKinsey said they had applied for career advancement opportunities. But the McKinsey survey also revealed that 65% of frontline employees were unaware or unsure of how to achieve advancement.
To keep employees engaged, companies have to provide equal access to learning and career opportunities, such as training courses or mentorship programs. Again, this may mean using digital tools.
Employee development case studies
Let’s take a look at two companies that are investing heavily in employee development for their frontline employees.
Amazon
Amazon is keeping a close eye on the future. Through courses and apprenticeships, the company is helping employees to develop technical expertise. New tech skills will benefit both employees and the company over the years to come.
But Amazon isn’t just offering L&D in areas closely linked to business goals. The company recently committed an incredible $1.2 billion to employee L&D. This fund covers all sorts of education.
Frontline employees can use it to pay for college tuition fees. They can use it to fund high school completion and English as a Second Language (ESL) certifications.
While these courses may not provide direct benefit to Amazon, the employee loyalty and engagement it fosters are well worth the investment.
McDonald’s
Employee L&D is fun and digital at McDonald’s. The company created a cash register training program that looked and felt like a computer game.
Learners had to respond to customer orders under timed conditions. They could use lifelines and win bonuses as they did their best to keep customers happy.
This gamification was successful. A high proportion of employees engaged in the training. McDonald’s reduced the time it took to serve each customer by 7.9 seconds and increased customer spend by an average of £18,000 per restaurant.
4. Contribute: make employee voices heard
Employees feel a greater sense of belonging and are more motivated to succeed when they’re empowered to contribute their ideas, skills, and expertise.
The company benefits, too. You avoid working in an echo chamber because you get to hear a wide variety of perspectives. You develop leadership skills among your workforce, which can help with succession planning. And you encourage employees to take greater ownership of their work and results.
A frontline business can encourage employee contributions by:
- Providing a dedicated platform for idea sharing. It’s not always easy for frontline workers to share their ideas. Dispersed shift work means they often have little access to office-based decision-makers. But you can use technology to recreate the ‘open door’ experience. With a dedicated employee voice platform, all staff can offer their contributions — and managers can give those valuable contributions the recognition they deserve.
- Seeking feedback from employees. Surveys are another great way to make employees feel heard. They’re an easy way for you to canvas employee opinion and discover the issues that matter most to your workforce. Regularly request employee feedback on topics like internal communications, employee satisfaction, and company culture to make meaningful improvements in these areas.
- Acting on employee input. However you receive employee input, be sure to act upon it. Employees only have faith in the process if they feel listened to. So keep employees in the loop. Tell them that you’ve received their contributions. Tell them what plan of action you’ve put in place, giving realistic timescales where possible. And once your plan has produced results, share these with employees, too.
5. Celebrate: recognize employee achievements
Recognizing and celebrating employee achievements is another of our employee engagement best practices.
Research from Gallup shows that well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to leave their roles within two years — and employees who get valuable feedback are five times as likely to be engaged as those who don’t.
The first thing businesses tend to think of when they hear the word ‘recognition’ is monetary reward. And of course, employees want to be paid fairly for the work that they do. You can use pay raises and financial bonuses to recognize a job well done.
But, in good news for budget-holders, monetary rewards aren’t the only way to recognize employee achievement. McKinsey found that up to 55% of employee engagement is driven by non-monetary recognition. A simple “thank you” goes a surprisingly long way.
Other employee appreciation ideas include fun benefits like a catered lunch, a day of volunteering, or an employee ‘wall of fame’.
To get the most out of non-monetary benefits:
- Get to know employee recognition preferences — and then tailor rewards to teams and individuals wherever possible
- Make it equal — all employees, whether they work in the office or on the frontline, should have equal opportunity for praise and reward
- Encourage peer-to-peer employee recognition — 75% of employees say that giving recognition makes them want to stay at their current organization longer, so encourage co-workers to highlight and celebrate each other
With Blink’s recognition feature, you can shout out employee successes, congratulate someone on a promotion, celebrate team milestones, and even wish your coworkers a happy birthday, all within the company newsfeed.
You can decide who sees your recognition post and have the option to create personalized messages, too.
6. Analyze and optimize: evaluate employee engagement performance
Once you’ve adopted the 5 C’s and associated employee engagement best practices, it’s time to analyze and optimize the process.
There are various metrics you can track to establish the success of your employee engagement program. These include statistics on employee retention, sick leave, satisfaction, and employee engagement tool usage. You can also gain insight from staff surveys.
If you’re to make good use of the available data, you have to clarify two things:
- Your metrics before you made changes to your employee engagement program
- Your employee engagement goals
Using this information, you can set targets. For example, you may decide that you want to improve your employee retention rate from 60% to 80% within the next quarter. Or that you plan to outshine your competitors by beating the industry average for staff satisfaction within the next year.
By setting goals and regularly analyzing your employee engagement metrics, you learn where you’re making progress. You can also make strategy changes based on insight, rather than anecdotal evidence or gut instinct.
The end result is an employee engagement program that is continually improving, better meeting the needs of your frontline team and your business.
This is another part of the employee engagement process that Blink can help with. Our app comes with powerful frontline analytics.
You get data on employee engagement, retention, and satisfaction. You can launch in-app surveys to find out how employees are feeling. And you can hone your communication style with insight into your most popular posts and topics.
Employee engagement best practices: key takeaways
extra thought and attention.
Finding ways to connect your team, offer training opportunities, get employee input, and show recognition can be tricky when your teams aren’t spending their days together in the same office environment.
But thinking about the 5 C’s can give you lots of employee engagement ideas. And when you incorporate the 5 C’s into your employee engagement best practice — and also take the time to analyze and optimize employee engagement — you can count on numerous benefits.
These include:
- Better employee retention
- Improved productivity
- Streamlined operations
- Improved employee and customer satisfaction
Go North West, a transport company in the north of England, used Blink to improve communication between office-based staff and drivers. The app drove employee engagement and moved the company lightyears from the office noticeboard full of old news they’d been using previously.
Take a look at the full Go North West case study here.
Employee engagement best practices FAQs
What are best practices in employee engagement?
Best practices in employee engagement include creating co-worker connections, giving employees a voice, recognizing employee efforts, investing in employee development, and prioritizing employee wellbeing. Other best practices include using data to inform your employee engagement strategy and using the right employee tech to facilitate all of the above.
What are the 5 C's of employee engagement?
The 5 C's of employee engagement are: care, connect, coach, contribute, and congratulate. When organizations prioritize these activities, they improve employee engagement.
You show employees that you care about their wellbeing. You help them to build relationships and foster a sense of togetherness. You encourage employees to contribute their thoughts and ideas and celebrate employees for the great work they do.
What factors improve employee engagement?
There are a number of factors that can improve employee engagement, such as open communication and feedback, recognizing employee achievements, providing engaging tech solutions for employees, and creating an inclusive culture.
Integrating these factors into your business processes will help you create a positive workplace that encourages employee engagement.
Discover how Care Synergy, a leading home health organization, transformed employee connection and engagement with the help of an employee app.
Discover how Care Synergy, a leading home health organization, transformed employee connection and engagement with the help of an employee app.