Managers drive 70% of the variance in employee engagement at the team level. An employee’s experience at your organization is deeply influenced by their manager, with nearly half of employees who leave a job saying they left because of their manager.
Don’t treat this as a frightening statistic; treat it as an opportunity. With such massive influence on employee engagement, managers are the frontline of your strategy. With the right guidance and the right support, they can completely transform the employee experience across your organization.
You’ll see their impact in all things. Productivity will increase, you’ll retain more top performers, and you’ll build a healthier company culture. Here’s how.
Key Takeaways:
- Manager and employee engagement are inseparable. Managers directly shape how employees experience their work.
- The impact of employee engagement extends beyond morale to productivity, retention, and profitability.
- The most powerful drivers of employee engagement — clarity, recognition, growth, trust, and purpose — sit within a manager’s control.
- Managers influence engagement weekly through consistent 1:1s, feedback, coaching, and workload management.
- Tools like 15Five Engage enable managers to measure and act on engagement data in real time, strengthening workforce engagement at scale.
Understanding the manager’s role in employee engagement
A highly engaged employee is motivated, proactive, and believes in your mission. They see purpose in their work, find opportunities to collaborate with their peers, and contribute new ideas when faced with problems. A disengaged employee doesn’t have the same kind of motivation. They’re more likely to miss work, less likely to contribute to challenging projects, and might even struggle to meet their responsibilities.
Organizations use employee engagement as a metric to measure the impact of organizational changes, the effectiveness of their culture, and more. They also launch initiatives to improve engagement, which often passes through managers. Because managers spend more time with their employees than HR and leaders do, they’re often the best people to pick up on low engagement, find ways to keep employees engaged, and fine-tune engagement strategies for each employee.
Employee engagement has an impact on everything that matters to your organization, like:
- Productivity: Engaged employees find more meaning in their day-to-day work, making them more productive.
- Profit per employee: More productive employees contribute to more productive projects, which improve the organization’s bottom line.
- Employee retention and turnover: Low engagement is one of the main factors causing employee turnover.
- Customer satisfaction: Highly-engaged employees in customer-facing roles create better customer experiences overall.
- Innovation and resilience: Engaged employees are more likely to innovate to solve complex problems and they’re more resilient to organizational changes.
The science behind manager influence on employee engagement
So why do managers have such a massive influence on employee engagement? Two reasons: psychology and environment.
The psychological mechanisms of employee engagement
Employee engagement depends on five key psychological mechanisms:
- Autonomy: Employees need the right level of autonomy to feel fully engaged at work. They need to know you trust them to do their work without being micromanaged or being left on their own if they need support.
- Recognition: When employees get recognition for their wins, they’re more likely to seek out more opportunities in the future.
- Growth: Employees get more engaged when they feel like they have a future with your organization, whether that’s in career growth or skill growth.
- Belonging: When employees feel welcome among their peers, they’re more likely to collaborate, innovate, and feel engaged.
- Psychological safety: Employees who know they can bring their full selves to work, share their opinions, and respectfully question leadership decisions will grow more engaged as they work.
Engagement starts with how employees feel at work, and managers play a key role in this.
How managers can control the five core drivers of employee engagement
The work environment you build can make highly-engaged employees disengaged and vice-versa. While a manager might not control every element of an employee’s work environment, they do control the five most important:
- Clear expectations: Few things are as frustrating for an employee as unclear expectations. If their role seems to change depending on the day (or who they work with), it’s harder for them to feel passionate about their work.
- Recognition and feedback: Managers set the rhythm for employee recognition and feedback within their teams. More recognition and more feedback help to increase engagement, with 80% of employees who say they received feedback in the past week being fully engaged.
- Growth and development: While managers might not control the rate at which their direct reports get promotions, they can help build plans for career growth, identify skill gaps, and recognize people’s growth as they stretch beyond their comfort zone.
- Trust and transparency: When employees trust their managers, they’re more motivated to work with them. That trust is built on transparency, or the expectation that managers will communicate openly with them in all things.
- Meaning and purpose: A manager might not be ultimately responsible for what employees find meaning in, but can help them discover what’s important to them and how that can tie into their role.
How managers can measure and improve employee engagement in real time
Go beyond annual surveys
In many organizations, annual employee engagement surveys are the only time engagement is measured. Not only does this approach not provide enough data to see how leadership decisions, organizational changes, and HR initiatives affect engagement, but they’re generally unpopular with employees. They’re long and rarely lead to visible follow-up.
Managers can help institute measures that better track engagement, including more frequent pulse surveys, weekly sentiment tracking, and 1-on-1 meetings.
Identify patterns and act quickly
When managers hear about the same issues from multiple employees, they might be detecting the beginning of a trend. If an organization supports them in reporting these trends—or gives them tools to compare team-level signals with broader engagement data—managers can essentially serve as an alarm system for engagement issues.
Not only that, but managers are often the most involved in addressing engagement issues. They can pause HR initiatives harming engagement, schedule additional feedback sessions for controversial organizational changes, and more.
Use technology to support continuous engagement
Having the right technology doesn’t just make tracking employee engagement more efficient; it gives managers more tools to make the best of their influence on engagement. That’s where an employee engagement platform like 15Five Engage comes in. With 15Five, managers can get:
- Real-time engagement insights.
- Built-in pulse surveys.
- Dashboards with employee engagement data.
- Next-step planning tools.
Want to see what 15Five can do for employee engagement? Learn more here.
Common mistakes that undermine manager and employee engagement
Treating engagement as HR’s responsibility
While HR might set the strategy for broader employee engagement, they’re not ultimately responsible for engagement at the employee level. Because managers have the most impact on employee engagement, they should see it as part of their responsibilities. They should absolutely expect support and guidance from HR, but not completely offload the role onto them.
Only addressing engagement during performance reviews
Managers address a wide range of issues in performance reviews, including employee engagement. In many teams, this is the only touchpoint allowing employees to express their perspective. When managers are responsible for improving engagement and reporting on low engagement, relying exclusively on these irregular reviews means they don’t have the data they need to meet that responsibility.
Confusing happiness with engagement
Employee engagement and happiness might seem similar on the surface. Happy employees are friendly, communicative, and collaborative. But they don’t necessarily get a sense of purpose from their work, innovate, or take the initiative when met with new challenges. Happiness is a mood. Employee engagement lies deeper.
Ignoring middle performers
In too many organizations, managers and HR concentrate their support at the extremes of the performance spectrum. High performers get conversations on career growth and succession planning while low performers get performance improvement plans (PIPs) to get them back on track. The people who fall somewhere in the middle? They’re monitored but rarely supported. That’s a surefire way to tank employee engagement until middle performers become low performers, creating a positive feedback loop that leads to more PIPs and turnover.
Failing to act on feedback
It’s one thing to know you should source feedback to improve employee engagement initiatives; it’s another to actually act on it. Every touchpoint you build into your employee engagement strategy (e.g., performance reviews, pulse surveys) should have a pre-determined plan for acting on the feedback you get.
Creating a weekly engagement rhythm as a manager
Managers who want to go beyond annual performance reviews and pulse surveys can build a weekly engagement practice into their teams, giving them everything they need to act on trends before they balloon into larger issues. Here’s a simple framework for doing this.
Monday: Clarify goals
Clear expectations are crucial for keeping employees engaged, and they should be revisited often. While many teams have quarterly or monthly meetings for doing this, managers can use a weekly check-in to get a more granular view of engagement week over week. Employees should have the opportunity to surface blockers and share their priorities, while managers keep an eye out for (and resolve) misalignment.
Mid-week: Recognition touchpoint
Employees who have their successes recognized will be more likely to pursue other opportunities to succeed. Managers can set up a quick, 15-minute meeting where they highlight success at a high-level; they should also give employees a chance to recognize their peers. Alternatively, you can use performance management tools like 15Five or chat apps to share this recognition without adding another meeting to everyone’s calendar.
End of the week: Reflection and feedback loop
Managers should invite their teams to reflect on the past week before they start getting ready for their weekend. They can voice their opinions on how Monday’s expectations translated into work throughout the week and share any feedback they have on the team’s work—and its impact on their own engagement levels. This gives managers rolling feedback and a ton of valuable data for gauging their own performance alongside broader engagement initiatives from HR.
Engagement as a weekly leadership practice
Employee engagement should go beyond the annual engagement survey, and managers have a significant impact on this. Engagement isn’t an HR program; it’s a company-wide priority that trickles down from leadership to managers. Because managers shape their team’s day-to-day, they can have a massive impact on employee engagement. A weekly commitment to employee engagement, through regular alignment sessions and feedback requests, gives managers the information they need to act and the levers they can pull to improve engagement.
Leadership directs the strategy, HR turns that strategy into initiatives, and managers put these initiatives into practice. But managers need support. They need help developing the right skills, guidance on aligning team-level priorities with organizational strategy, and the right tools.
Want to see how a tool like 15Five Engage can transform the way you handle employee engagement? Book a demo here.
