How to Increase Employee Engagement: A Step-by-Step Guide for Christian Leaders

A flourishing workplace with highly engaged employees provides a rewarding experience for workers, leaders, and everyone in the sphere of influence of the organization—including clients, customers, constituents, volunteers, and donors.

Leaders who prioritize workplace health value each person and display a commitment to their growth and development. Such a workplace models Christ to the world and has a strong mission impact.

The benefits of a healthy work environment include increased productivity and lower turnover, but a flourishing workplace doesn’t just happen. It takes intentional effort and continuous attention to achieve and maintain workplace health.

Best Christian Workplaces comes alongside Christian leaders to offer a step-by-step process of Discover, Build, and Grow for long-term flourishing.

Discover: Start with Assessment

Employee engagement isn’t just a fuzzy concept; it is measurable using a research-based survey. Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey is based on the FLOURISH Model that includes eight drivers that have been statistically validated to impact engagement. Your survey results will help you discover the way your employees are experiencing day-to-day life in your organization.

In addition to an overall employee engagement score, your Employee Engagement Survey results include details about how your organization rates on each of the levers that impact engagement. This helps you uncover barriers to engagement. Your challenges might be different from those of another organization, which is why specific measurement and action planning are most effective when you have data and a benchmark from your own employees.

If you ask AI how to improve employee engagement, you will get a reasonable list of helpful ideas. But how do you know which of these areas will be most impactful in your organization? It’s only through an assessment of your own workplace that you can discover a deeper understanding of the issues you need to address, and a road map on how to improve.

Build: Create Specific Action Steps

Your Employee Engagement Survey includes a debrief with your Best Christian Workplaces consultant. They serve as your personal advisor to understand the implications of your results and suggest areas of focus. They have years of experience in coaching leaders to implement positive changes in their workplaces.

We find that the most successful organizations pair their Employee Engagement Survey action steps with their annual planning cycle. This means that workplace health is front and center in annual goals, and not relegated to only human resources activities. Your human resources professionals can bring advice, ideas, and administer programs, but their work has the most impact when supported by an overarching strategy and with collaborative efforts of the entire leadership team.

A commitment to workplace health from the top leadership team signals the priority and sets the tone for the organization. Senior leaders own the organizational culture, priorities, and employee experience.

Once top leaders demonstrate their commitment to workplace health, it is essential to include middle managers and supervisors in planning action steps to positively impact their specific teams. This empowers managers to create a flourishing environment for day-to-day work. The everyday experience of front-line employees is most influenced by their immediate supervisor, so equipping supervisors and middle managers to positively impact employee engagement is an essential investment in workplace health. In addition to reducing turnover, a healthy work environment is more productive as employees bring their full energy to achieving the mission of the organization.

Implementing an annual cycle of assessment is important for ongoing health. New barriers to employee engagement can pop up at any time, and if you don’t regularly survey, then it can be hard to recognize and correct unhealthy situations. An annual survey enables you to assess the effectiveness of last year’s strategies, decide what efforts to continue, and commit to new areas of focus.

Grow: Work the Plan

Employee Engagement Survey reports and action plans are not documents that just sit on your computer server, but are lived out in day-to-day decisions and activities. A gym membership won’t automatically make you healthier unless you actually go to the gym and work out. Investing in an Employee Engagement Survey won’t automatically improve the health of your workplace, unless you use the results to build an action plan, and then work the plan at all levels of your organization.

Your actions to improve workplace health will vary, depending on which of the FLOURISH Factors showed the most risk in your assessment. But here are a few common next steps that regularly show a positive impact in many organizations that I work with:

• Communication: Communication affects virtually every other aspect of employee engagement. In more than 20 years of surveying hundreds of thousands of employees, Best Christian Workplaces research shows that communication itself is a critical driver of engagement, while it also has a powerful impact on all the other drivers of engagement. Above all, communication impacts the effectiveness and the perception of leadership. The core of healthy communication is dialogue that includes both listening and sharing information in all directions—up and down, and across teams. Employees are more engaged when their input is encouraged and listened to, and when they have access to information that smooths their everyday workflow and helps them see how their work impacts the overall mission of the organization.
• Training Supervisors and Managers: Top individual performers are often the ones who are promoted to supervisory or management roles. Their ability to be successful in a new and different role is contingent on getting appropriate training. People don’t automatically know how to have meaningful one-on-one conversations with their staff to encourage growth and development, or to correct performance issues. Managers need training in how to develop a strong team, and an understanding of how their team can interact effectively with other teams for an integrated approach to achieving organizational goals. An action plan that invests in training supervisors and managers pays off in increased employee engagement and productivity.

These two areas of focus are just examples of an action plan that can positively impact employee engagement. The key to seeing improvement in workplace health combines an understanding of engagement in your workplace and an intentional focus on best practices that have been proven to help organizations flourish.

The Hazards of an Unhealthy Workplace

It takes consistent effort to create and maintain a healthy workplace. So why put forth the effort? Does it matter?

In his book Road to Flourishing, Al Lopus, Co-founder and Board Chair of Best Christian Workplaces, described his experience during a presentation to the board of a Christian nonprofit that had a toxic work environment:

This was one of my first face-to-face situations where I felt deeply how real the data was. It was more than a set of numbers, more than a passel of charts, more than an executive summary of bullet points. It was real, flesh-and-blood people who were seriously suffering because of a bad workplace culture. To see that pain, dysfunction, ineffectiveness, and deception happening in an organization that carried the name of Christ made me angry. I was angrier when I recognized who the actual victims were. … It was the kids who lived in these group homes. … They needed the best help they could get. But that help was being stolen from them because once again they found themselves in a dysfunctional place.

Actively disengaged employees impact everyone in their sphere of influence. Their negativity infects their coworkers, who want to do their best job serving the mission of the organization. It impacts those they interact with—clients, customers, members, volunteers, and donors.

While people who care about the mission and vision of an organization may persevere for a time in an unhealthy workplace, it will wear them down, not just at work, but in their family and community relationships. Top performers will eventually find another place to invest their skills in a more positive work environment. People may say they are leaving for a variety of factors—such as pay or changing priorities—but a continually unhealthy environment will hasten the exit of the employees you most need to achieve your goals.

Perpetuating an unhealthy work environment displays a lack of responsible stewardship for the people God has entrusted to your care. The actions and attitudes of your work environment speak much more clearly than any framed values statement displayed in the hallway of your office.

Reflecting Christ in Your Workplace

There are a number of employee engagement assessment products available. What is distinct about Best Christian Workplaces is our core commitment to equip leaders to better reflect Christ in their workplace. Christian leaders can work with people in a way that brings more life to their work. Your employees can realize that they are part of a bigger story that is making a difference in the world. Life-Giving Work is the secret sauce for employee motivation.

Best Christian Workplaces is a ministry dedicated to helping Christian organizations and Christian-led businesses increase their Kingdom impact. Our vision is that Christian-led workplaces set the standard as the best, most effective places to work in the world.

Everything we do is motivated by the conviction that more flourishing workplaces will ultimately attract more people to Jesus. As a result, we work tirelessly to produce the most accurate data and effective implementation tools so your organization can reflect the light of Christ in and through your flourishing workplace.

Resources:

• Find out more about Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey and request a sample report.
• Read the State of the Christian Workforce 2025 Report to understand the research basis for employee engagement and see the common issues for various industry segments.
• Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being, By Al Lopus, Co-founder and Board Chair of Best Christian Workplaces, provides additional information on the FLOURISH Model and examples of ways that Christian leaders have improved workplace health so their organizations can have more mission impact.
• Read a case study of how one nonprofit incorporates an annual Employee Engagement Survey into their annual planning, resulting in increased capacity and lower burnout: Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission: When Staff Thrive, the Mission Thrives.