According to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, only 20% of employees were engaged in 2025 — the lowest level since 2020 — costing an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. With rising turnover costs and evolving workforce expectations, organizations can no longer afford to treat engagement and retention as separate initiatives.
Engagement is the driver, and retention is the outcome. This guide covers definitions, the most common barriers, and 10 actionable strategies for HR professionals and operations leaders to improve employee engagement and retention, especially in shift-based industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, and energy.
1. Give Employees More Control Over Their Schedules
One of the fastest ways to elevate employee engagement and retention is by giving workers more control over their schedules. A rigid, top-down scheduling process can leave employees feeling powerless and burnt out. Lack of predictability leads to stress, missed obligations, and decreased loyalty.
Organizations should implement self-service employee scheduling tools that provide the following capabilities:
- Enable Shift Swapping: Shift swapping lets employees trade shifts with qualified peers in real time. This provides flexibility for personal emergencies without creating extra administrative work for managers.
- Automated Time-Off Bidding: Simplifies the vacation request process by using preset business rules (like seniority or first-come, first-served) to automatically approve or deny requests, ensuring fairness and transparency.
- Visibility into Upcoming Shifts: Provides employees with 24/7 mobile access to their schedules weeks in advance. This predictability allows them to plan their lives outside of work, significantly reducing burnout.
This approach is supported by Gartner’s Future of Work Trends data, which shows that flexibility now ranks as a top employee priority, outranking many traditional benefits.
One global food manufacturer using Indeavor’s intelligent scheduling reported reduced turnover, roughly 8% lower overtime, and measurable increases in employee engagement as a direct result of giving frontline workers more control over their own time. Indeavor’s scheduling solution enables real-time access to shift data, increasing both trust and accountability.
2. Build a Culture of Consistent, Two-Way Communication
Clear communication is foundational to employee retention and employee engagement. But for many hourly or frontline workers, communication is sporadic and one-directional. Frontline employees are often the last to receive updates and are rarely given a channel to share feedback.
Establish multiple workplace communication channels, including specialized employee communication software built directly into your workforce management system, shift-start huddles, and visual cues on the floor. Instead of relying on disconnected messaging methods, reinforcing communication within your existing operational tools ensures everyone stays on the same page.
The goal is to reduce the latency between who knows and who acts. Managers should proactively reach out, listen, and follow up on concerns. When employees feel heard, they’re more likely to stay invested in the organization’s mission and goals.
Feedback loops, not just top-down broadcasting, are what move the needle. Organizations that create structured mechanisms for frontline workers to raise concerns and see those concerns acted upon build the kind of trust that improves employee retention.
3. Recognize Performance Frequently and Meaningfully
Companies with strong employee recognition programs experience a 31% lower voluntary turnover rate, according to Deloitte. Recognition doesn’t need to be expensive or formal to be effective.
To ensure recognition reinforces purpose and shows employees that their efforts matter, consider these ways to recognize employees:
- Use Real-Time Dashboards: Publicly highlight top performers on floor monitors or digital dashboards to celebrate those who meet or exceed KPIs.
- Enable Peer-to-Peer Shoutouts: Create a culture where coworkers can nominate one another for help with a difficult shift or a job well done.
- Tie Recognition to Business Outcomes: Reward specific, measurable impact such as perfect attendance streaks, high safety compliance scores, or meeting quality metrics.
- Celebrate Small Wins: Don’t wait for annual reviews; acknowledge daily successes to keep morale high, especially for frontline workers who are often overlooked.
Making recognition a consistent part of your culture, not just a periodic event, significantly boosts employee engagement and retention while aligning HR operations with core business needs. When employees feel their contributions are seen, they are more likely to remain loyal and continue performing at a high level.
4. Invest in Career Development and Skills Growth
A lack of growth opportunities is one of the top reasons employees leave. Providing opportunities for development shows that you’re invested in their long-term success. This doesn’t always mean promotions. Development can include mentorship, cross-training, and certifications that build new skills.
With 84% of employees saying that learning adds a sense of purpose to their work, according to the LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, the importance of development as an employee engagement idea is clear.
Additionally, leveraging a digital skills-tracking platform helps leaders identify talent gaps to maintain an effective labor system. By centralizing credentials and certifications, organizations can proactively recommend development paths before an employee starts looking elsewhere.
5. Enforce Workforce Policies Consistently and Transparently
When it comes to scheduling, vacation approvals, or overtime limits, transparency is key. Employees want to know the rules and trust that they’re being applied fairly. Consistent policy enforcement builds trust and reduces resentment among teams.
Inconsistent policy application, where outcomes vary by manager or location, creates perceptions of favoritism that erode team morale over time. To solve this, organizations should move away from manual tracking and maintain a centralized hub for policy management.
By digitizing your workforce policies, you ensure consistency across every shift, location, and department. Indeavor’s platform allows employers to build complex policy rules right into the system. This automation eliminates the risk of human error or bias, ensuring that every employee is held to the same standard without confusion.
This helps create a culture of fairness, a key driver of employee engagement and retention. It also reduces administrative overhead and improves compliance outcomes for both HR leaders and frontline managers.
6. Invest in Manager Development
Manager quality is the single greatest driver of disengagement and turnover, according to a Gartner survey. Yet, it’s among the most underinvested areas in most organizations. To empower your frontline leaders, consider a development strategy that includes:
- Coaching Programs: Pair junior supervisors with experienced mentors to help them navigate complex personnel issues and operational hurdles.
- Constructive Feedback Seminars: Provide managers with the communication tools needed to deliver performance critiques that motivate rather than discourage.
- Structured 1:1 Cadences: Establish a regular schedule for private check-ins between managers and their reports to ensure alignment and address concerns early.
- Continuous Skills Training: Offer continuous training workshops on emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, and technical proficiency to keep leadership skills sharp.
Manager development is also about bandwidth. When managers are freed from administrative scheduling and compliance burdens with the use of autonomous tools like Indeavor, they can focus on what they were hired to do: develop their teams and keep operations running safely.
| “In high-stakes 24/7 operations across Food & Beverage, Manufacturing, Energy, and Government, supervisors are drowning. They were hired to supervise, to coach their teams, maintain safety, and keep production running. But they’re spending 10 to 15 hours a week on scheduling drama, taking call-offs at 4 AM, running backfill phone trees, tracking attendance, and dealing with administrative noise created by legacy systems, Excel, and paper. Indeavor gives them that time back.” — Brandon Schwarz, Indeavor CEO |
7. Prioritize Employee Well-being — Including Psychological Safety
According to Mercer Global Talent Trends, 82% of workers reported work-related stress in 2025. For frontline and shift-based employees, that stress is amplified by physical demands, irregular hours, and limited control over their environment. All of these can negatively impact employee retention.
Psychological safety, where employees feel safe to speak up without fear of retaliation, is foundational to engagement as a form of employee advocacy. Teams with high psychological safety flag problems early, collaborate more effectively, and stay invested in outcomes.
Forced overtime is also a significant driver of disengagement. Employees who feel overextended without choice disengage faster than almost any other workforce condition. Investing in a proactive fatigue management solution demonstrates a commitment to employee health by ensuring no single worker is pushed beyond safe limits.
8. Redesign Onboarding to Set Employees Up for Success
Over 70% of new hires decide within the first month whether their role is the right fit, and nearly two-thirds find it difficult to change their initial perceptions once formed, according to Forbes. A poor onboarding experience is one of the most preventable causes of early turnover.
Hourly employee engagement best practices include pairing new hires with experienced team members, structured first-week check-ins, and setting clear expectations around scheduling, attendance, and advancement from day one.
Implementing a digital onboarding experience gives new employees immediate access to schedules, policies, and training materials from their own devices. This removes day-one friction and signals to the new hire that the organization respects their time and is prepared for their arrival.
9. Use Data and Workforce Analytics to Identify Risk Early
Most organizations manage retention reactively, whether they’re facing manufacturing labor shortages or retaining employees in healthcare is a struggle. AI-powered workforce analytics tools are changing that equation, enabling organizations to spot early warning signs before they lead to resignations.
Attendance pattern shifts, overtime concentration, and scheduling instability are reliable leading indicators of disengagement. These signals are already available in most workforce management systems and employee retention tools; they just need to be surfaced and acted upon.
Indeavor’s Workforce Analytics solution gives HR and operations leaders visibility into these trends, helping identify issues so they can build employee engagement strategies before they lead to turnover. This moves organizations from reactive workforce management to proactive employee engagement programs.
10. Digitize Workforce Operations to Remove Daily Friction
Organizations that rely on spreadsheets, paper forms, or outdated tools are at a disadvantage. Manual processes create friction, errors, and delays that directly affect how valued employees feel. These outdated methods often result in scheduling conflicts, unapproved overtime, and poor visibility into labor coverage.
Digitizing operations signals investment in the workforce to create a positive work environment. A digital schedule means everyone has the same version the moment it’s created — no walking to a bulletin board, no shift conflicts from outdated information, no avoidable confusion at the start of a shift. Allowing you to improve company culture through scheduling.
Indeavor’s purpose-built platform for shift-based environments unifies scheduling, compliance, communication, skills management, and analytics to give every stakeholder, from HR to the frontline, what they need to succeed.
Common Barriers to Employee Engagement and Retention
Many organizations unknowingly create environments that work against employee engagement and retention. Before implementing strategies, leaders need to understand what’s actively driving employee turnover. These are the most common and most costly barriers, particularly in shift-based workforces:
- Inflexible Scheduling: Rigid schedules and forced overtime lead to burnout, absenteeism, and resentment. Employees with no control over when they work are more likely to feel undervalued and leave.
- Poor Communication: One-directional or inconsistent communication creates confusion and distrust. Without feedback loops, disengagement spreads quickly, especially across multi-shift environments.
- Lack of Recognition: Feeling unseen or unappreciated is a key reason employees disengage and eventually leave. Workers want their efforts noticed and celebrated in real time, not just during annual reviews.
- No Clear Path for Growth: Employees without a development path often feel stagnant. Lack of visibility into advancement opportunities leads to job-hopping.
- Inconsistent Policy Enforcement: When workforce policies are applied unevenly, employees can feel frustrated and mistrustful. This inconsistency erodes morale over time and creates perceptions of favoritism.
- Manager Effectiveness: Many voluntary exits stem from poor management. Without properly trained managers, employees who report to them become disengaged.
- Neglected Well-being: Mental and physical health are more important than ever, with work-related stress at an all-time high. Organizations that ignore physical and psychological well-being see higher absenteeism and turnover, particularly in high-fatigue shift roles.
- Outdated or Absent Technology: When frontline workers lack access to scheduling visibility, communication, and training tools, they feel undervalued.
These challenges aren’t always visible on the surface, but they have a profound impact on the employee experience. When workers feel ignored, overworked, or misaligned with company values, disengagement quickly follows. Addressing these root causes is the first step toward improving both morale and long-term retention.
Improve Employee Engagement and Retention with Indeavor
Improving employee engagement and retention requires a connected system of strategies, data, and operational tools working together over time, not a one-time initiative. For shift-based organizations in manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and beyond, Indeavor’s workforce management platform is purpose-built to address the operational root causes of disengagement.
Customers using Indeavor have reported a 47% reduction in employee attrition. Ready to build a workforce that stays? Book a demo to see how Indeavor helps organizations reduce turnover, strengthen employee engagement strategies, and build a culture that retains people shift by shift.
Employee Engagement and Retention FAQ
What is the difference between employee engagement and employee retention?
Employee engagement measures how emotionally invested and motivated an employee is in their work and organization. Employee retention measures an organization’s ability to keep employees over time. Higher engagement leads directly to lower voluntary turnover. Think of engagement as the input and retention as the outcome.
How do you measure employee engagement?
Common methods include annual or quarterly engagement surveys and pulse checks in regular employee interactions. For frontline workforces with lower survey participation, operational signals such as absenteeism trends, voluntary turnover rates, and schedule adherence data also serve as reliable measurements.
How long does it take to see results from engagement initiatives?
Some initiatives, like improving communication cadence or introducing self-service scheduling, can produce visible behavioral changes within 30 to 90 days. Broader cultural shifts, such as improving manager effectiveness or redesigning career pathways, typically take six to twelve months to show measurable impact on retention metrics.
What are the 5 c’s of employee engagement and retention?
The five c’s of employee engagement and retention are: Connection (sense of belonging), Contribution (meaningful, visible work), Career (access to growth), Communication (two-way, timely), and Consistency (fair, predictable treatment). For shift-based industries, a sixth C — Control over schedules and working conditions — is often equally important.
About the Author
Claire Pieper is the Digital Marketing Specialist for Indeavor. In her role, she specializes in crafting strategic and engaging content, ensuring that customers are well-informed. Claire is dedicated to enhancing the customer experience and optimizing the user journey through Indeavor’s solutions. To learn more or get in touch, connect with Claire on LinkedIn.
