Employee engagement is fostered by transparent communication and appreciation from the employer, says John Luciani, chief operating officer of LTL solutions at A. Duie Pyle. When employees are engaged, they do the right thing for the customer. And while measuring employee engagement isn't an exact science, it's still important to do so.

“Any company can buy trucks, trailers and technology,” says Luciani, “But at the end of the day, the people that drive that equipment and provide the service to the ultimate consignee affect the final result.” When that result is good, customers come back for more, he says.

An engaged workforce is essential to that simple equation. “Those are people that come to work looking to do whatever they can do to exceed the expectations of the customer, because they know ultimately the company's going to take care of the employee,” Luciani says. 

At the most basic level, it’s about providing clean, safe, bright workspaces, but Luciani says it’s also important to offer candid information sharing. “There's good, two-way dialogue. When the employees know that the company genuinely cares about them and their safety and their health, they tend to be more engaged, and they tend to work a little bit harder.”

Maintaining a two-way engagement with workforce means measuring how you’re doing, too, Luciani says. It can involve annual, anonymized surveys of workers, but also meetings that are structured around employee questions. Keeping a keen ear for how those questions reflect a culture of engagement and belonging is key — “if they’re ‘we’ questions and not ‘me’ questions,” Luciani says. “Those are always telltale signs that the workforce is about the team rather than the individual.”