Five years ago, we founded Strive
Since then, we’ve helped companies bring their people together in halls, stadiums, warehouses and even the occasional tent! And over those 5 years, we’ve learnt firsthand that a great event can spark connection, but lasting engagement has to be built before and after the moment itself. People need to feel heard, supported and connected in the everyday, not just inspired for one afternoon.
So, for our fifth birthday, we didn’t want to write a blog that basically said, “Aren’t we great?” (although it was tempting). Instead, we asked four people who live and breathe employee engagement every day what they have actually seen, and continue to see, work.
Five things every leader should know, one for each year we’ve been around the sun.
1. People need real investment, not empty perks
Ping-pong tables. A new engagement survey. A Slack channel called #good-vibes.
Lovely. But none of it means much if there’s nothing real underneath.
Katelyn Hilburn, People Operations Coordinator at Process Street, puts it plainly:
“A survey only goes so far. Companies and leaders need to actually be building people up with tangible things.”
And she’s right. Your people can tell the difference between genuine investment and a quick culture plaster. One builds trust, and the other gets eye-roll emojis in the private group chat your team haven’t told you about.
Real investment looks like supporting training that helps people reach their professional goals, putting time into understanding your people, and actually listening to their feedback. It also means giving people something they want to connect to: a shared purpose they can see, understand and feel part of.
John Johnston, People & Culture Manager at IKEA, adds something leaders often underestimate: purpose. When people feel connected to something tangible, whether that’s their company’s mission, community or shared ambition, their engagement has something to grip on to.
2. Psychological safety doesn’t come from a workshop. It comes from consistency.
You can run all the wellbeing sessions you like. But if leaders go back to business as usual the next day, nothing really changes. People don’t feel safe, heard or valued because of one workshop, one team lunch, or one free pizza moment. They believe it when they see it consistently, in the small everyday behaviours.
Luca Zingale, Senior HR Business Partner at Innocent Drinks, describes one of those moments: a leader opening a meeting by owning a mistake.
“The whole room shifts. It tells people that honesty is safe here — and that’s when you start getting real engagement rather than performed engagement.”
Now that is the good stuff. No performative vulnerability, just honesty, modelled properly.
Sophie Mann, People Partner at Zinc, says the same thing from another angle:
“Leaders who admit mistakes don’t lose credibility, they build it. If you made a bad call, name it. It gives everyone else permission to be human too, and that’s where psychological safety actually comes from. Not a policy. A behaviour.” Your people won’t feel safe just because the onboarding deck said they are. It takes actively modelling the behaviour you preach to prove to your team that your company culture isn’t all talk.en just a bit. Otherwise, your culture becomes something people comply with, not something they believe in.
3. Listening is only half the job. Showing you heard is the bit that counts.
There’s a special kind of disengagement that happens when people are asked for feedback and then never ever hear about it again.
Honestly, it’s probably worse than not asking at all! And it’s interesting to see that this engagement faux pas was flagged by all of our contributors.
Sophie is direct:
“If you ask for input, show what you did with it. Even ‘we heard this, and here’s why we went a different way’ closes the loop. People disengage when feedback disappears into a void. Involvement only drives engagement when it’s genuine.”
Luca takes that same thinking into leadership:
“Ask ‘what do you need to do your best work?’ — and then do something about the answer.”
That last bit matters. Asking is easy, it’s following through and doing the hard work where your team actually benefits.
Katelyn adds something managers often miss: listening for what isn’t being said.
“Silence says just as much as noise. Haven’t heard from someone in a while? Time for a check-in. Noticing a drop in attendance? Ask if what’s being offered is actually useful.”
Whether it’s a team meeting, a feedback survey or a company-wide event, people want to know their input has gone somewhere. Not necessarily that they got their own way, but just that someone actually listened, thought about it, and responded like a human (not with an automated ‘thank you everyone for your feedback’).
4. See the person, not just the employee
Another strong theme across our contributors?
Really consider what ‘care’ looks like in practice.
Sophie puts it perfectly:
“‘We care about our people’ means nothing. Remembering that someone’s moving house this week, or asking how the difficult conversation went — that’s what lands. Engagement follows when people feel seen, not just surveyed.”
That’s the difference between employee experience as a concept and employee experience as an actual lived experience.
John frames this structurally, too. Benefits that flex around people’s actual lives (caring responsibilities, health, finances, family, etc.) send a clear message: we see you as a person, not a job title.
And when work is shaped around someone’s strengths and interests, job satisfaction can become something leaders can actively design.
Sophie says:
“The teams with the best culture I’ve seen aren’t the most ‘professional’ — they’re the ones where people feel safe enough to be themselves. Banter, niche interests, asking for help, crying occasionally. When people mask at work, you lose the best of them.”
See and support the actual person, and the rest follows.
5. Engagement isn’t something you launch. It’s something you maintain.
This is the section that should make you pause before announcing another big, shiny short-term engagement initiative.
Luca says it best:
“It’s not a quarterly initiative. It lives in the small stuff — the meeting that should’ve been an email, the win that went unnoticed, the feedback that never came. Get the everyday stuff right consistently, and you won’t need to keep relaunching engagement programmes.”
That’s the uncomfortable truth. Engagement doesn’t live in the launch moment. It lives in the consistency and making the day-to-day better for all.
John points to another increasingly non-negotiable foundation for engagement: flexibility. Giving people autonomy over when and how they work is one of the clearest ways an organisation can show trust and care. And that, consistently demonstrated, is engagement in action.
The companies getting this right aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones paying proper attention to their teams, checking in, and also following up. Creating work that works for real people. a ton. Definitely worth the extra allocation.
Five years in, here’s what we know
We’ve spent five years creating moments that bring people together.
The team trip people still reference. The conference that made a huge company feel like one community. The summit where people met each other face-to-face for the first time. The awards party where the CEO stayed until the end and danced so SO badly.
But the people professionals we spoke to reminded us of something we already knew, and probably needed to hear again.
Moments only work when they’re backed up by what happens every day.
Listening properly, following through, making people feel seen! Creating space for people to show up as themselves, not their work persona.
And when that kindling has been set, we can throw in the event spark.
That’s what we’ve spent five years helping companies create. Not just events people attend, but experiences that build belonging, energy and purpose long after the lanyards come off.
So if you’re thinking about how to bring your people together, we should grab a coffee.
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