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For years, HR teams have been focused on boosting engagement scores, measuring pulse surveys, and sprinkling in pizza Fridays (or the remote equivalent). In our annual Enterprise L&D: Trends and Predictions report, we found HR and L&D professionals are prioritizing and exploring how to improve employee retention and engagement—in fact, it ranked as the fourth highest priority for the coming year. Engaged employees are fantastic, but there’s a difference and a correlation between engaged employees and enabled employees.
Engagement is how employees feel about their work. Enablement is about whether they actually have what they need to do their best work. The two are so closely intertwined that it warrants more exploration—especially with engagement rates among U.S. employees hovering around 31% right now.
So let’s talk about what employee enablement really means, why it matters, and how to better enable your employees to build engagement organically.
What is employee enablement (and why should you care)?
If engagement is the emotional connection between an employee and their work, enablement is the practical side—the tools, resources, skills, and autonomy that helps employees succeed. And enablement is one of the key drivers of engagement.
Think of it this way: engagement says, “I love my job.” Enablement says, “I can actually do my job and do it well.”
Essentially, employee enablement is about clearing the path. It’s giving people the clarity, technology, training, and support they need to solve problems, grow, and contribute in a meaningful, impactful way.
Another part of this is employee experience enablement. Every employee touchpoint contributes to both engagement and enablement. So this means designing onboarding, upskilling, and support systems around employee empowerment, autonomy, and accessibility. When done carefully and thoughtfully, you in HR and L&D can take a more proactive approach to people enablement.
Why employee experience enablement matters
Let’s look at a few common experiences in the modern workplace and how enablement (or lack of it) shapes culture, satisfaction, and performance.
1. The collaboration conundrum
Picture this: a talented cross-functional team that wants to be creative and experiment, but can’t find a shared workspace that actually works. Half the team uses Slack, the other half lives in their Outlook inbox, and project files are scattered across six different cloud folders.
It’s not that people don’t want to collaborate—they’re just fighting the tools instead of actually using them. This is a negative employee experience rooted in poor enablement.
To fix it, an employee experience-focused HR and leadership team would address this by unifying communication channels, setting clear collaboration norms, and ensuring everyone has access to the same resources.
2. The workflow wall
We’ve all met (or been) the employee who spends more time navigating bureaucracy than doing actual work. Every new idea has to pass through layers of approval, and even small process changes feels like pulling teeth.
Barriers like this do more than just slow things down, they erode morale and trust.
Employee experience enablement means identifying and removing these friction points. Ask “what’s slowing people down—and how can we fix it?”
When workflows actually flow, culture improves. Employees feel respected and supported, rather than micromanaged and babied, and that satisfaction ripples outward into engagement and performance.
3. The learning loop
In a lot of organizations, learning and development can be treated like a checkbox. Employees complete their annual compliance courses, maybe attend a webinar or two, and that’s it.
But employee enablement-driven learning is continuous and personalized. It’s about helping employees do their jobs better today while also preparing for the future.
For example, an employee experience enablement-focused company might use different mentoring models to suit different desired outcomes—such as peer learning for collaboration and innovation.
Instead of training being a one-time thing, it becomes a part of the employee experience.
4. The feedback black hole
Nothing kills momentum faster than giving feedback that disappears into the void.
Enablement requires two-way communication. Employees should not only receive guidance—they should feel empowered to share their experiences and insights to help create positive change.
Again, focusing on structure and process an employee experience-focused company can create feedback loops that focus on accountability, transparency, and recognition.
The engagement trap
Employee engagement and retention continues to be a top priority for HR and L&D teams for good reason. From those examples above, we know that enablement helps drive engagement and vice versa—and we know engaged employees are more loyal, productive, and creative. But engagement often focuses on how employees feel rather than what they can actually accomplish.
Here’s an example to get the wheels turning:
- Engaged but not enabled: An employee loves the company mission, but can’t move projects forward because every decision requires five approvals.
- Enabled but not engaged: Another employee has every tool they need, but no sense of connection to the work or culture.
- Engaged and enabled: The sweet spot—an employee who’s motivated, supported, and equipped to make an impact.
Let’s talk about why employee enablement and engagement are so deeply intertwined.
Engagement and enablement: The dynamic duo
One thing we want to make clear is engagement and enablement are partners, not rivals. You need both. They have a symbiotic relationship, if you will.
Engaged employees care about their work, but without enablement that energy has nowhere to go. Imagine being super motivated…but every step of a project needs to be approved by eight people or the main software you need to do your job takes 15 minutes to load. Frustrating and demoralizing, right?
Enabled employees, on the other hand, have the tools, support, and environment to perform—and that fuels engagement. It’s a cycle: enablement drives performance, performance drives satisfaction, and satisfaction fuels engagement.
How to facilitate employee enablement
You don’t need a complete overhaul of your strategy or systems. Far from it. So let’s look at some practical ways to facilitate employee enablement in your company.
There are four core aspects of people and team enablement:
Digital employee enablement
Let’s talk tech and how it relates to team enablement.
Now more than ever, digital employee enablement is not optional. The digital employee experience is now the heart of almost every company and needs to be prioritized.
Just looking for “employee enablement software” isn’t going to net you the right results. That’s because employee enablement software and employee enablement platforms look different depending on your needs. Think about which of the core aspects of enablement your company struggles with. If the current project management software some of your teams use is clunky and over-complicated, then employee enablement software potentially means a new project management platform. If learning accessibility is the issue, a learning management system (LMS) or mentorship software could be the employee enablement platforms you need.
The key? Keep your tech human. If the software need you’ve identified is filled by a system that needs hours of dry training modules just to use, it no longer counts as enablement.
People enablement in practice
Individual employee enablement is fantastic and a great start—however, you also need to take it a step further to look at teams as a whole. Enabling collaboration and communication—especially in the context of learning—is a foundation that needs to be built with whole teams and the organization in mind.
Here’s how people enablement plays out at different levels:
Individual enablement
Give employees the autonomy, clarity, and resources they need. That means well-defined goals, access to learning opportunities, and permission to take ownership of their outcomes. This could also mean coaching your managers around micromanagement tendencies.
Truly encourage self-direction. Your employees were hired for a reason—trust them to do the job they were hired for.
Team enablement
Focus on shared context. Teams thrive when they understand how their work connects to broader goals. People enablement at this level means breaking down solos, clarifying roles, and creating systems for open collaboration and feedback.
Small changes—like improving onboarding or more transparent decision-making processes—all contribute to team enablement.
Organizational enablement
At the highest level, enablement is a leadership philosophy. It looks like aligning strategies, tools, and processes around one question: “how can we make it easier for our people to succeed?”
This might involve rethinking internal policies, adopting modern performance enablement frameworks, or investing in unified digital work environments that support learning, communication, and feedback—such as an LMS or mentoring platform.
Enable the experience, empower the people
At its core, employee enablement and employee experience enablement are about removing the gap between intention and action. It’s the difference between wanting your employees to succeed and making it possible for them to succeed.
As you refine your people and learning and development strategies, always keep this question in mind: “do our systems, tools, and processes enable people to do their best work—or are they getting in the way?”
The answer to that question reveals more about your company culture than any engagement pulse survey ever could. When employees are both engaged and enabled, work becomes far more meaningful and gives employees purpose rather than just a paycheck.
One way to drive both engagement and enablement is through structured mentorship programs and employee enablement software like Together’s suite of mentorship tools. Chat with one of our experts to learn how you can drive people enablement with mentorship—book a demo today.
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