A whopping 85% of the employees are not engaged in the workplace, and businesses are losing USD 450-500 bn annually because of low employee engagement.
On the other hand, studies show that employee engagement drives enthusiasm and motivation amongst the workforce and boosts workplace productivity, helping companies earn 21% higher profits.
McKinsey points out the resurge of COVID-19 as the right opportunity for companies to seize the moment and fuel workplace productivity with employee engagement activities.
But what exactly are these activities, and how can you determine whether they will generate results or not?
To help you resolve this dilemma, here are some excellent employee engagement ideas that can help you transform your workforce engagement.
Slay the Employee Expectation and Orientation Like a Pro
With a practical and well-designed orientation program, you can set the employee expectations on-point right from the start. Share the handbooks, but not the generic ones.
Ensure that you have specific handbooks for specific job profiles and the common ones for HRMS purposes.
This way, you can include details and work expectations for every job profile in the handbooks that are relevant for each employee.
So, your developers, designers, and content creators know about the department assets that they can access, the in-house information assets they can use and have all the work-related infrastructure right in their hands. The handbooks remain precise, relevant, and bite-sized.
To make your orientation sessions more rewarding, discuss the policies and have an internal policy management system that the employees can access anytime they want for collecting information. Set clear goals and action steps for new employees and how they can expect their workplace journeys to evolve.
Introduce Well-being Plans That Keep Your Employees Connected
While Covid may seem to be leaving us, surely its effects are still in place. We all went through the work from home structure and some of us are still adhering to the work culture. And all though it has helped us stay safe, we lost a lot on mental, social, and physical well-being.
Organizations like EY and Financial Times understood the growing need for employees to build a positive self-image. That’s why they started virtual yoga classes, workout sessions, or even adding Headspace as an employee well-being benefit.
They even started with virtual town hall meeting sessions where they meet up each other and connect with new and existing office employees regularly. That’s not all. Organizations across the globe went ahead and even started sending goodies for various occasions. Such efforts have helped employees to stay in high spirits and feel motivated to engage with their organization more frequently.
As for the remote employees currently working from the European countries, who are facing the brunt of the war are receiving their salaries for three months in advance. Organizations have taken to their social media profiles and have explicitly shown support for employees who are in the middle of the war. Business owners have also announced that they will help employees settle down in a different country if they wish to do so and help them with the work set up again.
Equip Your Employees With the Right Tools
Equip and empower your employees with the right collaboration tools that help them do their jobs effortlessly, in a manner that is well-aligned with your organizational goals.
Deloitte identifies this as a characteristic trait of an irresistible organization, as you can give your employees a sense of empowerment and purpose with them. They don’t have to search for relevant tools on their own or use average software for completing their tasks.
When you have standard tools available for organization-wide usage, you also regulate the quality of work and bring uniformity across your organization. This way, you impart autonomy to your employees, and they feel motivated to work.
Let’s not forget your proactive customer support and sales teams. They too can come up with many hiccups when building a personalized experience for the customers. That’s when they will need a customer service tool that enables them to interact with each other as they engage with the customers. A few live chat software offer this functionality where the support team members can engage and ask for files from other team members to build a better customer experience. They can overcome the productivity-related challenges by automating routine and mundane tasks, such as daily reporting, meetings, real-time collaboration, etc.
Internal Communication Videos for Better Engagement
Using videos for internal communications is one of the best employee engagement ideas. It helps you capture your workforce’s attention and helps them to “achieve more with less“.
“How?” – you might ask!
Suppose your development team gathers every week for an innovation call, where they discuss the new things they have done at the individual level, and they can do or are doing as a team.
Now, you wish to spread the word to grab more talent and clientele. The best way is to start an engineering blog where you discuss all these things.
However, your content creators might be working on anything else the moment this meeting happens, or they might not understand the entire discussion because of the obvious skill gap. This can send the whole project down south!
On the other hand, if you have video recordings, you can share them across the enterprise and everybody working on the blog can access them as and when required, pause them as many times as they want, discuss things, make notes or take screenshots. There can be many other use cases as well.
This is how videos drive employee engagement across different departments and the entire organization.
Recognize Efforts, Give Feedback, and Reward
Create a culture of recognition that empowers departments, teams, and people alike. Recognize the efforts, hard work, and even the small contributions your employees make on a daily basis. Build an internal channel or community portal where employees can share and applaud the contributions made by their colleagues.
Consider these recommendations and applauding remarks for KPI measurement and then reward the employees that received the highest number of mentions.
Further, guide your employees throughout their journey by offering one-on-one feedback quarterly or half-yearly. While this is manageable in SMBs and startups, one-on-one feedback needs proper delegation and automation support in enterprise-level organizations.
Check the employee performance once the feedback is rolled out and reward the employees who have actually worked, keeping the feedback in mind.
Motivational Seminars and Upper Management Interaction for Confidence
Every employee wishes to be a part of the change that drives organizational growth and transformation. Apart from having great leadership, having a trustworthy and inspirational leadership culture is important. BCG recommends having empowering and generative leadership for creating highly engaging workplaces.
Every employee wishes to get a morale boost from their superiors and upper management from time to time. They wish to learn from the experiential knowledge these superiors have earned personally across the wide range of industry use cases.
Deloitte suggests that the leaders must invest in their people, interact honestly and fulfill the organizational missions, vision, and purposes. Apart from offering inspirational leadership, growth and learning opportunities are becoming increasingly important employee engagement trends.
Every employee aims for professional, personal, and skill development while working in an organization. Hence, organizing seminars, training sessions, and workshops for industry best practices and 360-degree development is another excellent way to engage and motivate your employees.
Rewards That Are Relevant and Truly Rewarding
Well-rewarded and well-acknowledged employees are 30% more productive. Hence, provide tokens, rewards, discount coupons, recognition, memberships, etc. to keep the employees engaged.
However, make sure to keep the effort genuine by giving relevant rewards, such as meal benefits, eCommerce discount coupons, cash cards, high-quality routine use essentials, etc.
For example, offering personalized rewards and recognition packages to the employees keeping the individual preferences in mind can have a better effect, instead of free movie tickets, that the employees might not be interested in.
Stats suggest that 65% of employees wish for non-cash rewards and a significant number of them wish to get a personalized reward.
A commendable real-life example that you can follow in this regard is Apple’s paid time off reward, where every employee got a three-day off. Likewise, you can also have unique rewards, such as premium memberships for an educational or learning experience, travel tickets, event tickets, subscriptions, etc.
Gather Feedback, and Act on It
As important to recognizing and applauding the employee’s contribution and hard work, taking regular feedback from them is also important.
Pulse surveys, monthly feedback, quarterly feedback, etc., are some engagement activities for work that help you learn more about your employee experience and identify what ails the overall work experience.
However, if you wish to gather regular feedback, keep the surveys small, direct, and easy to understand. The surveys should not be confusing and steer clear of all types of bias and stereotypes.
Further, merely collecting the feedback is a job half-done. You must work on that feedback with alacrity and encourage the employees to participate genuinely in building a positive, flexible and streamlined organization.
This brings us to the next item on our employee engagement ideas list!
Listen, and Act on Employee Feedback
Continuously listen to the feedback from your employees, and keep your HR work focused on their needs and expectations. Upgrade and streamline your employee journeys and plan HR workflows well-aligned with the employee journeys.
Also, individualize the career paths as well as learning opportunities for your employees as they expect, plan and seek. This is how you shape the future of your work and steer your business towards sustainable growth.
Fostering continuous feedback and dialogue is one of the excellent ideas for employee engagement as per BCG.
This way, you not only let your employees know that their opinions are valued, but you also gain valuable insights into their morale and overall experience.
Employee feedback also helps break bad habits, such as after-hour calls, or weekend tasks. You can learn what according to your employees, is the positive behavior and adopt the required changes in your workplace culture accordingly.
Prioritize and Improve Flexibility
If there is anything that COVID-19 has taught us, then it is the importance of having a flexible workplace. The pandemic showed us various ways we can keep our employees and engage them remotely and how offering flexibility at work allow for better productivity.
Not all the employees feel motivated in the mornings, not all of them log out from the company’s system at 6 pm. Further, not all the employees are single or thriving on a bachelor life.
Irresistible organizations always make space for flexibility to ensure that their employees deliver quality work and stay motivated towards productive work.
A flexible and responsive workplace is built on higher levels of connection and works together with the employees to create authentic, personalized, and motivating experiences. All these things have a cumulative effect and strengthen the performance exhaustively for the individuals, departments, and the entire organization.
Offer Consistent Learning Opportunities
With technology evolving at a break-neck pace and workplaces becoming highly agile, the employees are continuously amplifying their education and learning skill sets. They keep on taking up new courses, and 87% of millennials find learning and development in the workplace important. Organizations with strong learning cultures enjoy a 30-50% increase in retention rates, and 70% of the employees consider changing workplaces if they can find a company that offers better education and learning opportunities.
These stats speak a thousand words!
There are various ways for you to promote learning and education culture in your organization:
- Covering partial or complete course fees depending on the course type, duration, etc.
- Hiring industry experts for skill development
- Offering paid day-offs for employees on exam days, for preparation, etc
These employee engagement activities convey that you actually care about the personal growth and skill enhancement of your employees and they feel motivated in their roles and responsibilities.
If you really want to go the extra mile, you can even take it a step further and create an online course that specifically covers the skills and topics of interest your employees will need to flourish in their roles. While creating a course can be time-consuming, it really cements your position as an organization dedicated to learning and education. Further, existing course material only needs to be updated from time to time for future employees and will serve as a useful source of education to countless others.
Thoughtful Actions for Consistent Engagement
One of the biggest mistakes you can make with employee engagement efforts is making it a once-a-year activity!
No matter how effective, unique, and thoughtful employee engagement ideas you have, if they are not implemented consistently, the results will be jittery.
You can think of engagement activities for work to be similar to the vaccination drives. These drives need booster doses and are as successful as your adherence to the schedule.
Consistent and thoughtful actions taken with insightful learning from experiences and employee feedback is something that makes irresistible organizations. So, take inspiration from the employee engagement ideas shared here and take the first right step towards the journey of employee and organizational success.
Author: Jared Cornell – Customer Support Specialist, ProProfs
Photo credit: Pexels
