We’ve chosen the top 13 employee engagement activities that will not only bring them in-line with your company’s values and goals but enhance their own sense of well-being, to create the best team possible. As an employer, you want to create a work environment that is optimal for all of the members of your company. If you want your employees to give their best and be willing to offer your company more of their potential and capabilities, you need to create a workplace approach through using employee engagement practices.
What Employee Engagement Activities Mean For Employees
The right kind of employee engagement activities means, as an employee, you get up looking forward to work, you know what you are working on, and you have some ideas of your own to share with your team. You understand your role in the workplace and have a sense of purpose, which nurtures a sense of well-being, as well as your skills and abilities.
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What Employee Engagement Activities Mean For Employers
As an employer, using employee engagement activities promotes a level of trust, respect, and positive attitudes. All of this works to improve your business. You want your employees to feel a sense of pride in their work and the company they work for. This encourages workers to go that extra mile for the company and customers.
How to Get Employees Engaged
One thing to consider, before you start planning how to get employees engaged, is that its a mindset. If you want results, you need to first look at the “why” when you plan events and activities. You need to see your employees as real individuals who have aspirations, ideas, and challenges both in and out of the workplace. Employees are not a means to an end result; they are a strong resource that you need to nurture.
We know it can be a challenge coming up with innovative employee engagement ideas, but the effort will be well worth it in the end. You can’t go into it half-heartedly. You will need to monitor the impact of each activity to find employee engagement programs & activities that work best. The following are some of the top employee engagement strategy ideas.
Top 13 Employee Engagement Programs & Activities That Work
1) Get your employees involved in the planning process
If you want your team to feel like a team, get them involved in the company planning process. Every quarter or six months have a meeting where you present the company’s most important issues and what is being done to resolve them. Ask them for ideas about planning ahead, reviewing any new opportunities, or how to improve the company’s business strategy.
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Why this works: You are promoting transparency in the company and offering your employees strategic insights into how things are being managed in the company. This fosters a sense of loyalty and builds a pipeline leadership that is prepared.
2) Share Knowledge
Did you know that one of the biggest expenses linked to high employee turnover rates is the loss of information that is essential to running things? By having a knowledge sharing system in place you can help lessen the impact of information loss. It also makes a great engagement driver for new employees.
Why it works: Creating a good mentorship program, where you are pairing up a newcomer with an experienced employee, along with a template program for learning, will give newcomers room to test their own methods of learning.
3) Create A Sharing Space
Sharing knowledge is one of the best employee engagement ideas, and creating a knowledge sharing space can nurture this even more. Quite often, teams will be so focused on their own projects that they lose track of what is going on elsewhere in the company. Every month or two have an open sharing space that allows each team to give updates on their progress and any key learning points. Make sure to keep it creative so it doesn’t turn into a boring mandatory meeting people dread. Have a theme each meeting, or make it a special lunch engagement where you order food in.
Why this works: Having teams know what is happening will help them to evolve more quickly, and the shared knowledge and learning experiences can help other teams who may be stuck.
4) Promote Group Collaboration
If you are looking for innovative employee engagement ideas that encourage teamwork, why not try a plant seed race? Get a pack of seed for a plant that will bear fruit or flowers and sow them all at the same time, in the same way. Pass the seed trays out to your employees to nurture. The first team or individual whose plant bears fruit or a flower first is the winner.
Why this works: It gets groups to work together while also sharing in the responsibility of caring for their plant. It works best when plants are given to teams, groups, or departments.
5) Financial Transparency
If you want to build trust in your company, give them monthly or quarterly updates of the company’s financial statements. You can show them how all of their efforts have helped, as well as set strong objectives for the next few months. This will help everyone get involved in meeting these objectives.
Why this works: It not only builds a level of trust between your company and its employees. It also gives them a sense of responsibility for the company’s success.
6) Make New Opportunities Exciting
When new opportunities for advancement open up you should let your employees know. Communicating these on a regular basis, and making the opportunities exciting will have them looking forward to what comes next, as well as gives them something to strive towards.
Why this works: If you have exciting opportunities to offer your employees, chances are they will choose to stay rather than be poached by other companies.
7) Learning Opportunities
Nothing makes a worker feel worse about them than not being able to grow their skills. This is why it’s important that have opportunities for development and knowledge. Did you know that one of the top reasons employees quit their jobs is due to a lack of learning prospects?
It’s important to assess the preferences and needs of your employees and set-up classes or learning time. If you are wondering how to get employees engaged and motivated to learn, make it rewarding by giving them a reward for passing their class.
Why this works: By investing time and resources into their learning, you are giving them the skills to do a better job.
8) Healthy Competition
As an employer, promoting the benefits of a healthy lifestyle and over well-being is important. A fun way that you can do this is by having a company sports or Olympics day. This gets everyone involved and lets them get to know each other in a non-work environment. It also gets those desk-bound employees up and moving.
Why this works: Its a great opportunity for people with the same interests to connect in a positive way.
9) Get Them On-Board
On boarding is an essential way for new employees to assimilate and learn information about your company. It can also be a bit mind-numbing and nerve-wracking for some if done in the wrong way. Try making the onboard experience fun. Take boring company information and turn it into trivia in a way that gets them using systems and tools. You can even bring inexperienced employees that have been with the company for a while give answers for newcomer queries
Why this works: Making the experience fun can help retain information, and using older employees helps them and the newcomers get to know each other better.
10) Create A Newsletter Or Magazine
A really good way to keep your employees in the loop is to have an employee focuses newsletter or magazine. Add fun columns, opportunities, news, featured stories, and even an employee of the month. You can do this as an online magazine monthly or a printed quarterly one.
Why this works: It keeps everyone well informed of what’s happening in the company and gets them involved in the creative process.
11) Giving Back To The Community
If you want to create a positive mental attitude in the workplace, which is a big part of employee engagement practices, getting your company involved in a charity or social initiative is a great idea.
Have everyone give ideas for a cause that they want to support and makes sure its something personal that counts for them. Whether its time of money that is being donated, it gives a sense of accomplishment and gets everyone working towards a mutual goal.
Why this works: Giving back to one’s community or a good cause not only creates that positive mental attitude, it fosters loyalty and pride in one’s company.
12) Have a TEDx-like Event
TEDx is a series of events where speakers and groups come together to share knowledge, innovated ideas, and plans that focus on moving society forward. So why not create your own similar event? You can have guest speakers, motivational coaches, sessions of sharing experiences and learning. Its something that you can even incorporate into another main event you are doing.
Why this works: It brings people from different areas of the business together, gives them a chance to learn, pick the brains of experts in the field, and share innovative ideas of their own.
13) Creativity Challenges
For something a bit lighter, why not have a creativity challenge using something like LEGO, or Play-Doh to boost employee engagement? Give different teams an opportunity to create the most innovative sculpture based on the theme of the week. Or you could let them choose. At the end of the competition (whether it lasts a day or a week) you can their fellow co-workers judge the pieces and give out a prize to the winners.
Why this works: During the creation phase, it gets groups to share ideas, get advice, and improve on their designs, opening up discussions that can be quite fun.
Make Employee Engagement Activities Happen
You need to be committed to taking action where employee engagement activities are concerned, not just wait for them to happen on their own. If you want to benefit from all that employee engagement has to offer, then you need to commit to taking action. This means making sure that all of your employees understand the vision of the company, its strategies, the direction its taking, as well as their own individual roles that help achieve those goals.