7 Employee Engagement Ideas You Can Implement Today
We all know how important employee engagement is for your company to obtain prime results and high performance from its employees. We also know it’s not always easy to stimulate engagement in your workforce, though. Here are 8 Ambassify approved strategies to up engagement among your people and create a vivid and enthusiastic environment.
Employee engagement is a term that’s on everyone’s lips, from top executives to HR specialists. And rightly so, considering how it relates to productivity and retention rates. To do that successfully, you need a deep well of employee engagement ideas to draw from when the time comes to act!
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Generally, employee engagement strategies take time to develop and implement, especially when they seek to change the company culture or modify established organizational patterns. That’s why we’ve created this list of awesome employee engagement ideas to spark enthusiasm and keep your employees engaged.
Do something fun every week
This doesn’t mean that you have to disrupt the workflow — instead, it means that your corporate culture welcomes a lighter attitude and that employees and managers don’t take themselves too seriously all the time. An occasional karaoke hour, an impromptu after-work aperitif with some drinks and good company are activities that allow everyone to let their hair down and make office hours seem a bit less monotonous.
Pick a local charity to support together
Most philanthropic organizations have high employee engagement because people like to feel that they are making a difference in the world and are willing to work harder.
Help your employees organize an event for a local non-profit that they care about. You can provide the venue, give some time off to enable employees to volunteer, and maybe even convince your finance department to match the donations partially. Both the community and your employees will appreciate and reward your involvement.
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Check out our sustainability use caseCelebrate wins: work-related and personal
As the manager, you will be the first to know when someone in your team hits their monthly or quarterly goal. When that happens, celebrate with in-office drinks and cake, or take the team out early on a Friday afternoon. To show that you really care, make an effort to celebrate personal wins, too — an employee moving into their new home, having a baby, or furthering their formal education.
Always act on employee feedback
Asking employees to provide feedback and then not acting on it is a surefire way to frustrate them and have them lose faith in the process. On the other hand, if you make even the slightest effort to change things based on feedback, you’re signaling that you’re indeed listening.
It pays off to go the extra mile in this process. After collecting feedback, share the results with your employees. Highlight the things that are high-priority and hold a meeting to decide which one gets tackled first. Send out regular updates until you have a policy in place that’s effective in handling the highlighted issues. This is less of an employee engagement idea and more of a cornerstone principle that you have to adhere to if you want your employees to care and be productive.
Invest extra effort to make new hires feel welcome
Another engagement-increasing strategy you should invest in is making sure that new hires hit the ground running. This should include personalized onboarding sessions, a mentor, and complete immersion in company culture.
But, don’t forget that new beginnings are also stressful and that people worry about fitting in with already-established teams. Instruct your employees to go above and beyond when it comes to making new colleagues feel welcome.
Map out the internal advancement pathways
Many employees get disengaged when they start feeling that there’s no clear path to advancement available to them. To avoid this becoming an issue, sit down with every employee and help them figure out their 5-year in-house plan.
Create with your HR department a roadmap with milestones that illustrate what is expected in terms of accomplishments, attitude, and self-improvement for an employee to get where they want to be.
Give employees a chance to recognize their colleagues
It’s been shown that recognition for a job well done can seriously boost employee engagement levels. We have a separate article on how you can learn how to measure employee engagement. That recognition doesn’t have to come exclusively from managers, though. Employees love to feel valued and validated by their peers, which is why instituting a peer-to-peer reward program is an employee engagement strategy worth considering.
Keep in mind that you don’t need a considerable budget for this — if you want to institute a prize, the prize doesn’t have to be cash, nor does it have to be super big. The recognized employee can be rewarded with a week’s worth of coffee delivered to their desk, their favorite snack, or that coveted prime parking spot!
There you have them — polished employee engagement strategies and ideas that you can use today to motivate your employees without pleading for a budget with your financial planning department!
Engaged employees are the best asset your company can have because they are productive, reliable, and trustworthy. And, hey, we know they also make the best employee advocates.