23 March 2020

11 Employee Engagement Activities That Work

In the workplace, it can be the case that members of staff aren’t fully involved with the company’s vision or are struggling to feel more involved. Though this is not ideal for any company culture, there is no need to despair, as there are many team engagement exercises that can turn this around and give you employees who are engaged with your organisation.

Invest in your Employees

1. Motivational Speakers

If you have the budget, you may find that bringing in motivational speakers can help with staff engagement issues. They will look into your business and find ways to re-engage your employees with their day-to-day lives. They are also employed to bring back that optimism that can be lost in the workplace.

If your budget won’t stretch to outside agencies, take on this task yourself and enthuse your staff with company spirit. If your employees have particular skills, encourage your employees to demonstrate them to others, as these skills may help to boost engagement for everyone, as well as involve your employees in how the company operates. Being a motivational boss is very important for your staff to boost morale.

2. Training and Educational Opportunities

Training is one of the biggest areas for improving employee engagement. If there are skills that employees are lacking, you can work with them to come up with employee engagement ideas to improve this and reduce some of the disconnects they are feeling.

Education in the workplace is also a great way to hang onto employees who want to improve their knowledge so that they can do their jobs better. Training can be done in-house, by external trainers (depending on your needs and budget) and even at a purpose-built training venue near you.

Give Feedback

3. Let Employees know how they are doing

It is important to give your staff regular feedback on their progress and strengths. Try to make this a regular occurrence so that you and your staff can rely on getting frequent employee feedback. Not all catchups have too long one-to-one meetings, you could have larger quarterly meetings, with monthly quick chats and even shorter catchups on workloads each week. This regular contact will help to highlight any potential issues before they become real problems and frustrations for your employees.

4. Give Recognition

When your team members do something amazing, make sure that you’re giving them the recognition they deserve. It doesn’t have to be a fanfare but if you mention it during their reviews, team meetings or through an email to your entire company, ensure that everyone can see how much they are appreciated and how their work contributes to the whole team.

Be a Transparent Company

5. Show Them Where the Company is Going

If your staff members know what the company is trying to do and how their profits are going, then it will leave employees feeling engaged at work, as these things will be clear to them. It makes it obvious that there is nothing hidden and that you trust your employees to know these details about the company.

6. Share Company Goals to Engage Employees

Likewise, if you show employees what the company’s goals are, whether that’s to be the biggest in the market, to turn over that extra million by the end of the year or acquire their competitors, it makes it easier to see how each little (or big) part of work each employee does will contribute to the bigger picture.

7. Commit to Actions and Give Feedback

It may seem obvious but you then need to commit to these things and let the company know how these are going. If the company has goals that they don’t work towards, then staff may become disinterested as they won’t know what to believe. Corporations changing direction and getting new goals is common and not a problem, as long as this is fed back to the team.

Always be a Team

8. Get Together Inside and Outside of Work Hours

Team bonding may seem like a small part of employee engagement but when you consider how much time people spend together in the workplace, it is vital that everyone can get on well and even if they don’t become the best of friends, will always be polite and happy in each other’s company.

One of the best (and most fun) team engagement activities that work is to gather everyone together for a team building day and get them to work together to solve problems and build trust. Treat the team to a meal out that night to celebrate your progress.

9. Volunteer Together

In the same vein as the above point, it can be good to all volunteer together, as this will enable you to help your community (which works wonders for the company’s image) but also has the advantage that you could focus the attention else to allow everyone to come together. You could volunteer at a local shelter or kitchen, hold a bake sale or find a sponsored activity that you’d prefer.

Focus on Wellness as well as Employee Engagement

10. Take on a Challenge Together

Get everyone involved in a challenge, whether that’s whoever can get the most sales or reviews wins a bottle of champagne, or get the team to enter a fun run and train together. With everyone working hard towards that goal by doing these employee engagement initiatives, your team is likely to feel more engaged than ever before and reduce any anxiety with the exercise and team spirit.

11. Subscribe to a Fruit Service

Keeping everyone healthy will boost everyone’s ability to concentrate and give their all. By giving them access to fresh fruit in the office, you’ll also be able to show them that you care about their wellbeing. Great ideas like this are one of many employee engagement exercises that can really make a difference for your workforce. You don’t have to use this employee engagement strategy but it is a simple one to try.