10 Employee Engagement Ideas for Your Workforce

Are you wondering how to make your employee interactions more meaningful? We’ve got you covered! Keep reading to know all about interesting employee engagement ideas that you can deploy at your workplace.

What Is Employee Engagement?

People often confuse employee satisfaction with employee engagement. To clarify, employee satisfaction refers to the overall positive outlook of the employees with regard to their roles and responsibilities. Whereas, employee engagement refers to how an employee interacts with the people, the processes, and the policies of an organization.

Why Invest in Engaging Activities for Employees?

Investing in employee engagement ideas can do wonders for you. Motivated and engaged employees help businesses become more productive, streamlined, and efficient. As a result, employees are also more likely to stay committed to their role and your organization. This, to your benefit, will ultimately reduce the costs of recruitment and training.

Benefits of Engaging Your Employees

1. Increase in Productivity

Employees who like their work perform better and are more productive. They make lesser mistakes, take responsibility more avidly, and meet deadlines with stronger gusto. Plus, if they use employee timesheet software, or additionally, using employee scheduling apps can assist in can tracking their work more efficiently and improve productivity.

2. Improved Retention Rates

Organizations spend a lot of their funds on the recruitment and training of employees. This helps in keeping the employees engaged. Thus, they enjoy their work and remain loyal to the organization.

3. Improved Customer Experience

A happy employee means a smooth consumer experience. That is to say, employees in forward-facing roles should be engaged and appreciated in order to boost their commitment to work as well as customers.

4. Rise in Profits

Higher productivity combined with lower expenses on recruitment means greater profits for your business. Therefore, employee engagement ideas and activities can be your key to improving your profits.

So, before we unravel the most amazing employee engagement ideas, let’s talk about some project management and team collaboration tools to make interactions easier between and within teams.

Best Project Management Tools

1. Asana

Asana is one of the best tools out there, especially for SaaS organizations. It helps automate workflows into projects and tasks, is totally customizable, and has a simple interface.

2. Trello

Trello comes with built-in collaboration tools and a simple and lightweight UI. You can support your collaborations with cards, boards, and lists. This tool is best for individuals and small organizations.

Best Performance Management Software

1. factoHR

factoHR’s performance management software is a powerful tool crafted to unlock the full potential of your workforce. It is intricately designed to align individual goals with the overarching vision of your organization, thereby accelerating the achievement of your business objectives. This software facilitates a performance-led culture by providing a comprehensive platform for managing and optimizing employee performance. 

Best Employee Engagement Survey Software

1. Outgrow

Outgrow is one of the best employee engagement survey platforms, which provides a multitude of interactive survey templates for you to start with. Moreover, you can choose from a range of pricing plans that are customizable based on your requirements.

2. Medallia

Medallia provides a 360-degree view of your CX profiles using an AI engine that integrates with your existing CRM, ERP, and HCM systems. It offers customized pricing solutions based on request.

Best Employee Recognition Software

1. Kazoo

Kazoo is the go-to platform for peer-to-peer recognition. Employees can earn behavior bonuses that promote and reinforce positive interactions. Moreover, you can reward them with more than 30,000 products ranging from branded merchandise to charitable contributions.

2. Kudos

Kudos is another platform where employees earn points for their accomplishments. They can then cash these points in for rewards ranging from branded merchandise, e-gift cards, local gift certificates to extra PTO.

Best Employee Review Platforms

1. Lattice

Lattice helps in measuring performance and collecting regular feedback from managers. It enables managers to set goals, track progress, and properly assess the performance of employees.

2. Impraise

Impraise enables employees to set up their own goals. Their managers can then approve these goals, track and rate them based on progress. HR managers can simply conduct performance reviews and real-time feedback exchange using the premade templates or even create new ones.

Best Communication Platforms:

1. Slack

Slack is ‘THE’ tool for a virtual work environment. It enables direct messaging between teams to streamline workflows, and also helps them in sending out important information.

2. Microsoft Teams

Though highly underrated, Teams has evolved into an end-to-end communication and workflow management platform. To make your experience even better, they also offer third-party integrations such as Loops, Piazza, Approvals, PowerBI, and SEAts Bot.

Bonus Employee Engagement Tools:

1. Qualtrics Employee XM

Qualtrics helps organizations in evaluating employee experience. This is possible with their efficient survey capabilities, optimization of resources, and easy-to-process UI.

2. Limeade Well-Being

Limeade offers a well-being assessment and pulse surveys to provide personalized recommendations, activity libraries, and rewards for excellence.

Unravel 10 Brilliant Ways to Engage Your Employees

Now that you know what tools to use in order to streamline your employee activities, here are some amazing employee engagement ideas for you.

1. Show Recognition and Appreciation

• Social Recognition: Employees recognized by their peers are more likely to stay loyal to their organization. Recognition at the workplace encourages them to work harder and improve their performance.
• Real-time Recognition: Employers should ensure that employees are recognized and appreciated for their performance in real-time. For instance, a team celebration for bagging a big client or a cake-cutting ceremony after closing a long project.
• Recognize Personal Achievements: It is human nature to get delighted when someone recognizes your achievements. Therefore, recognizing your employees’ personal achievements and endeavors will help keep them happy. For example, congratulating and celebrating an employee for getting into an MBA program at a B-school of their choice.
• Reward with Custom Recognition: An invaluable aspect of employee engagement is recognizing and rewarding their achievements in a personal and memorable way. Craft personalized stationery with thoughtful messages to show your recognition of every employee. Presenting glass awards designs as tokens of appreciation not only celebrates their accomplishments but also boosts morale throughout the team. Consider incorporating custom glass awards and trophies that reflect your company’s values and your employees’ unique contributions, further fostering a culture of excellence and recognition.

2. Prioritize Work-life Balance

Here are some tips on creating a healthy work-life balance for your employees.

• You can use Project Management tools like Asana, Trello, and others Asana alternative to manage all the tasks efficiently.
• You should encourage managers to create strong interpersonal relationships with their team and maintain regular interaction.
• You can also make use of wellness tools like Limeade and Aimeo to layout activities for employees to engage in wellness assessments in order to encourage a healthy lifestyle.
• You can also utilize policies like unlimited paid leaves, flexible hours, and remote wellness activities to boost employee engagement.

3. Create Interesting Quizzes

Quizzes can act as a fun element in your employee engagement program. They don’t just create a competitive buzz, but also stimulate the mind and act as a great learning tool. You can create these quizzes around work-related topics or based on any other topic from pop culture and sports to space technology. You just have to understand what is the best employee engagement idea for your team.

How to Create Engaging Employee Quizzes in Minutes?

Follow these simple steps to create your own fun quiz within minutes-

• Log in to your quiz maker. If you haven’t already signed up with any, try Outgrow’s 7-day free trial!
• Once you are in the builder, you can add your questions and set up the display features like background image, colors, button text, etc.
• Also, make sure you add a lead generation form.
• Now set up the results as per your workflow, add conditional logic jumps wherever required, and you’re good to go.
• Finally, save the changes and you can go live. Now you can embed it on any webpage, or social media platform, or even promote it via a direct URL.

Still, thinking about how to make the most exciting quizzes? Discover this in-depth guide on creating fun interactive quizzes.

4. Empower Your Employees

• Inclusive Decision-Making: “Employees as Stakeholders” is an impactful employee engagement strategy that you can implement. Try including team members in the decision-making process for the firm.
• Support Individual Growth: By encouraging personal growth along with professional development, you can boost both morale and productivity. You can use tools like Outgrow’s Employee Tracker surveys to understand where exactly your employees stand.
• Ownership: Employees are the custodians of their respective work. And with more autonomy, comes greater responsibility. Thus, you should encourage your employees to have a sense of ownership for their work duties.

5. Promote Transparency 

Organizations that promote transparency and have open-door policies have employees who are loyal and motivated. So, here are some tips on utilizing this employee engagement strategy in HR.

• Encourage Transparency: Interactions amongst and between teams should happen on public channels in order to avoid office politics. This will also prevent interpersonal relationships amongst teams from interfering with business.
• Build Anonymous Feedback Channels: Another important way to safeguard employee satisfaction and improve engagement is to gather feedback regarding people, processes, and policies. You can record such feedback and take the necessary action as per your judgment.

6. Engage in Team Building Activities (Offline)

• Team Lunches: You should encourage your employees to take their lunches together. This will give them a chance to converse on subjects other than work and ultimately help them create lasting bonds.
• Nature Hikes: Once in a while, you should plan something fun with your team. Be it a weekend getaway for hiking or an elaborate trip to the mountains. Such activities will help in team building & boosting motivation towards work in general.
• Road Trips: Organizing a road trip can be an exhilarating experience for your team. You can rent an RV and visit nearby landmarks, cultural sites, or retreats and create memorable moments.
• Volunteering & Charitable Events: You should encourage your employees to work for the causes they believe in or are passionate about. This can be done through charitable events such as fundraisers, bake sales, yard sales, etc.

7. Engage in Team Building Activities (Online)

Are you worried because the pandemic has sidelined your workforce? Don’t worry! We have a plethora of options for you that can help improve employees’ learning experience along with some fun activities. Here’s a list of some of the best games to spend leisure time with your co-workers-

• Jeopardy: Jeopardy is an engaging reverse quiz game that invites employees to be tested on general knowledge questions.
• Call of Duty: Call of Duty offers quick, stress-free multiplayer and engaging PVP Battle Royales. The best part? You can play this game on both mobiles and PCs.
• Among Us: This multiplayer game is the best to improve employee engagement and have a blast while doing so. Now that we’ve discussed the games that you can play at work, it’s time to decide on one. To do this, you can create a poll and ask your employees to send in their votes. Here’s how easily you can create a Poll in just a few minutes with Outgrow’s interactive content builder.

8. Give Them a Platform to Shine

Have an employee who loves singing? Another who is excellent at debating? Or simply a culinary expert? Give such employees an opportunity to shine.

Provide them with opportunities both at and beyond the workplace. You can do this by organizing cultural nights, encouraging them to pursue their passion through classes, and publicizing their talents on your own social media platforms. This will act as a great motivational factor for your employees.

9. Encourage Diversity

It is crucial that you recognize the importance of diversity and how it can bring about better results for your firm. Moreover, employers who encourage diversity in its truest sense get the most recognition from their employees.

For instance, you should encourage your employees to be comfortable in their own skin and don the attires they love. They should have an environment where they can be themselves without any unnecessary stress.

10. Provide Flexibility

With companies hiring people from diverse backgrounds, the needs and time commitments of all employees differ. Here are some ways you can provide flexibility to your employees without hampering your business’s progress.

• Work From Anywhere: With the pandemic raising permanent health concerns amongst everyone, it is important to acknowledge the employees’ needs and requests. Wherever possible, you should provide employees with the opportunity to work remotely. Be it from the comfort of their homes or from a rocky hill within the woods. The employees who get such flexibility will never have to resign due to concerns such as family locations and the need to travel.
• Flexible Work Hours: Wherever suitable, employees should be allowed to select their own working hours. Not everyone is an early bird, and by recognizing this, you can lower your turnover rates and boost employee engagement. Therefore, the night owls can serve clients from offshore locations and the early risers can take care of domestic clients. Moreover, others who have families and kids to worry about can work in peace once they send off their kids to school.

Bonus Idea: Evaluate Your Employee Engagement Through Surveys

Your end goal is to implement effective employee engagement ideas and get desired results. But how do you check if your ideas are working or not?

You can do this by collecting feedback in order to learn about your employees’ experiences. Thus, with proper employee feedback and enhanced analytics, you can understand where you can improve and take the necessary steps.

And,

the best way to do that is to conduct a SURVEY!

Conclusion

We hope that you’ve been able to understand what exactly employee engagement means and how you can go about improving it within your business.

So, to keep your employees engaged, ask the right questions using Outgrow’s survey builder. You can either check out the wide range of premade templates or you can design and deploy your own interactive surveys and feedback forms. And remember, an engaged employee is a profitable employee. Start your 7-day free trial and get going!