15 Employee Engagement Ideas You Should Try
Engaged employees are a great asset to any business. Being engaged means that employees feel connected to the mission of the company and their role in helping achieve that mission.
Fortunately, getting your employees engaged doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are 15 employee engagement ideas you can try out at your workplace.
What Is Employee Engagement?
According to Forbes, employee engagement “is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals”. It’s there to measure how emotional one person is devoted to their team.
Employee engagement is bigger than employee satisfaction. A satisfied staff will show up to work every day without any complaint. An engaged staff brings many things to the table, such as commitment, a hard-working attitude, and positive behaviors. They’re dedicated to their work and get along well with colleagues and their boss. That way the risks of low-quality work or retention problems will be reduced.
15 Employee Engagement Ideas You Should Try
1. Involve Your Employees in Business Planning Sessions
Every quarter or six months, hold a business planning meeting and invite your employees to participate. Present the most important problems your business needs to address and ask for ideas from employees. Encourage them to evaluate and give opinions on anything regarding your business strategies.
By prioritizing transparency and involving employees into the planning process, employees will feel they’re a part of your business and make more dedicated contributions.
2. Listen to Your Employees
Listening and understanding is the key to maintaining relationships with your employees and making them feel heard. So, as a leader, you need to take the time to communicate with employees, whether it’s face-to-face, via phone or email. You can also create topics on internal social networks to easily collect employee feedback and opinions.
3. Peer Recognition
By allowing your employees to evaluate and recognize their peers, you can build your workplace on the basis of teamwork and collaboration. Moreover, you’ll create a platform for your employees to give and receive immediate feedback, reinforce good practices and make sure your business workflow continuously improves.
4. Recognition and Rewards
Many employees said that one of the biggest mistakes that leaders often make is not fully recognizing their employees. In fact, employee recognition programs are extremely useful in improving employee engagement and retention.
Leaders need to acknowledge employees in immediate feedback and performance review sessions. If your employees have to wait until the end of the year to be recognized for their achievements in January, they’ll feel frustrated. Or worse, they may resign before having a chance to be acknowledged.
Instead, you can break down your company’s recognition and reward program into shorter-term periods to make sure achievements are properly and timely acknowledged.
5. Give Honest Feedback
In terms of work results, whether good or bad, honest feedback from leaders will receive employees’ respect. Honest feedback helps employees understand what they’re good at and what they need to work on.
6. Give Your Employees Autonomy
Nowadays, many businesses use project management software that allows employees to better manage their own work progress. This enhances the autonomy and accountability in work, as well as saving time on meetings. Everyone can control and evaluate the work progress through the analytics of such software.
7. Turn Daily Work into a Game
A day at work will go by with boredom if everything happens the same way as it is. By “gamifying” the daily tasks, everyday activities will become more engaging and exciting.
This employee engagement activity can be implemented in many ways. You can hold fun competitions between small groups in the workplace and give attractive prizes to winners.
8. Be Clear About Career Path
During the onboarding period, you should give employees a transparent plan about where they’re headed in the business. Discuss their personal goals and how your development plan can help them achieve those targets.
Besides laying out a career path for your staff, you should also tell them about your expectations towards their performance. Set milestones and metrics to make their work progress more visible. Let them know they’ve got your support and presence whenever they need you.
9. Mentoring New Employees
Assigning mentors to new hires is one of the most popular employee engagement ideas. New staff are often confused and lost in a new environment. That’s when mentors (either you or your current employees) come into place.
Mentors will answer important questions that new employees often hesitate to ask, and at the same time share experience and knowledge at work. This will help new employees quickly adapt, learn a variety of skills, and grow.
People are more engaged in the job when they know that you care about them, not just your business. There are various ways to show that you care, and they’re not difficult to carry out.
Look at what people are naturally good at. Find ways to help them enhance their talents. Talk about what employees want to do and what you think they can do. Try assigning new and challenging tasks to help them prosper.
Notice days when your staff are down and unproductive. Ask them if they’re OK. Listen empathetically if they’re open enough to share. Give them the mental support they need.
11. Internal Social Network
You can create and maintain an internal social network just for your team. This is the place where you announce new policies, send out internal newsletters, publish good and bad news. Plus, it’s a platform for employees to share and talk about their work.
12. Social Work
Organizing social or charity activities not only fosters a positive spirit within your workforce but also brings multiple benefits. Your staff can discuss and select the cause or organizations they want to support.
13. Emphasize Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is one of the most sought-after criteria among job-seekers and employees. To enhance employee engagement, creating work-life balance opportunities would be a way that leaders should check out.
Flexibility is the key to implement this employee engagement idea. Provide staff with a flexible schedule. Allow them to work from home or take days off once in a while.
14. Celebrate Good Results
Successful results, big or small, are still a clear testament to the dedication of your employees. No one goes through missions or projects that last for months or years without sacrificing energy and time. Recharge with praise and a small party to celebrate their merits.
15. Encourage Learning
Lack of opportunities to learn and develop is one of the top reasons why employee management fails. Establish training sessions, seminars, and conferences to help your employees hone their knowledge and skills.
You can also set up learning groups or a book club in which employees can share their experience and give each other advice or feedback about their job. Do internal surveys to find out what your staff want to learn about and when to schedule training sessions.
Conclusion
Engaged employees are a fundamental part of any good workplace. That’s why employee engagement efforts need to be done continuously and steadily.
Try out some of the above 15 employee engagement ideas at your workplace. Some of them are so simple and fun, but small changes like that can actually go a long way in keeping top people with your business.
