High employee engagement can mean higher productivity and a happier workforce, which means that creating creative employee engagement ideas is a priority. Leaving engagement up to chance is risky — it must be actively cultivated from the top down. But when coming up with fun ideas for employee engagement is proving tough, where can you start?
From digital content experiences to surveys to growth opportunities, we’ve rounded up 10 of our favorite ideas to kickstart your employee engagement program.
10 creative ideas for employee engagement
Prioritize the employee onboarding experience
When it comes to employee engagement, onboarding is often your first opportunity to start generating excitement and motivation among your new hires.
Onboarding – the process of integrating new hires into the workplace – gives employees their first real taste of company culture and an understanding of the mission of your organization. A seamless onboarding experience is one of the best ways to help new hires feel welcomed and a key part of the team.
Make sure new hires have everything they need and outline clear expectations. Offer a robust schedule with plenty of training sessions and check-ins. Investing time into helping your new hires settle in can help them feel secure that you’re setting them up for success and encourage them to buy into the larger mission statement.
Make transparent communication a priority
Regular check-ins (including skip-level meetings if appropriate) are a key part of maintaining open, honest communication with employees. Transparent communication can encourage employees to ask questions and express concerns as soon as they arise, knowing that their opinions are valued. This can serve to build trust – a key component of employee engagement.
In addition to scheduled 1:1s, communication should extend to company-wide communications as well. Are you being forthright in meetings and acknowledging challenges? Or are you constantly putting blinders on and only discussing the positive? Cultivating an environment in which honest discussions are welcomed can go a long way to building a company culture that naturally encourages employee engagement.
Encourage employees to take ownership of their work
When employees feel ownership over their work, they’re more likely to view the goals of the organization as their own due to having a personal stake in their work. This can be incredibly empowering and drive engagement.
To get started, encourage managers to learn more about their employees’ interests, skills, and goals at work. What kinds of tasks and projects do they enjoy doing? Are there new skills they’d be interested in learning? With this extra information in hand, seek out opportunities to encourage growth. Play to your employees’ strengths – matching skill sets to projects is a surefire way to ensure employees are bringing the max effort to the table.
Create opportunities for employee collaboration
Collaboration is great for the workplace, with collaborating employees capable of staying on task for up to 64% longer than their solitary peers. Collaboration also provides opportunities for employees to learn and grow in less structured settings and also feel less siloed in their regular work.
The more employees can work with each other, particularly cross-departmentally, the more they can learn about and feel invested in the organization. You can foster this by encouraging partnerships on projects, organizing big idea brainstorms, and activities like hackathons. Basically, don’t leave it up to your employees to collaborate on their own, find ways to encourage it.
Offer professional development and growth opportunities
According to Business News Daily, professional development can not only lead to higher job satisfaction in employees but better retention rates as well. Professional development opportunities are a great way to encourage employee engagement, as it helps employees grow their skills while feeling valued by the company.
There are a wide range of ways to offer development opportunities for employees.
If possible, you can provide lunch-and-learns or reimbursement programs for courses outside of work. Need something more affordable? Look into providing access to asynchronous learning or creating digital content experiences to house your own!
Take employee feedback seriously
Surveys, 1:1s, skip levels, and more are great ways to collect employee feedback, but if you don’t do anything with that information, it doesn’t matter. Your team will know if their complaints and concerns go consistently unaddressed and it will undermine whatever positive effect listening to them had in the first place. Learning how to take feedback seriously can help improve employee engagement ideas across the board.
Committing to listening to feedback means looking for ways to enact change when there’s a common complaint across the board, or if an employee has raised an issue that’s been overlooked. If change isn’t possible, then part of that open and honest communication is letting them know that and doing your best to explain why. This will help create an environment where employees genuinely feel heard and understood.
Ensure training doesn’t end with onboarding
Training is an essential part of creating an engaged workforce, but training needs to be an ongoing process – not something that ends after the first week. If you have a sales enablement team, this is the perfect way to leverage them. Enablement can help keep your team interested and growing through programming designed specifically with their needs in mind.
That’s not to suggest that only sales teams can use further training, though. Every department can benefit from a refresher course or new training for advancements in tech or strategies, and providing these opportunities is a great way to keep boosting employee engagement.
Get creative with social events
Social events are a great way to bring teams and departments together in a relaxed setting and can be one of the more creative ideas for employee engagement. Happy hours and lunches are great, but there are plenty of other creative ways to build camaraderie. Offering a variety of activities that range from problem-solving and team-building to charitable efforts and community engagement.
Creating a variety of events, some that take place onsite and some off, that can accommodate a range of activity levels to help all employees feel included can do wonders. It can stop workers from feeling left out and may help them feel that they’re viewed as a full person, not just a worker bee. Crucially, making sure to schedule social opportunities that include remote or hybrid workers can help to build a community that extends to all workers – regardless of location.
Champion diversity
Diversity is extremely important to creating a healthy workplace and can help lead to a more engaged workforce. Consider forming employee resource groups (ERGs) for diversity groupings such as working parents, veterans, and BIPOC or LGBTQIA+ workers. Often led by the employees themselves, ERGs can be a great resource to leadership and management who want to create a more welcoming environment.
Championing diversity can also look like time spent arranging mentorship programs between employees and underserved or underrepresented communities. Finally, it might involve evaluating your recruitment practices to prioritize the inclusion of diverse talent.
Leverage employee engagement tools and technology
A great way to strengthen your employee engagement strategy ideas and efforts is to use the existing tools and technology available to you. This could include everything from tools to help you recognize employees’ hard work (and for them to recognize each other) to tools for communication, surveys, and team-building.
All of these (or a combination of a couple of them) can help you stay on top of your employee engagement efforts. It can also give you key insights into top employee engagement metrics, helping you to track, analyze, and course-correct over time.
Engage your employees with digital content experiences
Zoomforth makes creating interactive engagement content simple.
Whether you’re looking to centralize your entire onboarding process or host digital employee engagement solutions such as training tools or surveys, digital content experiences offer the perfect online location.
Zoomforth offers customizable templates, a full media library, and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor to make creating your fully-branded microsites a breeze. With full mobile compatibility, you can be confident your content will be functional (and look great!) no matter where your employees are accessing it. Plus, with no limit to the number of sites you can create, the engagement opportunities truly are endless.
Want to find out if a microsite is the right fit for your business? Try a free demo of Zoomforth today!
