5 Employee Engagement Ideas & Strategies

High employee engagement is a hallmark of some of the world’s most successful companies. When your employees are highly engaged with the company, they’re more productive, less likely to leave, better at providing customer service, and more likely to contribute to business profitability. 

If your engagement could use a boost, you don’t have to overhaul your whole corporate culture to make some improvements. Here are five simple and fresh ideas to improve employee engagement.

How to Engage Employees

1. Make routine updates more fun.

Every company shares new information with its employees somehow - emails, a bulletin board, printed memos, or even just shared aloud through the grapevine. These routine updates don’t have to be boring, but they usually are. (Woohoo! It’s another memo!)

Seize the opportunity to share updates with your employees in a fun, engaging way. Instead of sending the same old weekly email, start a weekly video update, post it on your company’s private YouTube channel, and email everyone a link. Feature a star employee and add some fun facts. 

This kind of quirky habit can add to the upbeat culture of your company and make your employees feel more connected to your mission. Even if you can’t take on the task of making a video every week, consider developing a cheerful weekly newsletter or flyer.

2. Host meaningful employee events.

Done right, employee events can boost your engagement significantly. Done wrong, they can actually make your employees feel more frustrated and disengaged.

The key is to make your events meaningful and collaborative. Providing a delicious lunch isn’t enough. To have a positive impact on engagement, it must foster a spirit of teamwork.

Here are a few ideas:

• Send your production staff to an escape room, where they work together to solve a mystery.
• Host a weekly trivia challenge for your sales staff, so they can learn facts and stats through friendly competition.
• Allow each department to choose between several team-oriented options for an afternoon off-site: bowling, taking a cooking class together or volunteering.

3. Allow employees to work remotely.

It sounds counterintuitive, but remote workers can actually be more engaged than the average employee. According to a Stanford University study, remote workers are 13.5% more productive than their office-based counterparts and are 9% more engaged with their jobs. Plus - and this is huge - they’re also 50% less likely to quit.

Here’s why: remote work makes people feel respected. It supports your employees’ work-life balance, so they’re able to handle personal commitments more easily and maintain better focus during their work hours.

4. Be loud and proud about wins.

Chances are, you’re not celebrating your employees loudly enough. When your company lands a new account, do you thank the salesperson publicly on LinkedIn? When your office manager saves 10% on supplies by seeking discounts, do you feature them in your monthly newsletter? You should.

Companies with high employee engagement constantly celebrate their wins, big or small, by acknowledging their employees in a public way. So share your wins everywhere: social media, Slack, email, on flyers in the building, in advertisements, and in-person with a handshake. 

In fact, research shows that a simple handshake or word of acknowledgment from the company CEO can be enough to turn a mildly-engaged employee into a highly-engaged employee. That’s why Entrepreneur advises “To be a better CEO, become the Chief Encouragement Officer.”

5. Share road maps and career paths.

Finally, build engagement by giving every employee a peek into the future. If they stay with your company for the long haul, what will they see? Provide an overall road map of the company’s goals and help each employee build their own individual career path.

This is especially important for workers who are millennial-aged or younger because they change jobs at a rate that’s three times faster than previous generations. They want you to show them why they should stick around and stay fully engaged with your company.

Bonus Engagement Tip: Get Some Outside Help

We know building engagement isn’t an easy task. If your company needs some help fostering deeper employee engagement, we can help. Visit the SelectOne blog for insights or contact us to discuss your engagement strategy.