22 Dec 75 Employee Engagement Ideas To Keep Them Connected

After the first half of 2021, 36% of US-based employees and 20% of the global workforce claimed to feel engaged at their workplace. This current trend looks to continue through the year, showing improvement and stability after the unpredictability of 2020.

While this data is an example of recovered stability, the number of actively disengaged employees has risen from the recorded 14% in 2020 to 15% in 2021. This is a significant statistic, seeing as of that 15%, 74% of disengaged employees are actively seeking new employment.

In comparison, only 30% of actively engaged employees would consider looking for new employment. Therefore, keeping employees engaged reduces the impact of high employee turnover and ensures that the wellbeing of the workforce is at the forefront of company mentality.

Reducing employee turnover leads to a happier workforce and more profit for the business. However, studies suggest that replacing an employee usually costs between 90% and 200% of their annual salary.

High employee engagement has the benefit of keeping employees connected to the workplace, but reports show that it also makes businesses 22% more profitable. On top of that, investing in creating a workplace culture with high employee engagement can lead to a 41% reduction in absenteeism.

Productivity will also see higher rates, even up to 17%, when compared to businesses reporting low employee engagement. These studies have shown that companies must create comprehensive employee engagement policies to keep their workforce appreciated.

This also leads to higher employee satisfaction, less stress-related problems, a continuously high standard in profits, and the retention of skilled employees.

With these figures in mind, we’ve looked at some of the best strategies for employee engagement that the most successful companies are using. Let’s take a look at how the professionals are managing this aspect of workplace culture.

Improve Communication

Employees feel better when they are heard and when their needs are taken into account. Of the 15% actively disengaged employees, many reported that poor management and communication made them consider other work options.

Per Gallup, the standard definition of employee engagement involves the workforce feeling enthusiastic about their role and committed to it. Ongoing studies are showing that leadership communication is an essential part of this process. Therefore, an effective internal communication system can lead to a highly successful employee engagement strategy.

The following ideas and activities can strengthen this aspect of your business.

Give Voice To Local Leaders

If you have an enterprise operating across numerous locations, it can be easy to lose track of employee engagement. This especially affects companies with employees in different states or even countries.

Part of the workforce may end up feeling ignored or unseen by the leadership of the company. This requires an effective strategy that can be simplified by empowering local leaders with delivering communication that directly affects each specific part of the company.

Local leaders will be able to manage communication to feel more immediate and involved, which will then keep the workforce engaged and heard. They can also be effective mediators between the company leadership and the needs of the employees.

Convey Messages Through Relevant People

Companies have many things to communicate to their employees, from health and safety guidance to business targets. You should make sure to select the best people to deliver this information at any given time.

Professional experience should be taken into account when choosing the people to deliver the message and personal events. When talking about safety procedures, you can award the role to someone who has been directly impacted by them, for example.

Choosing the most relevant speakers will create a network of internal influencers that will keep the company on brand while still keeping the interests of the employees first. It also establishes direct communication from sources that will keep the employees motivated and engaged.

Keep Employees Connected While They Work Remotely

While remote work was on the rise before 2020, its importance and practicality have been cemented since the pandemic. In September 2021, 45% of the US workforce with full-time hours stated that they worked either part or all of their schedule remotely.

The same survey showed that 91% of employees hope that they can continue to work remote hours going forward and that 54% are favoring a hybrid model over a traditional one. The data shows that remote work is here to stay. Communicating with the company’s remote workers needs to be efficiently planned to make sure that they are kept connected to the business. It is easy to become disengaged when there is no physical workplace, so making sure to have appropriate tools for remote work is essential.

Use Efficient Communication

Streamlining the communication process will be useful when it comes to keeping your employees engaged. The workforce needs to be kept in the loop, but the information delivered to them should be straightforward to access.

It should also be as instant and to the point as possible. The modern employee doesn’t have time to spend to waste on extraneous processes. Therefore, communication should be kept constant, with bite-sized information delivered as necessary.

Employees need to be able to easily communicate with leadership and peers, but in a way that is efficient and takes into account the importance of everyone’s schedules. Keeping channels open and tools updated to ensure the efficiency of this process is a helpful strategy.

Communicate Through Videos

Video has generally become one of the top formats for consuming information and entertainment. Companies can take advantage of the modern world’s predilection for the video format by using it to communicate it with employees.

This is a simple and easy way to absorb information, whether it’s presentations or business details. Employees can be encouraged to use videos to communicate with their peers or to send messages to leadership.

Teams can also communicate with each other easily while working remotely through video calls. Integrating this format into the company’s routine will keep everyone well-engaged and within reach of each other, no matter the physical distance. This will help employees feel connected at all times.

Monitor Internal Communication

Internal communication can provide a wealth of information concerning the needs of the workforce. Studying the analytics generated through monitoring will show you what is working and what needs to be changed when it comes to communication.

The data gathered through this constant observation will be instrumental to the establishment of an efficient communication strategy on a business-wide scale. All platforms that include internal communication have tools that permit analytics to be collected.

From Google Hangouts to Staffbase and SnapComms, these employee communication platforms will let you see which strategies are working and which require changes. They will also show you how your employees are making use of these tools and how they are responding to them.

Turn Employees Into Brand Ambassadors

Your company should always prioritize employees. They are the force that ensures the success and profit of the business. You can highlight the importance of the workforce while also promoting the company by turning employees into your best brand ambassadors.

The talent you hire will provide the most authentic voice that represents your business. Content related to the company that is shared by the employees working for it has a far wider reach than when the brand delivers it. When employee advocates share promotional information provided by the business, it receives more engagement.

Brand channels can only go so far in reaching wider audiences. When employees become the brand ambassadors, it shows that their input is respected by both the company and the audience receiving the messages.

Boost Peer-to-Peer Communication

While top-down communication is essential to the performance of the company and the relationship it has with employees, peer-to-peer relations are some of the most significant for employees. They also have the benefit of creating relations that go beyond the workspace and can combine the best of both worlds.

Encouraging and supporting collaborations between peers will take some of the pressure off managers while still keeping employees connected and engaged with the company. Rewarding peer-to-peer relationships can also boost the productivity and efficiency of teams throughout the company. You can even create mentorship programs that set up relationships between veteran employees and newcomers. This has the added benefit of making sure that new hires get to learn from the experience of established talent.

Experiment With Different Strategies

While tested, communication strategies are always great to implement throughout a company. However, the world is evolving at a rapid pace, and this includes the workplace. Therefore, you should experiment with different methods to keep ahead of the needs of your employees. Even if some of these strategies can’t work on a long-term basis, they will still shed light on some important aspects.

If you want to be there for your employees, provide them with different communication strategies. Try to stick to traditional choices that are proven to work for the business, but insert new options at regular intervals.

Your employees will feel like the communication options aren’t stagnant. They will also feel engaged by the newness of the experiments, and you may find multiple choices that can be implemented as company staples.

Invest in Powerful Communication Tools

To have the best employee engagement, you have to ensure that you provide your workforce with the best communication tools. This will help them remain connected to the workplace no matter where they are, and they will be able to have easy access to each other and supervisors.

There are several types of communication tools you can consider to make available to your employees:

• Apps that make instant messaging easily available to your employees, like Slack and Flock.
• Collaboration tools that make working on team projects easy. They may also offer an in-document option to chat and comment live, like Google Docs.
• Employee Social Networks, or ESN, is a great communication tool to keep your workforce connected. You can use apps like Yammer for this purpose.

Extend Your Reach

No matter how large the company is, you should make sure that your reach extends to every employee, whether they work remotely or not. Establishing employee engagement through extensive communication must work for everyone involved in the business.

To achieve this goal, you should make use of comprehensive internal communications tools across channels. This will keep employees connected to the business and actively engaged with it. Avoid having disengaged workers by providing them with the necessary support to feel included.

The rise in disengagement is felt more starkly by remote workers. This is why having as many communication channels as possible made available to every single employee in the company is necessary.

Use An Employee App

Worldwide, companies have come to realize the importance of using employee apps. This has developed from observing the importance of having easy access to self-service tasks on the go and the data that shows the importance of personal devices.

This culture of smartphone appreciation has brought about the advent of workplaces implementing BYOD (or Bring Your Own Device) policies. Personal phones are no longer a distraction or a detriment but used as another tool for communication and connection at work.

The pandemic has accelerated the implementation of BYOD. Currently, 85% of companies have BYOD policies in place, and this figure is set to grow in the coming years.

This makes offering access to an employee app where they can stay in touch with each other and with the company an easy way to keep the workforce engaged while not using too many resources.

Communicate Through Various Formats

We live in a technology-fuelled world, and your business should reflect this and make use of every tool at its disposal. To keep employees engaged, you should be flexible and versatile with how you deliver on communication.

Go beyond just the video or the written format, and engage with media that is relatable to your workforce. For example, in 2020, 55% of the US population reported listening to podcasts throughout the year. In 2021, that figure has already risen to 57%.

Using podcasts as an employee engagement tool is a way to cater to your workforce while making the process fun and relevant. You can also implement the use of GIFs on employee platforms like Assembly or in Slack channels.

GIFs are a fun and easy ways to bring points across and encourage interaction and collaboration between team members. They are also one of the most used visual reaction tools.

Gamify the Employee Life Cycle

Making work seem more entertaining and less stressful is a great way to boost employee engagement and communication. Companies can benefit significantly from gamifying the parts of the employee life cycle that can be the most strenuous.

You can implement a gamified onboarding process by redefining how new hires have to fill out paperwork and meet their coworkers. This can be done through something as easy as a treasure hunt that encourages new talent to find pieces of information while collaborating with their colleagues.

This reduces the awkwardness of those first few days while also making the paperwork feel less intimidating and less like a chore.

Gamifying the work routine is a great way of delivering messages and enabling communication. Employees have more fun with the process and retain information far easier when it is gamified.

You can include small daily games like short trivia quizzes for the teams, holiday-specific activities, and team bonding exercises.

Allow and Encourage Informal Communication

For many reasons, work culture can be quite rigid and stifling for employees. There are many formal guidelines to adhere to, and communication becomes entangled in that. This can make employees feel like they can’t communicate in ways that feel relevant to them without having to go through multiple hoops.

You should enable channels for completely informal employees and where they can have the freedom to express themselves. The company can keep formal communication in place in other areas, as long as there is a balance.

Employees will feel heard and like their existence in the workplace is less regulated. It will boost communication and make them feel more engaged while promoting a positive work culture that treats the workforce as human.

Deploy the Right Tools for Your Business Model

Each business will have specific criteria and specific needs. Likewise, each workforce is different, and you should always base your company’s employee engagement policies on what is relevant to the people they need to represent.

If you have a large enterprise with numerous locations operating across countries and states, you will have to make sure each venue is well-serviced by its communication policies. If you have a small to midsize business, you should focus the tools you use for employee engagement on those numbers.

Doing too much or too little when it comes to employee engagement and meeting the workforce’s communication needs can quickly devolve into disengagement and high turnover.

Modernize the Intranet

While it may seem that using a company intranet has become outdated, it can still be used effectively to boost employee engagement while focusing on ease of communication. It will also allow your employees to feel heard while providing easy access to work tools even remotely.

To make sure you are using the company intranet as effectively as possible, use analytics to determine how your employees feel about it and what it enables them to do. Then, use that information to adapt the platform to meet those needs.

You should also ensure that the intranet serves every single employee, from frontline to back office. This will help the whole workforce feel connected and enjoy the benefits of easy communication.

Create Flexible Policies for the Digital Workplace

The formality we mentioned earlier can leak into the emerging digital workplace and negatively impact it. This evolution of the workplace concept should not be treated as a way to inflict further rigid policies on the workforce.

While certain regulatory and safety policies will always have to be implemented, no matter the type of environment, you should adapt the digital workplace to the needs of your workforce.

Create a people-positive place and provide it with the relevant tools to suit your employees. The digital environment can then be used to boost engagement while keeping everyone connected to match and even go beyond the physical workplace.

Gain Information Through Pulse Surveys

If you want to make sure you will remain constantly aware of how your employees are engaging with the business, you should deploy company-wide pulse surveys at regular intervals. These quick and short surveys can be used as a powerful analytics tool.

They require very little effort to create and to send out to the workforce, and they can be customized to seek specific information or just as a way to check in with employees. It also allows them to answer questions in an informal way without any pressure or expectations.

Pulse surveys can be completed in five minutes and can boost employee communication and engagement with minimal effort involved on all sides.

Ensure Employee Wellbeing

Employee wellbeing should always come at the top of the list of company priorities. Managing this aspect of tending to the workforce will help you keep engagement up because your employees will feel they are supported.

These next ideas and activities catered will help keep your employees safe, happy, and engaged. This will benefit keeping a loyal workforce in a positive work culture, so it shouldn’t be an aspect that companies overlook.

The success of using employee engagement tactics to promote employee wellbeing can have significant results that will extend long-term and continue to benefit your business model.

Make Fitness a Perk

It can be very complicated to maintain an active, healthy lifestyle while working a full-time job. The lack of time for it doesn’t mean it’s not a highly important aspect of maintaining a good work-life balance while keeping employees in good health.

Engaged employees are happy employees, and companies can boost engagement by ensuring fitness is included as a business perk. You can provide access to on-site facilities and integrate fitness activities with the normal work routine.

This will allow employees to benefit from all the advantages of leading a healthy lifestyle while keeping them from feeling like they’re missing out or having to sacrifice time during their day to stay active.

Invest in Wellness

According to Gallup, 43% of employees state that their work life positively impacts their physical and mental health. In contrast, 29% of employees state that it has a negative impact on their wellbeing.

Even more importantly, 62% of engaged employees report that their work lives positively impact their health, while a staggering 54% of disengaged employees say it has a detrimental effect.

These figures highlight the need for companies to invest in wellness programs that can provide adequate support to the workforce. All employees should feel they have enough access to wellness to have a positive experience within the company.

Offer Flexible Schedules

While some employees prefer a more traditional work schedule, many have noticed that a more flexible routine suits them better. The sudden massive need for remote work allowed many employees to realize that they can use flexible hours to improve their work-life balance.

Including the option of flexible shifts makes employees feel like their needs are being heard. It will also help keep them engaged by allowing them to have a say in how and when they work. This will often improve productivity statistics instead of having a negative impact on them.

The modern workplace has to provide modern solutions to today’s employees. This is a way to stay ahead in terms of innovation and employee engagement, even in an ever-changing world like this one.

Pick Relevant Incentives

When creating an incentives scheme designed to boost employee engagement, you should take into account the relevance of what you’re offering. Make sure to pick perks that fit your employees and will positively impact their lives.

The best way to establish what will best suit them is to ask them. You can use anything from feedback forms to opening a forum, allocating special meeting times for this subject, or filling quick pulse surveys.

Being aware of what your employees need is the way to establish what to offer them. This will also depend on the size of your company and the facilities you have available.

Enable Social Opportunities

Whether your employees are working remotely or in person, they can be affected by workplace loneliness and a lack of opportunities for social engagement. This can be a highly alienating occurrence and can easily result in disengaged employees.

It can be very easy for employees to get absorbed in a fast-paced work routine that demands all their time and attention. Especially with remote workers, it can be hard to disconnect from that when not provided the right moments for it.

As a company, you can avoid issues related to the lack of social moments by enabling them. Give your employees channels to connect to each other, even for those not in the same teams. You should also create social activities designed to cause easy interaction.

Make Healthy Behaviors Part of the Business

Companies can always include wellness in small ways, but it can have a huge impact when they take the time to include health in the business behaviors. When a company prioritizes health, this sends the right message to employees.

Behaviors are part of most businesses, and they usually put the focus on how the employees can benefit the company. In this case, the company can show employees that their wellbeing comes first.

Adding health to the business behaviors will make wellness part of the routine for everyone. This will not only have a positive impact on employee engagement but also on productivity. Promoting healthy lifestyles will reduce absenteeism provoked by stress-related issues.

Include Stress-Reducing Activities

Stress is one of the worst culprits behind illnesses that cause absenteeism, and that can lead to high turnover within a company. When a business takes the time to include activities that reduce stress during the typical workday, it can significantly impact the work culture.

To keep stress levels low, you should foster a workplace that focuses on the wellbeing of the people rather than just targets. Provide regular stress management classes, massage sessions, and easy access to counseling.

You should also make sure to include time for frequent one-on-one talks between employees and managers just to check in and enable communication. This will help your workforce feel engaged and less pressured.

Promote Mental Wellness

While physical health is a huge part of work wellness programs, companies should also prioritize support for mental health. This type of wellness can be hugely beneficial when actively promoted by the business because it will remind employees that they have the right to spend time on self-care whenever necessary.

Companies can help to prioritize mental wellness by providing various resources for it. Lack of mental wellness can become a huge obstacle for employee engagement, and it can easily make them feel disconnected.

You should include mental health education seminars and comprehensive information about how it can affect employees. You should also make sure that there is a support network for any employee who needs it.

Connect Wellness to Productivity

Wellness and productivity are both necessary for a business, but they are not mutually exclusive. As a company, you can easily connect these two concepts, which will help you use both as tools for increased employee engagement too.

When your wellness strategy aligns with wellness and productivity, it can immediately positively impact the workforce. These two separate aspects can be used at once to boost each other while creating excellent employee engagement.

Businesses can use wellness as a way to enhance productivity. By making sure, your employees are healthy and in the best mental and physical state, you will get to reap the rewards of their work.

You can use wellness to enhance productivity by promoting healthy habits. Provide easy access to good nutrition if the premises allow it, or at least to high-energy snacks. Allow employees to go enjoy some fresh air if they are feeling overwhelmed.

You should also include breaks that are designed with the needs of the employees in mind. This will, in turn, boost performance.

Keep Track of All the Factors

There are many factors related to wellness that can have an impact on employee engagement. A successful people-first business model should take into account all these factors to make sure that it covers all the necessary bases and provides the most relevant resources.

Your company might go through peak production times that will enhance your employees’ workloads and stress levels. At times like those, you should have even more support in place to make the experience as smooth as possible.

You should also have enough leadership and effective internal communication to correctly establish the needs of each employee and each team’s performance. This will allow the business to offer the correct type of support to those who need it.

Offer Comprehensive Rewards

Employee engagement is always helped by a good rewards program offered by the company. While fitness perks and mental health support are both welcome and necessary, providing relevant rewards to your workforce will positively impact your workforce.

From gift cards to employee discounts on electronics and services, you should make use of employee recognition platforms like Nectar or Blueboard. These platforms can also provide memorable experiences for your employees.

This will help employees feel engaged by getting rewards that can boost their personal lives and affect how they perform within the company. It allows them to achieve results that have an impact on their overall wellbeing while also boosting their performance.

Enable Easy Access to Insurance

Health benefits are some of the most sought-after by employees. Facilitating access to insurance policies is a straightforward way for companies to boost employee engagement while promoting wellness within the workplace.

Employees consider health benefits as a defining factor behind whether or not to accept a job offer. Making sure to have a good health package will help you attract and retain new talent. Companies also have the power to reduce the stress of getting health insurance from external providers.

Access to health benefits will keep your employees in the best shape, and it will take away the pressure of financial anxiety that potential health problems could otherwise cause.

Make Space for Wellness

Wellness is easily overlooked, both by companies and employees, especially during hectic work schedules. Businesses can avoid this important aspect being ignored by setting out specific times for it during the work routine.

This will highlight how essential it is to take a moment on any day, no matter how busy, and invest it in wellness. Make sure that your employees know they are not only allowed but actively encouraged to prioritize their wellbeing and give them the resources to do it.

By integrating wellness into the schedule and setting aside a specific time for it each day, even if it’s just five minutes where you can let teams check in with each other or take a breather, you will bring the point across that this matters to the business.

Employees will get the time to disconnect a little from the frantic rhythm of normal routines by checking in with themselves and others. This has the bonus of making them feel more engaged with their peers and with the company.

Streamline the Process

Due to time constraints and a lack of resources, looking for wellness support within a company can seem too difficult. When you invest in this aspect, make it as easy as possible to access and highlight its presence so that everyone can be aware of it.

Don’t waste too many resources on providing a convoluted wellness program that doesn’t accurately represent your employees. The size of your workforce and the individuals’ needs will impact how wellness should be shaped.

Take the time to learn about what would best suit your business and your people, and then create a program that is tailored to them in a straightforward way.

Boost Entertainment with Challenges

Wellness should never become yet another work activity that feels like a chore. It should be the time that employees take to disconnect from work while focusing on their mental and physical health.

To encourage this, you should create some fun challenges around this concept. Organize friendly team competitions that are awarded points for activities like step counting, hikes at lunchtime, healthy food cook-offs, and group cycling adventures.

This will make your employees feel engaged while fostering collaboration, communication, and above all, healthy work and positive work culture. It will also promote the company’s attitude toward wellness while increasing productivity through actively highlighting the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, both at work and at home.

Offer Financial Planning Resources

Financial stress is one of the biggest anxiety triggers that employees tend to face. While having financial stability through steady employment is a weight lifted off the shoulders of the workforce, you should provide support to help them with financial health.

This will keep employees feeling supported in all aspects, and it will boost engagement because it is a relevant resource that benefits the workforce. You can include easy access to financial planning that will help them manage their earnings and increase their profits.

This can also help them pay off student debt, invest in the right mortgages, and plan for future large purchases like cars or real estate. Minimizing financial stress will help your employees feel more positive, productive, and engaged.

Subsidize Wellness Activities

A healthy lifestyle is highly beneficial, but it can also require a financial investment every month that many employees can’t sustain on a regular basis. Healthy food tends to be the most expensive, while gyms and fitness classes can pile on the expenses.

Companies can get ahead of that problem by subsidizing wellness activities for their employees. This has the benefit of promoting a healthy work culture while providing relevant discounts or financial aid to support an active lifestyle.

It is an especially convenient incentive, especially if you have on-site fitness facilities and can add to them by offering various classes. You can also generally help the employees of the investment made into health by offering them cashback for their groceries from specific stores.

Provide Access to Classes and Online Learning

While fitness activities on-site are a great resource for boosting health, you should go further than that and cover all employee health needs with plenty of learning opportunities. For example, you can combine yoga activities with learning about the philosophy behind it. This will also help enable more profound meditation sessions.

In these turbulent times, you can make learning more accessible by enabling access to online resources. Online classes can be a great way to learn more about wellness, and you can also provide subscriptions to apps like FitOn. Employees can use the workouts in these apps whenever and wherever they feel like it.

Stay in Touch

There are so many aspects of wellness that may seem more important, but you shouldn’t forget to provide a personal touch. Include regular check-ins with employees on an informal level. Messages, one-to-ones, emails, all of these should be used so that employees don’t feel like their presence is unimportant.

Managers and supervisors should take the time to know things about their teams on a personal level. Teams should be aware of important events in the lives of the individuals forming it, as long as they are comfortable sharing that information.

Even if everyone works remotely, there should be an allocated time to focus on birthdays, weddings, and other milestones. No matter how many activities you offer, employees will still feel the need to have their presence acknowledged.

Create Hubs

Hubs are a great way to make every resource involved in a company’s wellness program easily accessible to all employees. You can use them as part of online employee platforms so that they can use them on the go.

You can include literature for mental and physical health, from coping mechanisms to nutrition. You can also include links to more information on these matters and services that may further help employees. These can be backed up with discounts or financial incentives for investing in healthy lifestyles.

This means that your employees will have access to these resources whenever they need them, and that will change based on each individual. The hubs will allow them to pick and choose what is relevant to them at a particular time and enable them to seek further support.

Put a Support Network in Place

Above all, the most important part of using a wellness program is to put a support network in place that is there for all employees. This will promote employee engagement and positive work culture, and employees will know they can seek support when necessary.

You should clearly signpost your wellness strategies and programs so that employees will know exactly what kind of support to expect from the company. Train your leadership in exactly how to offer and implement that support.

This will lead to a more harmonious and healthy working environment that will result in better performance and statistics all around.

Be There for Everyone

Employee engagement will be highly motivated by a company that is there for its employees in visible and constant ways. Modern work culture needs to invest in treating its workforce as individuals with different needs that require motivation, reward schemes, and support.

From new hires to long-term employees, everyone should feel acknowledged and respected by the company. This will boost engagement levels which will result in less turnover and in a far more productive business.

The success of the company cannot be divorced from the performance and wellbeing of its employees. Modern workplaces should tailor the culture based on this fact. These next employee engagement ideas will provide you with some guidance on how to best be there for your people.

Use Feedback Channels

If you’re using apps like Slack to remain in direct communication with your teams, you should add chatbots to specific channels that can be used only to share feedback. A chatbot can always be present in a dedicated space.

It can be set to ask feedback questions and then provide follow-up support for each employee that can then be escalated to management if necessary. Using a chatbot will allow 24/7 access to feedback sharing, which can then be acted upon efficiently.

These tools will streamline a process that can be cumbersome for all parties involved, and its convenience should be taken advantage of when possible.

Pay Attention to the Experienced Employees

New hires are always an exciting addition to any team, but your veteran workforce has been through it all and has an unmatched wealth of experience. They should not be made to feel that they are becoming redundant as they age.

Your experienced employees will be the most useful part of the onboarding process for new talent. You can create mentorship programs that will involve an exchange of experience and on-the-go learning that only the older workforce can provide.

New hires will become used to the company much more quickly in this way, and your older employees will get to feel like they continue to be heard and able to make a difference. This will also encourage building new relations from the start.

Take Visible Action To Implement Feedback

When feedback is passed on to the leadership, make sure it is all carefully taken into account. Not everything will be implemented, but the changes that do result from these suggestions should be highlighted.

The act of receiving and paying attention to each feedback suggestion should also be a visible and regular part of the work culture. Employees will know that their opinions are at the very least being heard, and the importance of feedback in shaping company policies should be advertised.

Encourage employees to use all the tools at their disposal to deliver feedback and then follow up with them even if their suggestions are not being used to change the company. The act of listening to them is as vital for employee engagement as the rest.

Reward Employees With Recognition

When possible, you should always use employee recognition platforms to boost employee engagement and reward your workforce with the credit it deserves for a job well done.

Software provided by Kazoo, Kudos, or Reward Gateway can help you implement this system with little effort on your behalf. These platforms will enable you to efficiently recognize the hard work that your employees are delivering within your company.

While material rewards are always welcome, recognition throughout the business is equally as satisfying to employees. The recognition can come from top-down but also from peers, which can be even more of a boost.

Focus On Personal Achievements

Team achievements and targets can seem more significant on a big scale, but you should never forget to acknowledge individual successes scored by individuals. Management should know to establish clear personal goals for all employees.

These goals can be worked on as part of an ongoing performance evaluation or as short-term objectives. When they are achieved, new ones should be selected that are tailored to each individual.

Before doing that, the fulfillment of these goals should be visibly celebrated to make employees feel like their hard work is being recognized no matter the scale. It is through each goal, no matter how small, that the company achieves overall success.

Redefine the Work Environment

The traditional work environment was generally known for being rigid and strict. The modern workplace has had to adapt through various local and global challenges, and this should be reflected in how it is planned to suit the workforce best.

The work environment should promote a positive work culture. It should also be flexible and used to foster communication and understanding. Your employees should feel motivated but also comfortable in this context.

Use the work environment to inspire your employees and to create engagement. Include entertainment spaces and outdoor areas that they can use to disconnect if the facilities allow it.

Allow Employees To Play to Their Strengths

All individuals who are part of your workforce will have different strengths to bring to the team. They should not all have to do the exact same things. Get to know them and establish what they prefer doing and what aspects of their role they excel at over others.

Some employees will deliver perfect targets in more than one area, but they should always be enabled and encouraged to play to their preferences and their strengths. This will build a stronger team that achieves more cohesive results and celebrates the different skill sets of each of its members.

Motivate Your Workforce

A big aspect of employee engagement is motivation. Keeping the workforce well-stocked with challenges that suit them and keep them engaged with the business is a great way to achieve excellent engagement levels.

Efforts should be made to keep each employee motivated, from the new hires to the long-term employees about to retire. Challenges shouldn’t be used to add pressure to the workload, but they should add variety and perhaps require different skills to be used.

Motivated employees have a lower rate of disengagement and discontentment because they don’t have to feel like they’re stagnating and doing the same daily routine.

Get Advice From Employees

As you’ve already noticed, listening to employees goes a long way in establishing positive relationships and boosting engagement levels. You should also include them when you are planning the goals of the team or even the company. Take their advice into consideration.

You are building a business full of some of the best talent available in the field. Their expertise and opinions on how to move forward with specific items on the agenda should be heard and taken into account.

This will make employees feel engaged and respected. It will also foster a culture of dialogue and a business community that chases goals together. Even if the advice isn’t implemented, it can still lead to a productive strategy.

Prevent Overworking

At times, adding extra working hours to the roster that are available for overtime can’t be avoided. This is when the company is performing at its peak and has a long list of things to achieve.

Despite this, you should not foster a culture in which overworking is actively encouraged. It should be regulated and only made available to claim by those who haven’t yet worked over their recommended hours.

It is important for the company and the employees to not foster a culture of overworking while being exhausted. Extra hours should be rewarded with double pay whenever possible, and they should be capped to avoid any related health problems.

Reward Individuals for Being Themselves

It can be easy for employees to think that they must be like everyone else in the team to fit in as a company member. Companies should combat this by rewarding individuality and innovation.

Modern businesses need both of these things to evolve according to the fast pace of our times. Employees who stand out for their individuality are an asset that prevents the workforce from becoming mired in outdated traditions.

Encourage individuals to be themselves and speak up about how they relate to the work and the company.

Promote Out-of-Office Activities

The workplace can become stifling, especially during high-performance times when there is very little time to do anything else other than the job each employee is assigned. To prevent burnout and other stress-related issues from taking over the workforce, you should include as many out-of-office activities as possible during the workweek.

If the weather allows it, set aside for team walks or picnic lunches. If the elements get in the way, visit a nearby café or restaurant instead. Take the team to museums, galleries, or other close entertainment venues that can allow them to disconnect even for half an hour.

Be Clear About the Vision

Company plans and targets can evolve, but they will usually be decided by the leadership, usually with data provided by the workforce. Employee feedback should be taken into account for business decisions, but they may not always know how the company is tackling the goals it has set for itself.

You should be forthcoming with your employees and let them know what the business model wants to achieve and how. This will make them feel included and that their opinions are valued, but even more than that, they will make employees know what they are heading toward on an individual level too.

Automate Processes

To keep employees engaged, you should not make them have to get mired in routine mindless tasks that they don’t need to do anymore. Empower them with self-service tasks, but automate redundant processes through people management platforms like BambooHR.

This will enable the automation of processes like payroll or time-off requests that will clear the workload of many employees in the company while allowing them straightforward access to these tasks.

Choose the Correct Leaders

Your management choices will have a huge impact on the success of your workforce. Internal communications are essential to establishing high engagement levels and supporting employees. These will usually be structured by leadership around the needs of team members.

When the leaders don’t take the time to get to know the people and to understand them, there is little chance of them inspiring others. Comprehensive training should be provided to managers and supervisors to make sure they are aware of how to deal with all their responsibilities.

Prevent Dissatisfaction

The most straightforward way to avoid employees becoming disengaged or discontent to the point of considering leaving the company is to check in with them about how they’re feeling. Set aside time for each manager or team leader to talk at length with each team member about how they are feeling and whether they are satisfied with what they are doing.

If the employee expresses any dissatisfaction, changes should be made immediately to the extent of what is possible. The same should be the case if you notice that the employee has become disconnected and apathetic. It means it’s time for proper check-in and new challenges.

Offer Volunteering Opportunities

Employees feel very engaged when they are giving back. You can establish a rewards scheme for those who choose to volunteer. The company should have various options in place with local charities, but they should also cover its expense.

Employees can be given flexible volunteering hours so that they can use their day to make space for more good in the world.

Highlight Employee Champions

While you should celebrate the efforts of all employees, it is highly motivational and inspiring to select champions among them when they go above and beyond what is requested of them. Employee champions can be a great way to promote the brand and company behaviors to their peers while also making the individual feel recognized and celebrated for their achievements.

Whenever employees go the extra mile for the company, make them the brand champion for an established period. This will keep employees engaged while encouraging them to also strive for this recognition.

Create Development Opportunities

A rising trend in the cause of employee disengagement is a lack of progression opportunities. This can be easily prevented even if there are currently no open positions within the company that they could fill.

You should provide all the employees who wish to participate as many development opportunities as they’d like. They can spend time actively preparing for a different position within the company and learn new skill sets that award plenty of experience.

Online classes and resources can help develop your employees so that they can feel like they are progressing even if they remain in the same role.

Enable Building Workplace Traditions

While the workplace should represent modern values and be flexible, you should encourage employees to build new traditions with their peers and with the company.  Creating holiday activities or special ways to celebrate milestones, going out for dinner every week, spending coffee hours together are all activities that will help keep employees engaged.

It will also make the company feel less like work and more comfortable and welcoming.

Go Beyond Money

Profits are, of course, a big part of a company’s success, but employees should not be made to feel like money is all they are there to make. They should be encouraged to network and form relationships, speak their minds and make statements.

They should see how their role impacts not only the profits but also the work culture of the company. When you reward or recognize their efforts, don’t just settle for financial bonuses. Treat them to experiences and make them aware of their importance.

This can be a memorable way for both the business and the employees to remember that they are not only there for material gain.

Be Flexible With Teams

Cross-collaboration should be implemented regularly to establish connections between teams and allow individuals to flourish in different environments and around different people. While standard teams should be a staple, allow employees to provide their individual expertise to other teams that lack it or that are looking for different perspectives. This will enable everyone involved to gain more experience than if everyone would settle in the same team for the entire duration of their employment.

Modernize the Ticketing System

The service desk is an essential part of the smooth running of any business, but many still opt for manual ticketing that can confuse employees and waste their time. A modern, automatic ticketing system will allow employees to self-service most of their troubleshooting.

This will streamline the process on both sides, which will allow the matter to be resolved quicker. With this system, employees can just submit a ticket, and a support chat will open with the service desk. Updates will be provided automatically, and the case will be marked as closed as soon as a resolution is reached.

Respect Should Always Be Present

It may go without saying, but respect is an essential part of keeping employee engagement levels up. The workforce should always feel like their time and their presence is respected, no matter their role in the company.

A culture of respect and positivity will keep employees easily connected to the company. Hearing them out and making space for them will allow this respect to be seen in ways that directly impact the culture.

Provide the Correct Tools

One of the most important aspects of keeping employees engaged requires you to have all the relevant tools accessible for them to feel connected. If you have remote workers, make sure to assist them with the proper technology so they don’t feel cut off from the business.

If they want to progress, make sure you give them access to all the relevant training that they require to do so. For those struggling with stress or mental health problems, give them an at-work support network with access to counseling.

Employees can easily feel disengaged if they are not provided with the right tools. A company should always be ready to foresee its needs.

Customize the Employee Life Cycle

Employees are not a one-size-fits-all group of people. They all have their own attributes and skills, and they have all been shaped by different experiences. The company should take that into account and provide a personalized approach to the employee life cycle.

This will involve getting to learn about employees from the start, which will make it easier to establish a good relationship with them that will help them feel engaged immediately. A tailored approach to their role in the company will make them feel appreciated as individuals.

Highlight the Importance of Diversity

A diverse workforce is one of the most powerful attributes that a company can have. By having good diversity policies in check, your company will be sure to get the best talent from anywhere and at any time.

This will encourage employees to share different experiences with each other, which can lead to a culturally rich workplace. Make sure to accommodate the needs of people from different backgrounds.

Encourage Active Engagement

One of the threats to employee engagement isn’t just the group of disengaged people but also the passively engaged individuals. These are always at risk of becoming fully disconnected.

Companies should have procedures in place to motivate and encourage employees to be actively engaged in the business. This includes asking them to share their views and listening to them, leading to them remaining actively part of the network.

Instill a Culture of Collaboration

Collaboration with peers is one of the easiest ways to boost employee engagement levels. It makes it easy for coworkers to socialize while keeping them connected to the goals of the company.

Allow different people to come together and work on the same projects, even beyond a team level.

Take Inspiration From Industry Leaders

Some of the biggest companies in the world have already implemented groundbreaking employee engagement ideas. Google, for example, has had huge success with its 20% program.

This is based on studies that have proven that the best productivity is reported in people working for 52-minute stints, then taking 17-minute breaks between them. Google allows their employees to use 20% of their workday on whatever they feel like doing, even if it’s not work-related.

Dell has implemented a successful flexible work program that is supported by extensive support tools. Examples such as these can help you see what works and what doesn’t.

Allow Space for Real Talk

The venture capital investment GV is the inspiration behind the concept now dubbed as ‘anxiety parties.’ These are special team meetings during which each member can write what their biggest anxieties are when it comes to interacting with people at work.

Everyone can then have a chance to read each other’s lists, which can dismantle the severity of these fears and highlight how unfounded they are. This can solve various issues holding employees back while fostering a safe space for them among their peers.

Encourage Innovation and Creativity

Regardless of the skills that leadership has, a company can quickly become less creative when it comes to tackling challenges. Employees should be encouraged to step up and provide innovative and creative opinions on how to go forward that can then become solutions.

Use Mantras as Cohesive Branding

Encourage your employees to create and use mantras at work. They can come up with their own, or the leadership can juggle ideas to see what would fit. These mantras can be used to start the day but also as part of brand merchandising.

Employees can get branded clothing or items that include their favorite mantra and remind them of their role in the company. This can keep them engaged for longer and in an entertaining way.

Start Shifts With Team Bonding

If you have daily team meetings before the start of the workday, spend a few minutes on team bonding. This can be a time for everyone to formally check in on each other and have a chat before the business side of things needs to be discussed.

A strategy like this can set a positive tone for the whole day.

Celebrate All Successes

No matter how big or how the company should always celebrate small an employee’s success within the company. This will cement the employee’s position in the company while keeping them engaged and connected to their role.

It also shows appreciation for their hard work and their progress during their time with the company.