Top Employee Engagement Activities

For a company with 10 or 10,000 employees, connecting them and ensuring everyone enjoys working is essential. One way to do that is with engagement strategies. Coming up with challenges or engagement activities can be hard, but they are effective.

Employee engagement activities tend to have a significant impact on the general morale of a team and ensures they gel well together. They help in bonding and creating a more robust core who understand each other and work better.

Finding the right balance of employee engagement activities is crucial in helping companies come across as a fun place to work in.. Here are a few employee engagement activities for your company to try out and keep the energy levels up.

• Assigning a mentor for every newcomer
  Onboarding process can be a bit difficult for newcomers, especially freshers. Building a healthy relationship with an experienced professional will help them ease up the process and in this way he or she can adapt with the team seamlessly.
• Themed office parties/celebrations
  This initiative can help build employee loyalty and office culture. This activity will be more fun when the theme occasions are unbiased and entertaining. Eg. Halloween party.
• Encourage charity
  Group donations to charitable causes within the company will help employees develop good morale and sharing mentality. Some people find peace with such activities and hence it boosts employee engagement and satisfaction rates.
• Celebrate achievements
  Achievements, whether it be small or big, are the solid proof of hard work from your employees. Encourage employees by giving recognitions and celebrating their achievements. This helps in building employee trust and boost employee retention rates. Recognizing achievements also helps to glue teams together.
• Fun activities
  Untangle time
  Truth and lies
  Observation game
  Pairs

1. Untangle time

This is a great team-building activity for employees. It’s a super-fun and simple activity that promotes teamwork, communication and problem-solving. Everyone stands shoulder-to-shoulder in a circle and faces the centre.

Each player places their right hand in the centre and then must take the hand of someone who is across the circle. Then, each player places his left hand to the centre and takes the hand of another person. No one must hold the hand of a person standing next to them. They must then untangle each other.

This is a super small fun activity for employees as they will have a great time trying to figure out roles and effectively untangle themselves! The game generally brings out the child in people, and it’s the ideal activity for small teams who want to bond better together.

2. Truths and Lies

This is a fun activity where everyone can get to know each other. It’s a great exercise for a mid- to a large company where there are different departments working separately.

Bring everyone to the centre, sitting in a circle and instruct them to come up with two truths and one lie about themselves. They could write it onto a piece of paper and mark the lie and truths.

Then, the rest of the group has to try and guess which one of the pieces of information is lies and truth. Watch as they confer and have a fun time trying to conceal themselves in this fun and engaging activity.

3. Observation game

This is a nice and fun game to engage a team that’s stressed or drained. It is a good team-building activity for employees. Divide the team into two lines and have them face each other. Choose one team to go first and tell them to study the opposite line.

Then, they have to turn away while the second line makes changes like swapping jewellery, untying shoes, rolling up their sleeves and more.

Once time runs out, the first line needs to turn around and try to figure out the different changes that have been made. Once they’ve been made, roles can be switched.

4.Pairs

This is another fun office game for employees to get to know each other. The only equipment needed in this game is a few pens, paper and some tape. Come up with different pairs – Yin/Yang, Salt/pepper, peanut butter/jelly etc. and write them on the paper

Make around 20 different pairs and once you’ve gathered a fair amount that’s equal to the number of people taking part, stick the paper to the back of each employee.

Participants have to ask Yes or No questions to try and figure out the word on their back and once done, and they also have to find the other member and sit together. While sitting, the “pairs” must learn a few interesting facts about each other.

Why is employee engagement important?

According to a study conducted by Glassdoor in 2016, 53% of employees irrespective of the industries are confident that, if they lose or quit their current job, they will get something similar or comparable within a period of 6 months. If you are not giving a compelling reason for your employees to stay, they will hop when they get a chance for sure. Retaining top talent is one of the major objectives of the employee engagement activities. When you are considering an exponential growth in innovation and profit, employee engagement is the most cost-effective and efficient tactic to experiment on.

It is scientifically proven that praise rather than criticism is the best tactic to help the employee grow and improve. Employee engagement activities help to supercharge employee activities which will help in maximizing the outcomes and client satisfaction. As Richard Branson says, “Take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your business”. Engaged employees are always proven to be happier and productive than the rest. When a person is engaged and is happy with the work environment, it reflects in his/her job and other activities. Such people work with enthusiasm and intensity. Employee engagement activities invoke certain persistence within the employees, which will help the organization prosper intrinsically.

Components of employee engagement

Employee engagement can be thoroughly understood by learning the two major components of it; Engagement and Purpose.

Engagement: The context of engagement here can be defined as encouraging the employee to be present and energized. The core purpose of engagement is to make the employee feel like being part of a big team or family, where he will involuntarily feel like contributing and working more happily.

Purpose: It is the base or core of engagement. Creating a clear purpose will align your engagement activities with company objectives. Healthy purposes create robust and result-oriented company culture

How and when to measure employee engagement?

Experimenting with various employee engagement activities can be tiresome. Once you finalise with your engagement activity plan for the year, you must measure whether the activities are nurturing your goals or not. Measuring engagement often will allow you to improve your tactics and point them to your goals accurately. Daily measurement won’t be possible for bigger companies but weekly or monthly assessments should be considered as a priority. In this way, engagement activities will remain focused rather than being a passing trend. Here are some of the best practices to measure employee engagement.

Surveys and single click polls: This might sound boring and time-consuming but with the collaboration of novice technological solutions, polls and surveys can be made simpler and interesting.

Creating focus groups: Focus groups are ideal to understand employee behaviour. This also helps in measuring the effectiveness of company initiatives which includes engagement activities.

Exit interviews: Departure is the right time to understand every employee. While some employees leave because of personal reasons, there is a huge percentage of people who leave the company for internal and external reasons. Employee engagement and satisfaction can be understood with the help of exit interviews. The outcomes from exit interviews can be improved if a follow-up is conducted in the form of commenting or survey.

Measuring retention rates: Employee engagement and satisfaction are the major motives of higher retention rates. Periodically measuring employee retention will also help you learn the effectiveness of engagement activities.

Always remember that employee engagement is directionally proportional to productivity. Measuring productivity metrics periodically will help you understand employee engagement and behaviour. The more engaged your employees are, the more likely they will work towards your goals voluntarily or involuntarily.

The role of HR in promoting employee engagement

Employee engagement is vital for every workplace and HR plays a major role in empowering it. Measuring employee engagement will help in calculating the loyalty that any worker has towards their job or position, as well as to their team or colleagues. HR staff should ensure that employee engagement is given major importance along with other activities. Human resource staff understand and mingle with all the employees more than anyone else. They can easily implement positive engagement activities which will connect employees to their job more intensely. Motivated employees always put in extra efforts willingly and consider sticking on to the role for a substantial amount of time.

The HR team should act as the maestro behind the scenes of engagement initiatives. They should take ownership of the engagement strategy and must correlate the activities with company goals. The ideal HR goals such as reducing staff turnover, improving productivity, enhancing retention rate, driving more profit etc can be achieved easily with quality engagement strategies. This can be further interpreted as Gallup says in its report — “Businesses that orient performance management systems around basic human needs for psychological engagement, such as positive workplace relationships, frequent recognition, ongoing performance conversations and opportunities for personal development, get the most out of their employees.”

To conclude –

Thus, these are just some of the activities for employee satisfaction in office. Everyday work can be hard and tiresome, and these activities act as a nice break in between. Choose from different styles of activities that can be easily arranged, so there’s no last-minute hassle.

These activities help in gauging employees and breaking the ice, especially if there are new joiners in the company. Have fun playing and building a strong team that has each other’s backs at all times!