Employees who are excited to come to work and are ready to contribute not only help drive organizational growth through their dedication and passion, but also provide enormous value due to their performance. Engaged employees are valuable employees, and they're the type who strengthen your entire organization.
But the onus is upon you to create a working environment that fosters employee engagement. Without strong leadership, employees won't be willing to become invested in either their team or organization. They look to you for cues, and if you prioritize employee engagement and motivation, they will too.
Thankfully, there are a host of employee engagement activities that can boost motivation and encourage ownership for various responsibilities. As long as you set aside time, resources, and budget to prioritize these activities, you'll be well on your way to creating an environment that puts employees as its center.
Why Are Employee Engagement Activities So Important?
Disengaged employees are bad for productivity, morale drainers, and diminishers of organizational trust. Engagement is a powerful tool to counter this problem, as well as a viable strategy for greatly improving workplace relations and experiences with employees.
The good news is, employee engagement activities don't require a magic formula or gimmicks, but rather, active communication, recognition, and creating opportunity. And it's easier to accomplish than you might think.
So let's take a look at the top 10 employee engagement activities you can easily implement to inspire, motivate, and energize your workforce.
#1 – Focus on Collaboration
Cross functional collaboration is essential to innovation, but it isn't something that often happens on its own. One way to encourage it is to hold a training session on why collaboration is important and how employees are empowered to put it into practice. It's also extremely beneficial to invest in technology that supports it.
#2 – Be Clear About Responsibilities and Goals
This might not seem like an engagement activity, but it really is. Arming your employees with a sense of purpose is critical to creating the emotional bond between your employees and their work, and in turn boosting their engagement. How well you communicate your company's purpose is directly correlated with how engaged your employees are, giving them a clear scope and fueling ambition.
#3 – Celebrate Achievements
Actively recognizing individual accomplishments of your employees provides solid proof that the work they are putting in has both value and meaning. By celebrating their hard work, you send a clear message of appreciation while simultaneously and subtly fueling ambition amongst your workforce.
#4 – Let Your Employees Help Choose Their Colleagues
Getting your team involved in the hiring process is a great way to reinforce how important they are to the organization. It communicates to them that management is invested in creating a harmonious team and places value on their input. They may also have useful insight into what it takes to do the job and who would be the perfect fit.
#5 – Promote Games, Tournaments, and Challenges
Fostering a culture of friendly, social competition is a fun way to promote bonding between your employees, even across different teams and divisions. Consider hosting a ping pong or pool tournament, challenge the office to a bake-off, or hold a 5K race or other sporting event. Even creating an office-wide fantasy football league can do wonders for the employees at your organization.
#6 – Conduct Offsite Team-Building Activities
Sponsoring events for employees to attend outside of the office environment can reap considerable rewards. By allowing employees to knit themselves into a close group and find common ground beyond the parameters of the workplace can translate into more efficient productivity in the office. Laser tag, go-cart racing, and bowling are all common options.
#7 – Encourage Personal Projects
Give employees an allotted time each day, like half an hour for example, to create, develop, or pursue their own projects. Having people from different departments connecting and brainstorming ideas can help get a new perspective. Projects and initiatives can spark new directions and ideas, encouraging a creativity and energy flow that would only benefit the rest of the working hours.
#8 – Assign a Buddy/Mentor for Every Newcomer
An important part of the onboarding process is having someone available to answer some granular, role-specific questions; questions that a newcomer might be hesitant to simply ask a manager. Building a trustworthy relationship with an established peer on the team can help guide the newcomer. This affords them the opportunity to better adapt and grow into their role on the team.
#9 – Involve Everyone in Improvement
Nothing is more frustrating to an employee than knowing how to solve a problem, but being un-empowered to do so. Employees who know that their ideas for improvement will be taken seriously are more likely to offer them and exercise discretionary effort to implement solutions.
#10 – Let Software do the Heavy Lifting
Use employee engagement software – like NICE Employee Engagement Manager (EEM) – so you can spend more time on positive change with the added benefits of automation, real-time agent alerts, and increased efficiencies.
The NICE Employee Engagement Solution
NICE Employee Engagement Manager (EEM) is a state-of-the-art solution for engagement and operational improvement that can motivate your contact center teams and bring new life your organization.
EEM's intelligent architecture makes it easier to communicate with employees and keep them engaged, with unique adaptive capabilities that empower organizations to personalize employee engagement initiatives by individual.
EEM is the key to proactive staffing. The proven operational benefit for contact centers using EEM range from six- to seven-figure dollar values within the first year. And it just grows from there.
It is the only solution available that empowers employees to independently make scheduling changes and receive immediate confirmation through intelligent automation. Agents can view and change shifts, self-swap shifts, trade shifts, take paid time off or voluntary time off, add extra hours to their schedule, and act upon personalized schedule change offers, all via the EEM mobile app or browser-based desktop application. Additionally, all of the notifications and potential changes are distributed to the individual agents based upon their skills, availability preferences and notification preferences, ultimately contributing to a better work/life balance and ongoing engagement.
