Employee Engagement Initiatives (Try These 5 Ideas)

Written by:
Collin Waldoch
Updated:
July 7, 2021

Employment engagement initiatives can boost team productivity and increase the output of your workforce. If you want to optimize around the talent on your team, you should consider deploying a range of employee engagement initiatives. A lack of engagement and interest in the workload can detrimentally impact your team’s ability to deliver results.

Water Cooler Trivia can act as a fun employee engagement initiative and could quickly become your team’s favorite weekly ritual. We can send trivia quizzes with handpicked questions to the inboxes of all team members. Upon answering the quiz questions at your own pace, we grade the results. From start to finish, the process is entirely automated and asynchronous.

Building High Performance Teams

If employees don’t feel passionate about their jobs, you’re not going to get the best out of them. Many organizations fail to address employee engagement because it is difficult to measure. The easiest and most common way to measure the engagement of employees is through surveys and questionnaires.

It’s important to understand the difference between employee engagement and employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is an indication of how happy or content an employee is, but doesn’t offer insights into their emotional commitment. For some, satisfaction means collecting a paycheck while minimizing work.

Employee engagement is all about driving performance. Once you understand employee engagement, you can take steps to actively address the issue through activities, games, and events.  How can you unlock the talent on your team? How can the employee experience be altered to ensure all team members feel a collective sense of purpose? These are the key questions.

How do you build employee engagement?

If you want to improve employee engagement, you need to define your core values and emphasize your mission. Team members must be united by a collective sense of purpose. You should pinpoint a unifying goal that every team member can get behind and strive towards.

To boost employee engagement, you should prioritize feedback. Frequent feedback creates an environment of honest and direct communication. In the most effective working environments, there is a constant flow of communication across the workforce.

One little-known way to communicate: stack your hands in a pile.

To increase cross-team communication, you can encourage team members to participate in some lighthearted activities, such as trivia quizzes. Employee engagement initiatives can help to loosen up the workforce and reduce tensions that have built over time. To reap the rewards of improved communication, invest time in fun activities. 

Why is employee engagement important?

A hyper-productive workforce consists of highly engaged employees. These people are emotionally invested in the outcome of their work. A lack of employee engagement may seem insurmountable- but it can be relatively easy to address by launching engagement initiatives.

According to the latest report from Gallup, 51% of employees are disengaged, while 13% are actively disengaged in the workplace. These actively disengaged employees are categorized as spreading negativity across the workplace because they feel miserable. While the percentage is high, it’s not surprising.

A second report from Gallup on employee engagement shows organizations with highly engaged workforces have 21% higher profitability. These organizations also have 17% higher productivity than those with disengaged workforces. These statistics emphasize the clear correlation between employee engagement and workforce productivity.

In recent years, expectations of employees have changed across all sectors. Professionals are showing little hesitation about moving on from jobs - making retaining top talent incredibly difficult for companies with poor team cultures.

What are the best employee engagement initiatives?

The best employee engagement programs promote a sense of lighthearted fun in the workplace. These activities should effectively unite employees and promote key communication skills while providing opportunities for team members to collaborate.

1 - Water Cooler Trivia sparks conversations between employees through lighthearted trivia quizzes. Customized trivia quizzes can be delivered via email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams to all employees in your organization. These can be completed around your team’s schedule. Upon receiving graded results, team members can talk about the trivia facts with their colleagues.

It's more colorful in "real" life.

2 - Peer-to-peer recognition can have a tremendous impact on team morale, helping to boost engagement. Whether it’s on a Slack channel or via email, you should encourage team members to recognize their colleagues and promote positive reinforcement in the workplace.

3 - Show team members how their jobs advance the company vision. If you’ve recently outlined the company’s long-term objectives, take the time to talk with team members about their roles in hitting these objectives. This will help them to feel like more than just a cog in a big machine.

Just like this! If the company mission = climbing a prairie-dotted mountain.

4 - Give your employees more responsibilities, not just more tasks to complete. To drive engagement, employees should take ownership of their work. When employees do this, they typically become more invested in the outcomes associated with their work.

5 - Emphasize work-life balance. Team leaders must do everything in their power to ensure employees are never feeling overwhelmed by the pressures of their workloads. When working life begins to infringe on an employee’s personal life, this is a one-way route to disengagement and should be prevented at all costs.

Are you ready to begin implementing employee engagement initiatives? Get started with Water Cooler Trivia today!