Top 10 Employee Engagement Activities in the Office

Employee Engagement

“Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.” – Angela Ahrendts (Former Senior VP – Apple Retail)

Your employees are pivotal to your business’s growth. By engaging with them mindfully and productively, you can ensure positive business outcomes. Engaged employees are also known to report better loyalty to their workplace and greater commitment towards their jobs.

According to a Gallup survey, 62% of employees worldwide are not engaged. However, this is merely a challenge that requires actionable guidance to solve.

This blog explores ten unique, fun employee engagement activities in the office to help you keep your workforce engaged. You will also learn about the nuances of employee engagement and discover tools that can help implement and enhance it.

What is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement represents your employees’ ownership over their work and the feeling of active involvement and interest in their work in the office.

Engaged employees are often passionate about their work responsibilities and feel excited to come to the office daily. They actively contribute fresh ideas and new perspectives to the discussions and display independence and confidence in their roles.

Several factors contribute to enhancing employee engagement:

• Recognition: Promotions, shout-outs, incentives, gifts, etc., are excellent ways to recognise your employees for big wins or small moments.

• Collaboration and communication: Seamless internal communication through employee apps helps employees connect with each other and stay engaged.

• Growth opportunities: Employees who see a clear path of personal growth and development in the workplace are more engaged.

• Wellness and benefits: Mental, physical, and emotional wellness in the workplace impacts engagement and productivity.

Related read: 10 Ways to Improve Mental Health at Workplace

Why is Employee Engagement Important for HR?

Employee engagement directly impacts your company’s productivity, employee retention, and competitiveness. A survey shows that low levels of employee engagement result in a loss of $8.9 trillion annually in the global GDP. That is 9% of the global GDP lost because employees don’t feel involved in their work or companies.

Engaged employees are happy about their jobs and work. They are more productive, responsible, and accountable. Engaged employees are more likely to contribute innovative, bold ideas to their companies. They are more actively involved in the company’s performance, growth, and upholding its reputation.

In short, engaged employees care about their company and jobs. By providing interesting engagement activities to your employees, you are providing them with more opportunities to display their talents and skills (which ultimately benefit the company in the long term.)

Top 10 Employee Engagement Activities in the Office

Below is a compilation of the top 10 employee engagement activities in the office. Feel free to pick the ones that fit your workplace, or create your mix and be experimentation:

1. Employee Recognition

Your employees work really hard for the company, and recognising their efforts and achievements goes a long way in enhancing engagement. It also works as a positive motivator for the peers to perform equally or better.

Dedicate a communication channel or stream to send shoutouts on your employee communication app. Or, you can also dedicate a monthly newsletter spotlighting names and figures in the workforce that spearheaded a positive change.

Employee recognition helps reduce turnover by making your employees feel valued. It enhances productivity by making the employees feel appreciated, which motivates them to perform even better.

2. Introduce Gamification

According to a TalentLMS survey, gamification makes employees feel more productive (89%) and happier (88%) at work. Gamification refers to using game-playing elements in training, communication, and other aspects of work to make them interactive and engaging.

For example, you can employ progress bars, quizzes, and badges in your internal communication channels to gamify your employees’ experience. To motivate your workforce, you can also introduce daily challenges (like most productive hours), points, competitions, and leaderboards.

Gamification creates a fun environment and helps employees release work-related stress. It introduces healthy competition that encourages employees to perform better.

3. Make Work Flexible

According to EY’s Future Workplace Index 2023, 41% of leadership said hybrid work has resulted in much higher employee productivity. When your employees have the option to decide which tasks require in-office presence and the ones they can complete from their homes, they become more engaged.

Introduce work flexibility in the form of weeks or days your employees need to be present in the office. For example, you can have 2 or 3 in-office days every week, leaving the rest to your employees’ discretion.

Doing this empowers your workforce to be more accountable for their time management and work with improved productivity even when away from their desks.

4. Workplace Events

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. The same concept applies to working professionals. Workplace events like Halloween parties, Thanksgiving dinners, potluck meals, etc., help your employees connect on a personal level.

You can create a company calendar marked with events planned for the entire year. Alternatively, you can leverage your internal communication platforms to create a dedicated stream or channel for events planned.

Remember: you don’t need to host too many such occasions – two or three per year would be enough. Such events allow employees to meet each other’s families and partners and make deeper connections, which helps enhance engagement.

5. Introduce Special Days

Special days refer to days like “Bring your pet to work” or “Casual clothes” days at the workplace. They help employees release work-related stress by introducing a fun or exciting element to the work environment.

You can begin by summarising what your brand stands for or supports and creating “Special days” around it. You can also select themes like “Colour of the Day” to get the ball rolling. Alternatively, you can have employee surveys to ask them for ideas.

The workplace doesn’t need to be stiffly professional—introducing special days helps employees feel more appreciative of the company and their work environment.

6. Sports

It is well known that moving the body is a natural way to reduce stress levels and enhance focus. Sporting events are a great way to bring your employees and their families together for enjoyment, team building, and competition.

You can choose a sport by taking employee vote and deciding your budget for a venue. You can create teams or ask your employees to submit their team rosters for the event. You can book a premises and introduce tickets to fund this event.

Sports days help employees disconnect from work and reconnect with their bodies, helping them rejuvenate mentally and physically.

7. Wellness Programs

Wellness programs are an excellent way to show employees you care about their well-being. Businesses can conduct health and wellness camps and provide customised benefits to help employees prioritise their physical and mental well-being. Corporations can drastically reduce employee absenteeism and boost workforce morale through such programs.

Partner with wellness providers like Onsurity to facilitate enterprise wellness and fitness apps, access to good doctors, incentivised and insured checkups, etc., to implement a comprehensive wellness program at your company.

Wellness programs tell employees the company cares about them equally, if not more.

8. Team Building Activities

Team building activities like escape rooms and scavenger hunts help break the ice between employees and establish camaraderie between them.

It is also an excellent way for your employees to gain new problem-solving skills and learn to think on their feet. They allow employees to engage in interactive, live learning and socialise with each other.

It helps your enterprise develop and hone the workforce to work well together and drive tangible results.

9. Encourage Employee-Led Committees

If your organisation has employee communities (like LGBTQ+, women’s communities, etc.), encourage and support them to enhance diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

You can start by recognising and officiating such communities. You can also plan benefits, incentives, funding, etc., targeted to improve the work environment for people in these communities. You can also encourage them by recognising their social efforts on company notice boards.

Encouraging diversity and inclusion in tangible ways helps employees feel like a part of your company and enhances engagement.

10. Cultural Celebrations

Cultural celebrations can be considered an extension of DE&I initiatives. By arranging cultural celebrations in the workplace, you recognise people from different countries and regions and give them a chance to educate other employees about their culture.

Start by studying the demographics of your company’s hires and identifying important cultural dates they observe. Put these on the company calendar and organise a theme-based gathering for recognition. It doesn’t have to be grand; just a gathering for acknowledgement with snacks or traditional desserts.

It helps employees feel included and recognised for their roots, enhancing their loyalty to the company.

Benefits of Employee Engagement Activities for Businesses

Enterprises that successfully implement employee engagement activities realise several crucial benefits:

• Higher profitability: A Gallup survey shows that companies with engaged employees have 23% higher profitability than those with disengaged employees.

• Positive company image: Employee engagement activities and initiatives create a positive and supportive work environment, which in turn leads to a positive company image.

• Cost savings: Reduction in absenteeism and turnover helps companies save expenses on hiring new employees.

• Stronger collaboration: Engaged employees are less hesitant to collaborate with new or external teams, enhancing collaboration efforts across the enterprise.

Also read: 10 Ways to Improve Work-Life Balance for Your Employees

How to Implement Employee Engagement Activities?

You can implement employee engagement activities in 9 easy steps:

1. Assess current engagement levels: Before implementing any engagement activity, measure your current engagement levels to understand where you are starting from and where you need to reach.

2. Set goals: Define specific, measurable goals to achieve from engagement activities and make sure they align with company image and policies.

3. Promote communication: Establish open communication by using employee tools and encouraging ideas. Listen to your employees’ voices to get the best results.

4. Invest in L&D: Revamp your L&D technologies to make learning and connection more accessible to your employees. This platform can also be used for engagement initiatives.

5. Conduct employee surveys: Employee surveys help you gather information and ideas to prioritise or select engagement initiatives that employees want to participate in.

6. Gather feedback: Make sure to gather feedback on every engagement activity that employees participated in. This will help you measure how effective and impactful it was in achieving its goals.

7. Tweak your initiatives: If the results are not what you expected, you can tweak your engagement activities or initiatives, change them, or scrap them for better ideas to achieve your engagement goals.

8. Stay updated: Do not let your engagement activities stagnate year after year. Be innovative and stay current with engagement trends to get the most out of your initiatives.

9. Explore technological partnerships: Look for apps and other digital partners (such as Onsurity) that facilitate the easy implementation of engagement solutions in the workplace.

Recommended read: Top 11 Health and Wellness Gifts for Your Employees​

How Onsurity Can Help Enhance Employee Engagement

If health and wellness are engagement items on your checklist, Onsurity can help you incentivise these initiatives seamlessly. Onsurity’s monthly healthcare and wellness membership allows you to subscribe entire teams to wellness programs and gain incentivised benefits for healthcare and wellness.

From facilitating discounted health checkups to group health insurance, from access to good doctors to discounted medicines and wellness benefits, Onsurity helps elevate workplace engagement by making well-being easier and more accessible.

The whole enterprise can use the Onsurity app for fitness tracking, access to health webinars, member access benefits, and much more. Onsurity is a way to show your employees how deeply you care about their well-being.

Explore benefits for fitness, insurance options, and memberships today with Onsurity.

Conclusion

Engaged employees are assets to a company as they deliver consistent results and work mindfully. This year, the global employee engagement rate stands at 23%, highlighting that much work remains to improve this number.

Let the 10 employee engagement activities discussed in this blog act as a starting point for your company to promote employee engagement in the company culture actively. Feel free to explore more ideas and be creative with how you want your employees to engage with your brand.

Explore platforms like Onsurity to learn how to prioritise health and wellness in your organisation. Use the platform to help your employees reach wellness goals and keep themselves fit with regular fitness checkups.

Want to know more? Contact the team today!

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