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Before you start spinning the wheel and plan engagement activities, you first need to realize that employee engagement is not just conducting events but one of the most essential functions which impacts the culture and performance of the organization.
Start by looking at the team as real individuals, with thoughts, goals, achievements, and challenges, both within and beyond the workplace. These individuals are not a way of producing business outcomes, they are a formidable force that needs to be recognized and nurtured in order to deliver on what is required of them as employees.
Why is Employee Engagement Significant?
As a manager, ensuring your employees engaged can be the toughest obstacle you face. It’s also a perfect way to achieve the team’s long-term commitment and discretion. In the end, commitment would lead to better outcomes and fewer errors.
A great amount of persuasive research shows that enhancing employee engagement will greatly increase business efficiency in a number of key areas, such as profitability, efficiency, customer loyalty, creativity, health and safety, illness and absence, morale, and well-being.
However, in order to do this, your engagement activities must be consistent with your overall business plan. Implementing unplanned ideas and events that you believe can help, without tracking or assessing their effect, is a waste of time and money.
Recommended Read:- The Five Stages of Team Development and Its Importance
Organizational Objective with Employee Engagement
You’ve got to be specific on “what” you want to achieve in your business before you hop on to “how” you’re going to do it. Your HR plays a vital role in the development and planning of the employee engagement plan that is consistent and well-aligned with the objectives of your organization.
Employee engagement is not an abstract HR function. In order to achieve the benefits that we spoke about earlier, it takes organizational participation and engagement to execute these events successfully.
5 Innovative Employee Engagement Activities
The Desert Island Scenario
All of us played icebreaker games like this at school.
In this virtual team building game, team members are given a situation where they are trapped on a lonely island with seven items, however, they can only capture three. Make these objects as elusive and complex as possible such that the team members are compelled to make real use of strategic planning and coordination.
Make these objects as elusive and difficult as possible such that the team members are compelled to make real use of strategic planning and coordination.
Examples of products include a bag of fruit and vegetable seeds, a pocket knife, a 100-foot chain, a bedsheet, a bucket, 2 liters of kerosene, a pen and paper, and so on.
Then break the team into small groups to encourage them to work together on which items they would like to select. If all the conversations are done, hop on a video call with the squad.
Activities and drills like these enable team members to see each other as teammates and will contribute to healthy competitiveness and enthusiasm within the team.
These games and simulations also show how working together makes a team produce greater outcomes and can help virtual employees learn how to work together without being in the same room.
Trivia Contests (Weekly/Monthly)
People love trivia! Trivia quizzes are one of the most interesting activities that engage employees effectively. Teams are emailed a trivia quiz on Monday morning, with answers due that night and scores released the next morning. The schedule is easily customizable.
Importantly, it is not a one-time occurrence, but more a medium of weekly entertainment and conversation for the squad, with no recurring setup or maintenance activities. The adrenaline rush of bar trivia minus the two-hour time commitment and logistics!
The events are highly customizable, which means you can choose the
- Attributes (Pop Culture, Current Events, Science & Tech, etc)
- The level of difficulty (Easy, Medium, Hard)
- The pacing (day of the week and the time for the quiz and results)
- Geographical field (if you have global teammates and want to exclude US-centric questions).
Share Your Bucket List
A bucket list is a list of items you want to do or do until the end of its lifetime. Naturally, each person’s bucket list shows a great deal about them. So, what better way to really get to know the teammates than to ask them to share their bucket lists?
Every week, give one person the burden of sharing their bucket list ideas. You may decide the lengths of these lists as well as whether or not activities that have already been done should be included.
Everybody who is listening will then spend a few minutes contemplating the bucket list, whether it’s identifying similarities or just asking interesting questions! Sharing bucket lists with others helps you to hear a lot about their personality and see how alike you are.
Who knows, maybe a colleague will help you check a few items off your own list!
Two truths and a Lie
A classic icebreaker activity is two truths and one lie.
Each team member makes three claims about themselves, two of which are true and one of which is false. The team will then take turns determining what is true and what is a lie. The speaker exposes their fib after everyone has guessed.
Bring a healthy competition to the game by using a scoring system that is captured digitally or by the player with a pen and paper. The one who makes the most correct guesses wins!
The Road to the Future
This is a quick and enjoyable experience. Send an e-newspaper or magazine to the team and invite them to highlight ten stories that might be relevant to the company in the future.
Headlines such as “World’s greatest place to work” and “How this business changed the world” are excellent examples. This allows you to better grasp each team member’s priorities and aspirations from the organization. You can also compare each choice to see if there are any gaps in commitment or goals!
Final Words
Remote teams do not have as much face-to-face interaction as collocated small teams, but that doesn’t mean they have to feel isolated from one another! According to research, “97 percent of workers and executives agree that a lack of team alignment has an effect on the success of a mission or project.”
So, as you can see, bonding is crucial for creating a cohesive team!
Employee motivation, performance, and teamwork improve as a result of engagement and team bonding. It makes employees feel connected and appreciated, which leads to a high level of dedication to their assignments and the organization as a whole.
“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” – Simon Sinek
In other words, engaged employees do not work merely to receive a salary at the end of the month. Instead, they come to work each day motivated and ready to walk the extra mile.
