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2020, a year that has been merciless on everyone and has taken the word ‘unpredictable’ to a whole new level. Nevertheless, on the flip side, some good things went well like Working From Home as we got the opportunity to stay with our families and also air pollution has been lowest in many years.
Of course, most of us miss the office now and dying to return because we all want to feel our workspace, meet colleagues and have fun while working. But no matter how tempting it is, stay wherever you are and save your emotions until the day comes. Trust me! It would be worth the wait.
It’s Christmas and New Year is also around the corner. It would be different if it were in the office, but virtual work doesn’t seem too bad to plan out your cultural and engagement activities. Why not gift them something special? No, I’m not talking about sending out materialistic gifts to employees but empathy. Work from home diminishes the sense of belongingness among employees who are continuously exposed to the new work environment’s monotony.
This Christmas, take a pledge to give your employees a sense of belonging and happiness. How do you get started? Here are some ideas that can help you in fulfilling your goal of employee well-being.
Day off
It’s important to realize that work boundaries are blurred and employees work overtime for most days. This induces stress and dissatisfaction of not being able to get adequate me time. Surprise your employees with a random day off in a month or two to help them rejuvenate their energy.
Turn off the cameras
Zoom fatigue is real. Sitting before the cameras during the meetings is mentally exhausting. Take the step to put an end to this. Give employees the democracy of turning the cameras on or off.
Ring up the phone
Call your employees and have an informal conversation. It would be overwhelming for your employees to receive your call, so make them comfortable by letting them know in advance. Talk about how their lives are going, what they have learned over the last few months, and anything other than work.
You don’t know what insights you will be getting and how good they must be feeling after the informal conversation. Pick up the phone and start talking to your people.
Happiness officers
Appoint happiness officers in the organization to solidify your goal of employee happiness. Let’s be honest, there are smart people than you in your organization. You need to pull them in and discuss the best ideas to be implemented and give them the responsibility to make things happen to engage employees. This way you’re making your job easy and teaching a culture of cross-team collaboration.
Memes
Enable your teams to share entertaining digital content such as memes. Byte-sized memes are quick to consume and are sure to make your people chuckle. Individual contributors from each department are well versed with their domain-related humor and internal team jokes.
Let them create smart and funny memes and share them with you. Pick the best ones and post them on a channel where everyone can see and have some good laughs. You can post the best ones on social media as well, considering your company’s brand guidelines.
Use social media
It’s now time to dust your social media skills. Let the best performing employees be on your organization’s social media wall. Make their efforts known to the world and allow the flow of appreciation from the community in the form of comments and likes.
It’ll make your employees feel valued and also builds a strong brand presence for your company. Identify the best performers across the departments and reach out to your marketing team to curate content and plan a series of posts.
Digital Competitions
Competitions during festivities haven’t died due to WFH. You can give a second life to them by thinking out of the box. Have a digital approach to conduct them, and the best example for it is Swiggy. Swiggy recently ran a contest to promote their new venture Swiggy Genie which contains unstructured pictures on their Instagram handle’s wall. The users need to save them in a chronology in a new collection to form a picture on their wall. Those who’ve solved the puzzle can send a gift through Swiggy Genie.
Go check out the impressive marketing by Swiggy Genie.
These are some of the ideas that you can try to implement. I’m sure you might be having a great deal of even better ideas. Just make sure that you do at least a few because a little investment of your time would go on impacting your employees and business in ways you could never imagine.
