Are you struggling to engage employees and come up with effective employee engagement ideas? Are you having a hard time measuring employee engagement activities?
The benefits of employee engagement and empowerment go much further than just having employees like you. Focusing on employee engagement makes your employees more productive and more likely to stay with your company.
In this post, we’ll break down our list of top employee engagement ideas and activities with examples to keep your workforce connected. We’ll also introduce you to the internal communications tools that can help you collect effective employee feedback.
What Is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is how attached or invested someone feels to their employer and their role. Employee engagement is related to higher performance and better business outcomes.
Three key drivers of employee engagement are:
- Committed and trustworthy managers and senior leadership.
- Meaningful work in a role.
- Positive relationships with co-workers.
Employees are people first and need human support in the places they work.
Using an all-in-one employee engagement tool like ContactMonkey takes the guesswork out of connecting with your employees:
Scheduled Email Sends increase open rate by helping you find the best time to send internal emails.
Employee Surveys can gather focused feedback about specific topics and issues.
Anonymous Comments let your employees share their true feelings without hesitation.
Engaging Newsletter Design draws attention from your staff and boosts employee newsletter open rates.
Email Analytics show your most engaging content and most engaged employees using powerful email tracking tools.
Leverage these great features with our 30 employee engagement ideas to see how easy it is to connect with your employees using your internal communications!
30 Ideas to Boost Employee Engagement
We’ve collected our favourite ideas to help you boost employee engagement. While not every idea may apply to your business, we encourage you to take and use the ones that can help get your employees more engaged and enthusiastic.
1. Gather employee feedback with surveys and emoji reactions
One of the most effective ways to better engage employees is to use employee engagement software. You can use ContactMonkey to create your employee newsletters, but our internal email tool features eNPS surveys, employee pulse surveys, and emoji reactions to facilitate two-way communication with employees.
With ContactMonkey’s click maps feature, you can see exactly how your employees are engaging with your internal emails. This can help you optimize your email design to ensure important information gets seen by your employees.
If you aren’t quantifying employee engagement activities, how will you ever know they’re actually engaged with what you send out?
Mettler Toledo, a manufacturing company, uses ContactMonkey to measure employee engagement. Using targeted insights from their email newsletters, their internal communicators were able to identify which employee segments were not opening newsletters. Then, they could adjust their employee engagement strategies accordingly. In this case, they were able to change the time their newsletters were sent, which resulted in a 33% increase in open rates in the disengaged segment.
Here’s an overview of ContactMonkey’s two-way communication features:
Emoji Reactions
By adding emoji reaction icons to your communications, you’ll be able to proactively learn what your employees crave. You can easily add emojis to any section of your employee newsletter to gauge employee sentiment. With emoji reactions, your internal communications team can constantly gather feedback in a seamless way. Best of all, it’s quick, easy, and fun for employees.
Surveys: Pulse and eNPS
With pulse surveys, you’ll also get actionable data on your email communications in seconds. All you have to do is ask a question, and attach one of our drag-and-drop rating options (like stars) to it. For eNPS, it’s pretty much the same; just attach the 10-scale to the question. You’ll be able to see survey response rates and all of the individual responses in real time on your ContactMonkey dashboard.
Not sure how to write effective employee survey questions? Try using ContactMonkey’s OpenAI ChatGPT integration to generate unique survey questions for your needs. Simply write a prompt describing what you’d like to learn from your survey, and edit the suggested questions according to your audience.
Like Buttons
Your employees are already “liking” content on the social media platforms they use off the clock. By adding like buttons to your own internal emails, you’ll be able to engage your employees with your content and actually learn what they like.
Anonymous Comments
Go a step further and enable a comment option as part of your internal newsletter with our drag-and-drop email template builder. Comments will enable you to understand exactly how employees feel, and anonymity will encourage more transparent responses. You need to pair comments with an open-ended survey question and a visual element, like star ratings.
Try one—or all—of these features in your company newsletter today. Not only do they add more visual appeal, but they give you more data to work with. And that helps you check all the boxes when it comes to email newsletter best practices.
Anonymous employee comments and ContactMonkey’s anonymous email tracking also help your company adhere to internal or external regulations around email privacy—while still allowing you to gather data to help your employee engagement initiatives.
Gathering employee feedback is super easy with ContactMonkey. Book a free demo to learn how to boost employee engagement and retention using feedback.
2. Video
You really need to go above and beyond with your employee engagement ideas if you’re aiming to provide an engaging employee experience for a diverse workforce.
Don’t be afraid to play with video options (and other employee engagement apps) to create an authentic and engaged employee experience.
Interview some of your employees for an internal communications video and showcase this at all your next company-wide events. It’s also a great visual aid to highlight during workshops or embed within your employee newsletters.
Videos are also a great employee engagement tool for anyone struggling to engage with remote employees. They can be viewed anywhere on almost any modern device, making it easy to engage frontline workers and remote employees.
With ContactMonkey’s email template builder, you can easily embed videos with your employee emails. You can also embed animated GIFs featuring Giphy’s massive image library. Use multimedia to break the monotony of employee emails and grab your recipients’ attention.
3. Internal communications campaigns
As an internal communicator, you obviously understand the power of leveraging your inner creativity and imagination to create a holistic employee experience strategy. Don’t be afraid to utilize special events to your advantage to launch an epic employee engagement campaign. Not sure how to start an employee engagement campaign? Check out these great employee engagement models for different approaches to increasing engagement.
Have you heard of AXA’s internal communications Valentine’s Day campaign? Witnessing a drop in employee engagement activities, AXA’s internal communications team distributed Valentine’s Day cards to employees.
These cards were decorated with the words, “you complete me” on the front. On the back, they asked workers to give feedback on what they liked and what they didn’t about their company.
In case you’re wondering how well this strategy worked, 91% of workers found this exercise a valuable use of their time.
Want to find your best-performing email campaigns? With ContactMonkey’s Reporting function, you can see the email analytics of your past email campaigns:
Easily see if there are emails that stand out to your employees (or if there are emails your employees ignore).
You can also increase email engagement on your campaigns by targeting relevant employees and leaving out employees who don’t need to see them. By using ContactMonkey’s list management feature, you can create custom email lists—without needing IT—in order to send your emails to relevant recipients.
Custom email lists created with ContactMonkey integrate with your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) like Workday and ADP, as well as Azure Active Directory, so they’ll automatically update as employees join and leave your organization.
Book a free demo to see how ContactMonkey supports a data-based approach to your internal communications plan.
4. Seek out internal influencers
It’s important to figure out how your internal audience wants to consume your communications and identify who your internal influencers are. According to McKinsey, an internal influencer knows exactly what your average employees are experiencing; they are one of them.
Exemplis, one of our customers at ContactMonkey, puts a great deal of focus on two-way communication and the voice of the employee.
“Giving our team the chance to interact with pulse surveys monthly, comments weekly and ratings frequently has allowed us to informally check in on our team without sending another bulky engagement survey. “– Corey Kachigan, Engagement and Communications Lead at Exemplis
By adopting ContactMonkey, Corey and her team were able to gather feedback on what employees cared about, and tailor their messaging to increase employee engagement.
Want an easy way to find your internal influencers? Book a free demo to see how ContactMonkey can find your most engaged employees.
5. Gamification
Game-based learning or gamification can really ignite productivity levels. Introducing fun and play into your organization will enable collaboration and some friendly competition, enhancing employee performance and drive.
You may be scratching your head and wondering if this process involves bringing in a deck of cards?
How exactly is this supposed to make employees engage with their work and actually get more done?
Don’t overthink gamification.
It could be as simple as adding a trivia contest for each onboarding cohort. This could entail engaging your employees through interactive quizzes on the company’s brand, values, and mission statement. You can also incorporate real-time quizzes and games in your conversation channels. The most engaged employees could win prizes. Here are some fun employee engagement activities you can introduce in your office, courtesy of SnackNation.
What a fun way to drill company spirit and brand loyalty into the workplace!
6. Work from home
Create a company culture where working remotely is an option for employees. Embrace the fact that technological advancements have changed the modern workplace and it may be for the better.
Millennials and other remote workers want this freedom, and many companies are willing to give it to them. A 2019 study by Owl Labs reports that 62% of workers in the United States work remotely at least some of the time, with 11% reporting working remotely once a week.
According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends Report for 2019, 72% of talent professionals agree that work flexibility will be very important for the future of HR and recruiting.
Giving employees the option to work from home may actually make them more productive and loyal to your company. 30% of workers would be willing to take a 5% or greater pay cut in exchange for flexible working arrangements.
The ability to work remotely makes employees feel less stressed. Plus it decreases the time and money they need to spend on unpaid commuting. The boost to work-life balance is sure to help keep employees engaged.
If you have an entirely remote workforce by design or thinking about trying out remote work with some of your teams, use your internal communications as a medium for getting employee feedback on this experience.
There’s always going to be an adjustment period, so it’s important to understand what’s working well, and what needs to change as you go along.
7. Team events
Speaking of fun and games, team events are a great way to introduce some liveliness into the workplace. Hosting different events that enable cross-collaboration and teamwork across departments can inspire productivity.
Some fun employee engagement ideas include:
- Axe throwing
- Bowling
- Karaoke
- Table tennis
- Escape rooms
- Murder mysteries
- Trivia
These sorts of employee engagement activities are great for bonding and breaking up the day-to-day in the work environment. At ContactMonkey, we host company-wide activities every other month.
Before your next awesome company event, make sure you send an awesome invitation to match!
8. Team lunches
You can start introducing the concept of team lunches with the goal of getting different departments and demographics to interact. When you offer catered lunches for the entire office, you’re demonstrating that you value your employees. As a result, they will return that value by staying engaged and loyal to your company.
Lydia, a Toronto office manager, notes:
“I think it’s those little things that make a big difference for employees. They enjoy coming to work, and they feel provided for which incentivizes them to keep working really hard.”
Whether you offer daily or just occasional team meals, this employee activity is a great way of boosting work morale and improving company culture.
9. Workshops
One of our favourite employee engagement best practices for enabling a sense of camaraderie is hosting an interactive team workshop.
You’ll have the opportunity to:
- Gather industry insights from each other
- Learn about what workplace successes and failures
- Brainstorm strategies to deploy and execute in the workplace
Use visual storytelling to brainstorm about why employee engagement is important. Introduce team events in every department and watch as your company’s employee experience changes for the better.
Remember that employees, especially those newer to the workforce, want the opportunity to contribute to their workplace. Improving employee engagement activities is easy when you treat employees like stakeholders.
10. Podcasts
Podcasts are a great way to absorb all sorts of information, including topics in your field. Their accessibility makes them worth considering as a medium for internal communications.
Podcasts are also great for:
- Reaching remote workers
- Featuring in-depth employee stories
- Encouraging professional development
- Showcasing company culture
If you’re going to incorporate podcasts into your internal communications, have a plan in place for pre-production, production, post-production, and dissemination of the material. You don’t want to overwhelm your team with tasks, nor do you want to annoy employees with the same information found in a different medium (like your company newsletter).
There’s also a ton of great internal communications podcasts that cover the topic while giving you an example of how it’s done!
Have goals in mind, plan out the release of content in your internal communications planning calendar, and ensure they align with those of the business. Don’t have an IC calendar? Grab a template below, on us!
11. Health and wellness
Employee engagement ideas focused around health and wellness can be great for improving employee morale and productivity. Try introducing yoga as part of your employee engagement program to optimize the employee experience.
Alternatively, offering benefits like subsidized gym memberships can go a long way towards making employees feel engaged.
Within the office space, make sure that healthy snacks are readily available. Sugary pop and energy drinks, although tasty, are not the ideal way to nourish your employees and help them with productivity. Be sure to consider dietary restrictions and allergies when selecting items to offer in the kitchen.
12. Awards and recognition
When thinking about how to interact with employees or making a list of employee recognition ideas for employee engagement, don’t be afraid to think outside the box.
In addition to hosting a games night or a holiday party, how about hosting a fun awards ceremony?
It’s a great way to showcase to employees that you appreciate the work that they do, and you don’t need a high internal communications budget!
According to Response, it can be as simple as rewarding employees on a Friday afternoon. Or coming up with fun awards such as “Most Creative Employee of the Year,” or “Most Organized Employee.”
You can even spice it up and celebrate the winners in your newsletter, making your awards extra coveted. Everyone likes getting recognition and feedback! Consequently, your internal newsletters are a great avenue to encourage employee engagement activities.
Play around with ContactMonkey’s email template builder, and find a new style for your employee newsletter.
13. SMS text message alerts
Companies often need to reach their employees with important information that employees need to see immediately. But not every employee has easy access to a computer to check their emails constantly. This is where SMS text message alerts shine.
With ContactMonkey, you can send schedule updates, IT threat warnings, office closure announcements, event reminders, and more directly to your employees phones from your Outlook or Gmail inboxes:
SMS messages are a terrific way to keep in touch with your on-site or frontline employees who do not have easy access to a computer. Whatever information you send, you can be sure that your employees will be notified as soon as possible
14. Onboarding
Employee engagement starts as soon as an employee submits their offer to your company. You are responsible for using the employee engagement ideas available to you to make sure their first impression is a good one.
According to a study by BambooHR, 31% of employed Americans report having quit a job within the first 6 months. A third of those respondents report leaving within the first month.
If there’s a problem with your onboarding, don’t wait until it’s too late. Start engaging your employees as soon as possible. Internal communicators, HR, and management all need to collaborate for an effective employee onboarding process.
Company policies, as well as work duties, need to be communicated accurately during hiring and onboarding. The responsibility belongs to everyone to make onboarding awesome again.
15. Dress down days
Look, we get it. When we picture professional attire we’re probably not picturing ripped jeans and a hoodie. Regardless, norms around workplace dress are changing.
Over 50% of workplaces in the U.S. allow casual dress regularly, and up to 60% allow casual dress sometimes. Even Wall Street titans like Goldman Sachs have relaxed dress codes. They went from business formal to “a manner that is consistent with client’s expectations.”
Obviously, there are exceptions to what is appropriate. Profanity and immodesty are still out of the question, as are outfits that could pose a safety risk for those working with machinery.
For your average office worker, swapping the tie for a t-shirt could boost morale significantly. Even if your workplace needs to maintain a stricter dress code, consider offering dress-down days or Casual Fridays.
To sweeten the pot, many companies offer dress-down days in exchange for contributions to a charity initiative. For example, Casual Fridays at some offices come at a minimum donation of $5 to a charity pot. This is a great way to increase employee engagement activities without impacting the bottom line.
16. Profit sharing
Ever wonder who the most engaged employees are? They’re the ones with a stake in the company.
Several studies indicate that employees who have a profit stake in the company’s success are more motivated and experience higher levels of job satisfaction.
Employee Stock Option Plans effectively dampened what employees felt were the poor aspects of a job more so than performance-related compensation plans.
Obviously, it may not be possible to implement stock options for every single employee. You might consider offering stock options for employees who have been with the company for a long time.
This rewards both their past and future loyalty. Plus, this is a great strategy to build employee engagement activities for newer employees as well, as it gives them a benefit to look forward to.
17. Leadership office hours
A common reason employees become disengaged is because they lose sight of their department or company’s goals. The other prominent reason is that they feel disconnected from leadership.
Luckily, the solution doesn’t have to involve extravagant social parties or a disruption to the workday. Simply holding “office hours” where employees are welcome to come in and express their concerns or ask questions can go a long way towards improving employee engagement.
According to McKinsey, about ¼ of working hours are spent by employees looking for information. By creating a forum for people to freely ask questions and raise concerns, information can be found more quickly, and employees can even pitch potential improvements to work processes.
Creating an open line of leadership communication will improve employee engagement. The best part is that office hours are a free and easy way to encourage employee engagement.
18. Tie employee work to company vision
Your company’s vision and values are the cornerstone of your business. When you get employees to share a passion for your brand mission and goals, it motivates them in their work and helps to boost employee engagement.
The best way to help align employees with your company vision is by tying it to specific tasks. You’ll have to do this on your end first. Prepare a list of a your employees’ specific responsibilities. Jot down a few bullets explaining how each responsibility relates to the company’s overarching goals.
For instance, say a core responsibility is developing two client case studies a week. Meanwhile, your organizational mission is to simplify how employees communicate. You would then underscore how your case studies expand brand recognition and influence how employees prefer to communicate.
These are easy employee engagement ideas that are simple to implement. What it does demand is some thoughtful reflection on your end, and great internal storytelling.
19. Hybrid work options
Hybrid work is quickly gaining momentum in the corporate world. As such, it’s quickly becoming one of the most prominent employee engagement ideas. That’s because hybrid work is the preferred choice for employees who want increased flexibility.
Hybrid work can equally benefit employers. It allows them to phase in the return to work—often incorporating return-to-work communications—while upholding health and safety guidelines.
Not to mention, hybrid work options help make companies more competitive as many generations of employees prefer flexibility. As such, it helps make it easier to engage and manage a multigenerational workforce.
You can gauge employee sentiment around hybrid work by conducting a simple pulse survey. Ask employees whether they want to see more hybrid, remote, or other flexible work options.
Once you get a sense of how many employees approve of a hybrid workplace model, you can start thinking about how to implement it. At this stage, our hybrid work guide can help set you on the right track.
20. More professional development and employee coaching
Employee coaching and development should be an ongoing process. In fact, Deloitte shows that employee retention and engagement is 25% higher for those staff who have participated in workplace mentorship.
To help employees in their professional development, start by conducting a pulse survey to gauge employee interest in this area. Ask employees what sort of coaching or mentorship opportunities they’re interested in, and whether they want to be connected with a mentor.
Once you have an idea of the topics employees want to explore, you can reach out to professionals in relevant departments.
From there, you can either pair employees with the right individuals as mentors or ask managers and leaders to become team coaches. They can lead webinars on specific topics to interested employees or have more informal virtual discussion sessions. The most important part is gathering employee feedback to create tailored programs based on their interests.
Check out our blog for more tips on creating a dedicated employee coaching strategy.
21. Lunch & learns
Lunch and learns are becoming quite popular, especially in smaller companies. You can invite a motivational speaker from another company to talk about a specific topic, or get employees to speak about their expertise or passions outside of work.
At ContactMonkey, our marketing team hosts a bi-weekly lunch and learn. For an hour, we share a meal, watch an educational webinar or listen to a podcast, and discuss our key takeaways. It’s a great way to promote professional development and team bonding.
Ultimately, lunch and learns boost team collaboration and get employees actively involved in leading team discussions. This helps increase employee engagement by empowering staff and showing them that their input is valued. Not to mention, it helps in strengthening team bonds.
22. Focus on diversity and inclusion
Diversity and inclusion (D&I) is both a moral responsibility of your company and a key driving force for employee engagement and retention. Feeling welcomed and included in the workplace is the minimum requirement for employee engagement.
When employees feel like their opinions or ideas for employee engagement will be rejected because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation, it makes genuine engagement impossible. Not to mention, employees facing these circumstances begin to feel uncomfortable and isolated in the workplace. As a result, it’s unlikely that they’ll stay at your company for long.
If you want to increase employee engagement in the long haul, boost your efforts in promoting diversity and inclusion internal communications. There are many ways you can go about this. Some employee engagement ideas to consider include:
- Regularly sharing diversity and inclusion survey questions to see how employees feel about your D&I efforts.
- Implementing diversity and inclusion webinars with knowledgeable speakers.
- Launching diversity and inclusion focus groups to discuss ways to improve workplace D&I efforts
23. Learn what excites and motivates your employees
Are your employees into painting and illustrating? Do they have a passion for animals? Are they travel junkies?
Understanding what your employees are passionate about is vital for building genuine connections in the workplace.
For instance, you can ask fun employee survey questions in your company newsletter to find out about the passions and hobbies of your staff. Then, try to integrate their interests into your next virtual team-building event.
If a bunch of your remote employees are into art and drawing, you can make your next event a virtual paint night. Or, if you have some standup comics among your staff, you can host an open mic night. You could even hire a comedy crew to perform at your next virtual town hall.
However you choose to act on your employee insights, by doing so, you’re already showing employees that you care. You’re demonstrating that you want to make the workplace more engaging for them and value their suggestions.
24. Offer perks that promote mental health and wellness
Employee perks are a great virtual employee engagement idea as employees don’t have to be in-office to reap the rewards.
Not to mention, these types of benefits help make your company more competitive for top talent while increasing engagement among existing staff. This is especially the case when your employee perks are centred around health and wellness.
Not only do these types of perks make your workplace more fun and engaging, but they also help support employee work/life balance.
Some health and wellness perks that you can implement at your company include:
- Unlimited paid time off (PTO).
- Flexible work options, including flexible work schedules as well as remote and hybrid work.
- Company wellness retreats, such as monthly yoga and meditation sessions (or virtual sessions), along with paid lunches. You can order and send food gifts and catered lunches directly to employees with tools like Snacknation – a healthy food and snack delivery company designed for businesses.
- Paid gym memberships up to a certain amount.
25. Incentivize workplace goals
Incentives are a great employee engagement idea to boost employee morale long-term.
With prizes and rewards, you can create some healthy competition and show recognition for top performers. And the best part: there are many creative incentives that you can implement and tailor to your employees’ interests.
For instance, if you have a lot of sports fans on your team, you can reward top performers with game tickets. On the other hand, if you have lots of foodies among your staff, you can reward employees with a gift card to an amazing local restaurant. Or, keep things simple and opt for an Uber Eats gift card, letting employees choose what sort of food they like best.
Incentives can also be important to remember that incentives don’t always have to be prizes. You can do a simple shoutout on your company’s public social media, or add an employee achievements section to your company newsletter.
For more inspiration, check out our blog post on the best employee recognition ideas.
26. Hand out team swag
Let’s face it, we all love free stuff. When you offer team swag, you not only give staff a small token of appreciation, you also encourage them be proud of their team. By sporting company swag, with its unique colours, logos, and slogans, employees are embodying company culture. This is integral in strengthening team bonds and helping to boost employee engagement by building excitement around your brand.
You can hand out team swag during work anniversaries, following an outstanding employee achievement, and during holidays. Limited edition swag is a particularly engaging incentive as the scarcity would boost employees’ motivation to earn the item.
Some popular team swag employee engagement ideas include:
- Hoodies and crewnecks with company logos and slogans.
- Backpacks with company emblems.
- Branded water bottles/stationary.
- Sweatpants and other sports apparel with the company logo.
27. Measure employee engagement
Last but not least, this employee engagement idea should be at the forefront of any employee engagement strategy. Measuring employee engagement helps to inform your employee engagement tactics and focus your efforts in the right places.
With ContactMonkey, you can measure employee engagement using a single internal communications platform. Create, send, and track email newsletters directly from your existing Outlook or Gmail inbox. Easily find the best time to send employee newsletters and ensure that future emails are scheduled at optimal engagement times.
Not to mention, with employee engagement surveys, emoji reactions, anonymous comments, and eNPS, you can continuously gather feedback to improve employee engagement.
28. Inexpensive employee engagement ideas
Not all employee engagement ideas have to cost a fortune – sometimes the most impactful initiatives don’t cost anything at all! Here are some inexpensive employee engagement ideas that you can implement right away:
- Create an Employee Suggestion Box – Employees can provide feedback anonymously, without fear of repercussions. Build excitement around this box by offering small rewards for the best suggestions.
- Encourage Social Interaction – Create an employee lunch group where employees can share their ideas and interests with one another. This is a great way to build relationships within the office environment.
- Host Office-Wide Activities – Whether it’s a trivia night or yoga class, find something that allows your team to bond in a relaxed atmosphere outside of the office.
- Organize Community Service Events – Invite employees to come together and volunteer at a local charity organization or park clean up. This will help create a sense of purpose in the workplace while also giving back to the community!
- Recognize Employee Achievements – Show your employees they are valued by recognizing their hard work with a simple thank-you note or public shout-out. It doesn’t take much to make your employees feel appreciated!
- Provide Free Snacks – Nothing says “we care” like free snacks! Reward your team with healthy snacks throughout the day, or even a weekly treat from a local bakery. This small gesture can go a long way in boosting employee morale.
29. Employee engagement contest ideas
Contests are a great way to get your employees excited about the workplace. Not only do they create healthy competition and boost morale, but they also encourage employees to think outside of the box. Here are some engaging employee engagement ideas that you can try:
- Best Picture Contest – Encourage employees to capture memorable moments in the office with their camera. The winner would receive a prize for the best photo.
- Idea Generation Contest – Ask employees to come up with creative ideas that could help improve the workplace or workflows. The winner would be rewarded based on their innovative idea!
- Trivia Contest – Challenge your team to a trivia game related to your company, products, or industry. The winner can receive a prize or reward of their choice.
- Most Engaged Employee – Reward the employee who shows the most enthusiasm and dedication to their work with a special recognition or small gift. This encourages employees to be more engaged in their tasks!
- Team Building Contest – Divide your team into groups and challenge them to come up with creative ways to work together on a project. Give the winning team a bonus for their efforts!
30. Holiday employee engagement ideas
The holidays are the perfect time to show your employees some appreciation and spread festive cheer! Here are some ideas to help you engage with your team during this special time of year:
- Halloween—Organize a company-wide costume contest, or host a spooky movie night with snacks for your team.
- Thanksgiving—Show appreciation to your employees by giving out thank you cards and small gifts.
- Christmas—Send out holiday cards or organize a virtual gift exchange, so everyone can celebrate from their own homes!
- New Year’s—Encourage your team to set goals for the upcoming year and provide resources to help them achieve their resolutions.
- Valentine’s Day—Organize a potluck lunch, or host a happy hour with fun games like Secret Love Letters.
- 4th of July—Organize an outdoor BBQ or picnic for your team, complete with fireworks and star-spangled decorations!
Creatively Engage Your Employees
Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list of employee engagement ideas. There are dozens of creative ways you can engage workers. What works for you will depend on what makes your workforce unique. Factors that influence the success of an engagement strategy include:
- Age
- Department
- Education
- Location
- Industry
If you’re in doubt about how you can implement these creative employee engagement activities and ideas, don’t worry! Get in touch with our team of experts for a free consultation on how you can use your employee newsletter to boost employee engagement.
