23 Employee Engagement Activities And Ideas To Keep Your Team Happy

Do you need help engaging employees and developing effective employee engagement ideas? Well, this guide is for you! 

For any successful organization, employees are the backbone. They are the face of the organization through interactions with your customer base and drive all operations. But why do only 20% of employees feel engaged at work? That’s because many organizations struggle to find effective employee event engagement ideas. 

Simply put, employee engagement means that employees are invested in the organization and willingly contribute their time or energy to making it successful. Focusing on employee engagement activities makes them more productive and more likely to stay with your organization. 

Check out this blog’s top creative employee engagement ideas to keep your workforce connected and motivated. Let’s get started!

What Is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement refers to how attached or emotionally invested an employee is in the organization and its job role. As Forbes states, an employee’s emotional commitment to the organization and its goals is employee engagement. 

Employee engagement is all about how the employees care about their work. It is directly related to higher performance and better outcomes. Are they responsible, invested, and excited about company projects? Do they respect other employees or partner with others at work? The three critical drivers of employee engagement are:

• Determined and reliable managers or senior leadership
• Getting fruitful work in their job role
• Positive and healthy relationships with their colleagues. 

 Don’t forget that employees are also human and need workplace support.

 23 Best Employee Engagement Activities 

To help you boost employee engagement, we’ve collected our favorite team engagement ideas. The primary goal of these ideas is to prioritize activities that put employees at the center. Check out the ideas listed below to engage your employees actively in the activities.

1.  Recognize Success

Recognizing success is one of the best employee event engagement activities you can carry out at your company. When a team member achieves a certification, completes a project, or meets their goal, celebrate as a team.

You can announce the celebration on social media or in person with your team; it will motivate all team members and make them feel valued. According to a survey, over 75% of full-time employees felt satisfied with tier position when recognized by management at least once a month. 

2. Collect Anonymous Feedback 

The first and foremost step is understanding why your employees don’t feel engaged with your brand if you want to enhance employee engagement. You need to understand why your employees don’t feel engaged and what your company isn’t offering. Anonymous surveys can play a pivotal role in overall employee satisfaction for this reason. 

You can do it effectively by implementing employee feedback survey forms or feedback tools. The information you receive through the feedback tools will help you brainstorm new team engagement activities to improve employee engagement.

3. Hold Open Office Hours 

Organizational leadership must hold office hours weekly or monthly to keep communication lines open with team members. These staff engagement ideas are required because many employees feel they needlessly occupy a superior’s time by sitting down and having an open conversation.

For both employees and organizations, small but frequent investments of time can create exponentially more excellent benefits. 

4. Encourage Innovative Thinking 

Every corporate employee shares their thoughts on improving tasks and projects with other employees during lunchtime or between breaks. If you are not actively harnessing creativity, innovation, free mind, etc., you’re missing out on the chance to improve the organization.

Engage in mobile friendliness and open-ended discussions to ensure management is always aware of employees’ innovative ideas. When employees interact regarding improvements, it is the foundation for creativity and innovation that can propel your company into a successful future. 

5. Cross-Training Opportunities

Motivated and successful employees want to acquire new skills and knowledge for career advancement. Enabling employees to occasionally shadow another team member or get training on different roles within the organization makes them feel more engaged with the company.

This training will help them understand how different parts of the company work together. Throughout the company, the cohesive relationship between different departments enhances a healthy line of communication to increase productivity. 

6. Internal Networking Events 

Effective internal networking event ideas might include happy hours, casual get-togethers, or team lunches. These event engagement ideas enable team members to spend time together outside regular working hours, no matter the time or place.

This idea helps employees to know each other better personally. For different teams, these event types also present an opportunity to develop and improve relationships that would have been missed. Some of the internal networking events are: 

• Team Dinner
• Bring your children to work
• Office competitions 
• Escape room, etc. 

7. Social Media Wall

Creating a social media wall for events at your office can be one of the most influential event engagement ideas for engaging more employees. To create buzz around the event, these walls showcase social media content. Event attendees post content about their experience on social walls.

Displaying such content is social proof and inspires other employees to do the same. Social Walls is a tool that helps you show a social media wall at your events and create a lasting impression. 

8. Provide Foundations for Career Advancement

Employees who want to advance their careers will thrive for a level of success, and the whole organization will benefit from it. Employers can develop this motivation by implementing mentoring programs, allowing team members to attend workshops, and covering the costs of relevant classes..

They even assign mentors within the company to guide the career advancement of team members. To complete courses and attend workshops or seminars, companies must allocate a large portion of their budget to each employee whenever possible. 

The companies will benefit in specific ways after doing this: 

• Enhanced employee motivation
• A more innovative mindset
• Better job satisfaction 
• More remarkable ability to implement new technologies 

9. Budget For Team Celebrations

You should celebrate in a big way when your team makes a significant accomplishment. Your company must decide on a budget for team bonding for everything from team engagement activities to wellness and recreational days. Team events are a great way to introduce some liveliness into the workplace.

You can host several events that allow cross-collaboration, and teamwork across departments can boost productivity. Some fun engagement ideas include bowling, karaoke, table tennis, escape rooms, etc. 

10. Host a Yearly Awards Night

Getting lost in the moment can be easy, especially at high-growth companies. Host a yearly awards night to highlight growth and celebrate employee success. Award ceremony ideas are suitable for recognizing employees who go above and beyond for your brand.

Awards make employees feel valued and proud of their contributions. They also set a standard for the rest of the team. Employees who want to stand out in your organization should know which areas to improve to get the rewards. 

Your employees know what they need to do if they want to stand out in your organization by giving out rewards frequently.

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11. Host Happy Hours

Happy hours and office outings are important event engagement activities for employees to bond and discuss topics outside of work. Sometimes managers are busy, but employees want to stay connected with them. It’s also crucial for leaders to have open lines of communication with their team.

To provide employees the chance to engage with leadership throughout the work week, hosting happy hours is a great way. It’s certainly easier to know the real intent of an employee if you know them personally rather than connecting over emails.

12. Organize Lunch And Learns

Lunch and learning are quick team engagement activities to educate employees about a topic of interest. These types of activities are famous in small companies. To talk about a specific topic, you can invite a motivational speaker from another company or get employees to speak about their expertise outside work.

Lunch and learn are great corporate event ideas to enhance team collaboration and engage employees in leading team discussions. 

13. Ensure Transparency From The Top Down

Having open conversations with your team about uncomfortable topics can be challenging, but they are crucial. Your company doesn’t need to shy away from those tough conversations; instead, it must embrace them.

You can gain employees’ trust through this activity, and it’s hard to get back once it’s lost. Create a positive culture in your company by having tough conversations with employees open to discussing anything.

14. Establish An Open-Door Policy

You can schedule an open-door time to invite employees of all levels to discuss their ideas with higher managers. This event engagement idea will help you understand the team’s personality. The frequent ask-me-anything meetings and an open-door policy ensure that people are always comfortable sharing ideas and opinions. 

15. Have Social Areas In Your Office

You must design areas for team members to relax, bond, and eat in your company office. Many teams take pride in eating together at lunch and some gel in game rooms. You can connect with the team during lunch; if impossible, consider bringing the team together in video games, ping pong, or other bonding activities. You can utilize this throughout the day to get people to engage with one another. 

16. Create Relaxing Areas In Your Office

On the mind and body of an employee, sitting at a desk all day can be harsh and exhausting. Many companies are applying relaxing seating arrangements in their offices as part of their ideas for employee engagement to improve the workplace.

Employees can change work positions from the people they work near and refresh their environment. You can relax by placing bean bags or coffee tables in your meeting room to create a more relaxing environment. 

17. Make Your Office Pet Friendly

Pets help improve happiness and reduce employee stress by enabling them to engage with something that’s always happy to see them. Taking dogs to work significantly reduces employee stress. To boost employee morale, this initiative is a simple and cost-effective way.

A study found that over 80% of employees in pet-friendly offices say having a pet makes them feel relaxed, happy, and pleasant at work. 

18.  Utilize Office Hot Seats

Sometimes, it can be challenging for employees to become more familiar with colleagues across departments. This is because they meet people only from their team. One of the best team engagement ideas you can try is to tag some seats with monitors as ‘hot seats.’ 

Employees from any department can sit on these seats and gel with each other. These seats will encourage team bonding among employees of different departments. Without having to schedule a meeting, they’ll learn more about other departments and how to connect with them by using the hot seats concept. 

19. Create Office Game Rooms 

Office game rooms must be part of creative employee engagement ideas in companies. Games Like Office Bingo give people a quick outlet to bond with colleagues in a fun way and inspire employees to leave their desks. You can put a ping-pong table, soccer table, and video games, including gaming consoles and bean bags. This activity will help employees step away from work and make them feel relaxed. 

20. Prioritize Mental Health

One of the many virtual employee engagement ideas is employee perks, as employees don’t have to be in the office to reap the rewards. Mental health perks are one of them. Employees must be getting the resources they need because mental health is as important as physical health.

These perks offer more fun and engagement and support employee work/life balance. You can offer your employees mental health services or mental health breaks and ensure they will be relaxed when they return to work. 

21. Offer Wellness Activities

Employees often don’t want to work because they are mentally exhausted. Little things like wellness event engagement activities can excite your employees to work. Employees may even band together to reach personal fitness goals, as on-site gyms make working out before or after work more convenient.

Onsite offers a flexible wellness spending account. Many companies provide dental, health, and disability insurance to their employees. 

22. Provide Competitive Insurance Packages

Great insurance packages are a must, depending on your employees’ demographics. Specific insurance packages will be more beneficial than others when considering your workforce.

For example, TripAdvisor provides 100% coverage on employee medical insurance along with competitive contribution rates for family coverage. This insurance will ensure everyone in the company receives the medical attention they require without worrying about financial burdens. 

23. Reduce Stress With Family Medical Leave

Every year, conduct a survey to find the most suitable benefits to offer employees. One of them is family medical leave. When an employee’s family member requires medical attention, grant them such leave without cutting their pay.

This benefit will reduce employees’ stress and help them contribute more focusedly to company goals. You can implement such leaves that employees can use to care for their sick family members. 

5 Best Employee Engagement Examples From Well-Known Companies

The inspiration behind many work engagement activities comes from well-known companies that have seen them succeed. Here are five employee engagement examples from reputed organizations that you can practice: 

1. Google 

An excellent example of a successful employee event engagement activity is Google’s 20% Time program. Under this program, employees can spend 20% of their working hours on passion projects outside their job responsibilities. Google develops innovation and helps keep employees engaged by offering employees the freedom to explore their interests. 

Developing an environment like Google’s workplace can encourage employees and allow more open communication channels. Employees are better connected to the people and workplace around them when every employee’s opinion is considered. 

2. Zappos 

Lack of development opportunities is one of the most significant challenges to employee engagement. An online shoe and clothing retailer, Zappos, applied a management system called ‘Hollacracy’ or ‘Shadow Program’ to eliminate traditional hierarchical structures. This program enables employees to shadow one another to learn what coworkers do during a typical workday. 

To better understand their work, this organization lets employees ‘shadow’ coworkers in other departments for a few hours. This approach inspires employees to take ownership of their work and develops engagement by giving them a sense of purpose. Zappos has experienced higher employee satisfaction and customer service excellence. 

3. Salesforce 

A leading cloud-based software company, Salesforce uses the “V2MOM Framework” to engage and align its employees. V2MOM simply means Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. This framework lets employees understand how their roles contribute to achieving them. Maintaining a highly engaged workforce and delivering outstanding customer experiences, Salesforce’s transparent approach has been crucial to its success. 

4. Apple 

Apple, one of the leading tech giants, has set new standards for team engagement activities. To promote good employee relations and increase productivity, the company has an elaborate strategy. The ideas for employee engagement on which Apple emphasizes: 

• Fandom culture- Apple believes employees are the company’s biggest fans and brand ambassadors. The brand promotes the use of its products among the employees by giving them a 25% discount. 
• Allowing employees to explore- Apple’s innovative designs and trend-setting products have resulted mainly from a culture that enables employees to explore. The company promotes employee engagement by motivating them to design better products that they have seen. 

5. Microsoft 

To promote shared values and secure long-term success, Microsoft considers employee engagement an outstanding tool. Over the last decade, Microsoft has been voted one of the best places to work several times. Here are some of the Microsoft’s employee event engagement ideas: 

• Team-building and networking options- Microsoft provides many team-building activities through which employees connect and share. These opportunities help the company strengthen its workplace values and objectives. 
• Professional development- Through training and coaching, Microsoft has committed to creating a pool of highly-skilled workforce. The organization supports employees who want to grow by learning new skills. 

Final Note

In conclusion, employee event engagement activities are crucial to developing a motivated and productive team. You can practice the above-mentioned employee team engagement ideas, such as recognizing success, hosting internal networking events, and hosting yearly award nights to achieve goals. Employees who align with the company’s motive are likelier to be committed, satisfied, and perform at their best. 

Start investing in your team’s happiness and see the positive impact on your company’s culture and performance.