In a post-pandemic environment, workplace conversations surrounding employee benefits have shifted from the bare minimum, including reimbursements, paid leave, free snacks and drinks at the office, etc. Now, some of the most common questions heard among peers include:
“How often do you go to the office?”
“Does your company let you work from home?”
“Which resort do you frequent for your team bonding activities?”
“Suggest some great places for our next team lunch! We have a budget.”
Such conversations indicate the extent to which employee wellness and engagement initiatives are seen as comparative parameters to determine a company's desirability for workers. A few decades ago, this discussion centered on factors like bonuses, leave policies, working hours, and more, which are the traditional HR initiatives for employee engagement.
Organizations worldwide are striving to adapt and promote employee engagement to address their employees' changing needs and priorities. Companies must do their best to provide employees with a sense of value at their workplace to prevent turnover and disengagement.
The HR team is one of the primary stakeholders responsible for a company’s employee engagement levels. Let's learn more about some HR initiatives for employee engagement that can impact the company’s performance over the long term and keep employees satisfied.
What are Employee Engagement Programs?
Employee Engagement programs and initiatives aim to keep a company’s employees invested in their roles. Such initiatives also provide the employees with a sense of value and belonging to their parent company. Studies show that the more employees feel valued for the job they do, the lower the employee turnover rate in the company.
However, each employee's sense of value can have a different definition. For instance, some may prefer recognition and appreciation as a motivating factor. Others may prefer flexible working hours. Similarly, some employees can expect adequate recreational facilities at the office as a reason to travel to work.
Ideally, employee engagement programs should be tailored to suit all employees while aligned with a company’s core objectives and values. This alignment is crucial to ensuring that all employees become aware of their purpose at the workplace and stay committed to the organization’s goals.
The core of employee engagement is to promote healthy communication among employees and leaders. Such communication is crucial to help employees unite over common interests and goals. Moreover, engagement programs also encompass employee wellness initiatives targeted at overall physical and mental well-being.
While the definition of employee engagement initiatives can seem simple, implementing them involves many complex dynamics. This is where the HR team comes to the rescue!
How HR Can Improve Employee Engagement?
Employees are the backbone of a company’s consistent progress and success. For this reason, companies have a dedicated Human Resources (HR) team that focuses on how to make employees perform their best while maintaining a balance between their work and home lives.
The HR team is responsible for charting a comprehensive employee engagement plan that caters to a wide variety of employee needs aligned with the company’s core values. Here are some of the common strategies adopted by HR teams across several companies to improve employee performance through engagement:
- Facilitate multi-channel communication: Employee needs and requirements are best assessed through face-to-face or anonymous communication. To understand employee needs at the grassroots level, HR must facilitate regular meetings between employees and leaders. Peer group discussions, team/part-level meetings, and discussion threads on official online communities are some ways to create a safe space for such open communications.
- Identify employee engagement levels: Employees exhibit different engagement levels depending on their team dynamics and work roles. The HR team must devise a blend of surveys, feedback channels, and other similar methods to identify and group employees based on their engagement levels. Special programs must be curated to convert neutral or disengaged employees to actively engage with their work.
- Recognition and appreciation: Although recognition at work is an age-old concept, it is important to adapt recognition strategies to current times. The HR team must devise faster recognition initiatives and flexible reward options to improve employee satisfaction and value.
- Employee-centric policies: HR must focus on creating a workplace culture centered around employee preferences and choices. For instance, remote working is now an expectation for employees. Similarly, companies with adaptive childcare policies are showing lower turnover among female employees.
- Empower leadership: Employees engage better when their leaders, managers, and department heads lead by example. Before advocating any employee initiatives, the HR team must focus on training the leaders to follow them sincerely. Special training for managers and team leaders helps propagate engagement goals. Also, it is through individual leaders or heads that the HR gets to understand each team’s work dynamics, engagement setbacks, ways to improve, and much more.
10 HR Initiatives to Improve Employee Engagement
The core of employee engagement is devising initiatives tailored to meet the needs of different employees based on their motivational drivers. Additionally, such initiatives to improve employee engagement must foster a sense of unity in diversity, promote overall employee wellness, and align with organizational goals.
Thankfully, many employee engagement solutions and platforms are available today to help HR develop successful employee engagement programs. In fact, such tools make it easier for HR to measure the results of different initiatives.
Let's learn some of the popular examples of employee engagement programs adopted by HR teams in different companies across industries today.
Recognize Contributions, Small or Big, Instantly!
Who does not love at least a small token of appreciation for doing something that makes a difference? Words of appreciation, like “You did great,” “Thanks for your commitment,” “You are valued,” and more, can definitely boost an employee’s morale.
Employee enthusiasm improves exponentially when such appreciation is shown in front of the whole team or the entire organization. Although such events are not physically possible on a regular basis, the HR team can develop company-wide online channels or platforms to announce employee appreciation and contributions.
Depending on the impact of an employee’s engagement, they can be rewarded appropriately. Such initiatives become more successful when the rewards actually benefit the employees and meet their expectations.
For these reasons, several online engagement tools offer flexible rewards programs, including cash, coupons, charity donations, and more. Such programs are more beneficial when peers recognize the efforts of those who collaborate with them.
Therefore, a flexible system of instant or fast recognition and appropriate rewards is one of the best ways to improve employee engagement levels in an organization.
- Create a flexible rewards and recognition program for small and big achievements.
- Empower leads and team members with appropriate rewarding authority.
- Make HR approvals for peer recognition fast for better engagement impact.
Encourage Open Communication Across the Organization
It is important for all employees to know the organization's current affairs for overall employee engagement. Furthermore, every employee must have a channel to voice their views on organization-wide decisions and initiatives.
Here is where a company-level Intranet can help all the employees stay connected on a common platform. Creating a company-level social media-like software solution helps employees stay connected and updated with the latest happenings. Such channels also serve as the best way to broadcast announcements and notifications from the company’s management.
Furthermore, a common discussion portal helps employees post queries and start discussions with like-minded people. An online portal can be a good way to showcase company insights, performance analytics, employee feedback, links and guides to policies, organizational hierarchy, and much more.
Moreover, having access to the latest company metrics and insights helps employees remain aligned and unified with the company’s goals.
- A robust online communication channel facilitates company-level knowledge sharing.
- Online discussion threads in the company’s Intranet can be the best way for HR to measure the pulse of employees.
- Company-wide online portals must encourage freedom of expression without violating general and company-specific ethics.
Provide Collaborative Opportunities for Teamwork
When employees are hired for a job role, they are mostly expected to work within a team and follow the team’s work dynamics. At one point, this routine can become monotonous and lead to employee disengagement.
If even one team member is disengaged, it can affect the overall engagement of other team members. For such reasons, employees can be encouraged to collaborate outside the team without following rigid working rules.
Several employee engagement solutions provide an ‘explorer’ tool for looking up and searching for employees. Instead of just searching by name, one can search with interesting filters, such as their team name, skillsets, project names, and more. This way, employees can look out for other employees working across the company to collaborate on new and interesting opportunities.
However, such collaborations must not affect an employee’s relationship with the existing team or make them feel overloaded. Here, HR can intervene and help employees and their leads plan their work goals during such collaborative opportunities.
- Employees must be given opportunities to connect with peers with similar areas of interest and technical expertise.
- HR team must ensure employees are not overloaded with work from their parent team and their new collaborations, leading to exhaustion.
- Employee contributions towards such collaborative projects and voluntary contributions must be valued.
Curate Immersive Onboarding Experiences and Stay-interviews
The first step to ensuring smooth employee engagement is to ensure that the right candidates are hired for a given job role. A hiring mistake can cost the company significant financial losses, specifically when new hires find themselves unfit for the role they applied for.
Onboarding for a new role can be a nervous experience for several hires. Here is where the HR can come up with a smooth and comprehensive onboarding program. Such programs must be tailored to provide as much information as possible regarding the company’s policies, the working team’s dynamics, organizational goals, POCs within the company, and much more.
Additionally, similar training programs must be conducted periodically to refresh employees' memories regarding their roles, responsibilities, and company policies.
Onboarding does not stop with an employee's entry into the company. The team leads, and an HR partner must conduct regular/yearly “stay-interviews” to understand employee concerns and barriers to active engagement with their team and peers.
Insights from past employee turnover data, stay interviews, and feedback can give precise suggestions on employee engagement initiatives that employees desire.
- Provide a wholesome employee orientation program while onboarding new employees.
- Use data-driven analytics to craft detailed and meaningful job roles and hire the best employees.
- Ask precise questions in stay-interviews to understand employee engagement and growth barriers.
Conduct Periodic Quizzes and Pulse Surveys
Continuous employee feedback constitutes the backbone of any company initiative. Working based on the majority's response to employee feedback helps enhance a workplace initiative or preempt any futile initiative.
Rather than focusing on only one channel, HR must devise innovative ways to collect employee feedback. As we have seen earlier, a common online portal can be a good way to initiate discussion threads and detect employees' pulse. However, some may not be comfortable sharing opinions on a public platform.
For such reasons, HR must roll out occasional pulse surveys or quizzes with precise questions to collect employee opinions. Tools like SurveyMonkey have options to create interactive, gamified surveys and quizzes that also provide AI-powered suggestions.
Should such surveys or quizzes be online only? Not necessarily. Opinion sharing, voting for a policy change within a team, and more can happen as a physical meeting with relevant team members. HR representatives can be present to coordinate such meetings, maintain employee anonymity if necessary, and decide upon initiatives depending on the results gathered.
- HR must roll out occasional pulse surveys to understand employee engagement levels with company goals, their team, and their career growth.
- Make such surveys interactive and interesting to prevent employees from skipping them.
- Opinion collection can be online and offline.
Encourage Cultural Celebrations and Team-level Events
Employees engage better when they find the company inclusive of their cultural and religious beliefs. Such cultural events can be a great way to promote unity in diversity. For the company, celebrating events significant to the employees’ culture and religions can be a great way to connect employees from similar ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Such events are one of the main reasons people wish to come to the office and bond with employees, despite the rising popularity of working from home. The HR team must earmark days of the year that hold significance to the religions and cultures of different groups of employees. They can plan celebrations, including theme-based fun, locally inspired lunches, and more, to maintain the festive spirit.
Celebrations need not be limited to culture and religion. Special days like an employee’s birthday or anniversaries can call for team-level celebrations that are simple or grand.
Each group and its related teams can have a special event to celebrate their performance milestones, discuss team goals, celebrate veterans, welcome new team members, and more.
Such events act as icebreakers and help employees get familiar with and bond with members from different teams under their leaders.
- HR must ensure active employee participation to celebrate events of cultural significance.
- Team leaders must collaborate with HR partners to celebrate team achievements and conduct ice-breaker events quarterly and annually.
- Encourage team-level celebrations of days like an employee’s birthday, work anniversary, and more.
Mandate Team-level and Part-level Outings, Lunches
Rather than waiting to celebrate important dates, it is more effective to create occasions to bond and engage with employees. For instance, even if HR has planned a company-wide Christmas celebration, some employees may be on leave to celebrate the year-end with their families and loved ones.
Therefore, creating more of these events to facilitate employee engagement becomes crucial when all team/group members are available. It is also essential to involve the entire team's employee-manager hierarchy in such occasions.
Monthly team lunches, quarterly recreational team outings, coffee with the boss, and more are some ways to promote informal, but official, engagement with team members and leaders. HR must play an integral role in planning and budgeting for such events within teams and groups in the company.
If the team is too busy with work in a given quarter or has a majority of its employees working remotely, HR can encourage online engagement initiatives. Monthly Zoom calls and knowledge-sharing sessions, online arcade gaming like tombola or dumb charades, and more, can be fun ways to connect with team members and take a well-deserved break.
- HR must prioritize mandating recreational outings for all teams in the company.
- Informal yet officially approved team connects can happen online, offline, inside the office, and outside.
- Team connect sessions must be aligned with the team’s work dynamics, say a team that works late in the evenings can have a team dinner rather than lunch.
Conduct Regular Workshops on Goal Alignment
Just like periodic feedback collection, periodic workshops and training are a compulsory part of employee engagement. Training and workshops must be focussed on promoting the company’s policies, goals, and vision with specific topics like:
- Employee Code of Conduct.
- Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH)
- Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
- Payroll, Leave and Reimbursement policies, and much more.
Such awareness workshops help employees act in unison when following a company’s goals. Even if one employee tries to deviate from such goals, the others can handhold and engage to ensure they stay united.
Such formal training sessions can happen both online and offline. Physical training sessions can be more interactive, where employees can instantly clarify queries and provide feedback. Such sessions are also venues where employees can group and engage in impromptu ice-breaker activities. Online training sessions help employees undertake them in their own leisure time.
Such workshops must be mandatory for all employees irrespective of designation and teams. The HR must create a separate calendar for company-wide workshops and training on specific technical areas that will benefit employees. They can also encourage employees to volunteer and conduct training sessions to teach their experiences, hacks, and more, to others who may be interested.
- HR must encourage the mandatory participation of all employees in training and workshops that reinforce the company’s goals and policies.
- Collect employee preferences through surveys and quizzes regarding the topics for which they require special training.
- Training must be a blend of online and physical/offline sessions.
Train Leaders to Lead by Example
One of the key drivers to help the HR team implement successful employee engagement initiatives is the team and group leaders in the company. Leaders are one of the important feedback bridges between employees and the management/HR of the company.
Leaders must be empowered with the right tools and training to handle employees working with them. Conducting regular 1:1 meetings, being available for the team, appropriately handling resources in times of crisis, being empathetic towards employees’ personal needs, and similar behaviors are what employees expect from their leaders/managers.
Adaptive leaders who accommodate their team’s dynamics, set realistic goals, provide the right insights, and handle crisis situations are known to show high levels of engagement in their teams.
For those employees who are new leaders, the overwhelming amount of opportunities can make it difficult to implement engagement initiatives all on their own. Here is where HR can handhold such leaders and ensure their smooth transition from an individual contributor to an empowered leader.
- Conduct special leadership training to help leaders implement engagement initiatives in line with the company’s goals.
- Assign an HR partner for each team/group for leaders to connect with for references and engagement aid.
- Encourage leaders to follow all engagement initiatives, such as providing instant appreciation, facilitating team celebrations, participating in recreational activities, and more, to motivate others in the team.
Create Career Development Opportunities
A small yet significant contributor to employee turnover is a lack of career growth. Sometimes, employees feel stagnant when they do not learn on a daily basis, when work becomes monotonous, or when a sense of tension or disengagement prevails in the team.
Here is where HR and leaders must be quick to identify dissatisfaction and provide the right growth opportunities for employees. A stagnant period of work can be a good opportunity for employees to upskill themselves, get certified with relevant coursework, attend distance education programs, and more.
The HR team must also provide sufficient opportunities for employees to switch teams within an organization. Such processes must be transparent and facilitate a smooth transition for an employee while maintaining good ties with the old and new team.
Employee retention surveys and stay interviews are informative ways to detect the kind of opportunities employees seek in their careers. Team leaders can be the best people to interact with directly and also suggest ways for employees to climb the corporate ladder without switching companies.
- Provide internal job-switching opportunities within the organization with friendly and transparent policies.
- Encourage leaders to provide insights into their employee’s performance and suggest skills to learn and improve.
- Tie up with universities and online educational portals to help employees take up coursework relevant to their work profiles.
The Impact of HR Initiatives on Engagement
Successful employee engagement initiatives can drive an all-round improvement in the quality of a company. In fact, it is possible to measure the impact of such initiatives through several metrics.
Here are some areas that show visible results of active employee engagement:
- Reduced employee turnover: When employees find sufficient motivation to work in a company, they hardly seek opportunities. With sufficient career development pathways, recreational activities, team bonding activities, recognition, and rewards, employees would only try to bring in more referrals than finding ways to switch companies.
- Higher profits and returns: Engaged employees perform better when working in unison. When employees work towards achieving common goals, it reflects in the company’s returns and profits.
- Better employee well-being: Engagement initiatives promote employees' better physical and mental health. When these needs are met, employees perform their job roles with more dedication.
- Promotes brand image: Employees are a company's face. Their quality and engagement with the company are a direct reflection of the company’s core values. For an outsider, an employee’s satisfaction with a company shows its brand value.
- Positive work culture: An organization that adapts to accommodate the needs of all segments of employees promotes a flexible work environment. A flexible work culture makes an organization most desirable to work for.
Improving Employee Engagement with Revaluate180
The employee engagement lifecycle begins right from the time an employee is onboarded to ensuring a long and memorable stay in the company for as long as possible. Therefore, HR initiatives for employee engagement must start right from crafting crisp job roles, making optimal hiring decisions, building robust teams, and ensuring smooth offboarding during unavoidable circumstances.
Revaluate180 offers employee engagement solutions aimed at assisting HR professionals with the right engagement initiatives curated to suit their companies. Our data-driven insights help provide accurate predictions on the right hires for job roles, analyze existing engagement levels, and suggest the best engagement initiatives to improve team performance.
We provide special assistance with employee development programs to help employees understand and work in an inclusive and dynamic work environment. Connect with us today — we would be happy to assist you with engagement initiatives for your company.