15 employee engagement activities that you can start doing now

Korte versie van een Artikel van Paula Clapon op http://www.gethppy.com, mei 2016

Before you start spinning numbers and planning activities, you need to realize that employee engagement is a mindset. The only way that an engagement strategy will yield results is if you start with the “why” of the matter, with each activity and event you plan.

Start by looking at your team as real people, with ideas, aspirations, accomplishments and challenges, within the workplace and outside of it. These people are not a means to generating business results, they are a formidable resource that needs to be understood and nurtured in order to deliver on what’s expected of them as workers.

Why is employee engagement so important?

As a manager, keeping your employees engaged is perhaps the biggest challenge you face. It’s also a huge opportunity to gain long-term commitment and discretionary effort from your team. That effort will ultimately lead to higher sales and fewer mistakes.

There is more and more convincing evidence that improving employee engagement can significantly improve company performance across a number of key areas, such as; profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction, innovation, health and safety, sickness and absence, turnover and wellbeing.

But, in order to achieve that, your engagement efforts have to be aligned with your overall business strategy. Implementing unplanned ideas and activities that you think might help, without monitoring or measuring their impact, is a waste of time and resources.

Business commitment to employee engagement

You have to be clear about “what” you want to achieve in your company, before jumping to “how” you’re going to go about it. Your HR function is essential in defining and planning an employee engagement strategy that aligns with your organization’s goals.

Like we pointed out in a recent article, HR has a much more strategic function within a company and should be involved in the business planning process to ensure its profitability. Being inherently cross-functional, the HR function has a high degree of authority in terms of managing the employees who will ultimately execute that strategy.

Employee engagement is not an isolated HR process. In order for it to deliver the benefits we talked about earlier, it needs organizational commitment and involvement to implement efficient initiatives.

Now that we have that covered, whether you’re simply browsing for some ideas that might boost up morale or if you’re putting down the final details for your HR strategy, here are 15 activities ideas that you should try! If you’re short on time or if you prefer to have it all in a pdfdownload the free eBook and go over it when you have more time to design and implement these employee engagement activities.

 15 Employee Engagement activities

Read an explanation of the activities in the original article.

 1. Involve employees in your business planning process

 

2. Create a knowledge sharing system

 

3. Encourage knowledge sharing in a creative way

 

4. Show them the money

 

5. Encourage and provide learning opportunities

 

6.  Mens sana in corpore sano

 

7. Have a hack night

8. Create excitement about upcoming opportunities

 

9. Let them create their own onboarding experience

 

10. Make onboarding fun

 

11. Create your own internal magazine

 

12. TEDx [InsertCompanyNameHere]. Sounds good right?

 

13. The League of Extraordinary Managers

 

14. “I am my own hero”

 

15. Give back

 

Moving from theory to practice is a big challenge. Most companies that measure employee engagement do little beyond that measurement.

In order to obtain all of the benefits of employee engagement, you have to commit to taking action:

“An emerging view is that engagement needs to be characterized as transformational. Organizations dedicate 90 percent of their engagement effort on ‘post survey’ activity to inspire people to do great work and match their efforts with business needs.

The other 10 percent is attributed to ‘transactional’ engagement – the often sterile process of capturing survey-based evidence to support the transformational programme of engagement activities.”

Dr Martin Reddington DBA, Academic Fellow CIPD (Source)

Taking action means ensuring that all employees understand the company vision and its strategic direction, as well as what their individual role is in achieving it.

It also means engaging managers by developing their leadership skills, living the company values on a day-to-day basis and allowing open, two-way communication with employees.

Bottom line

Employee engagement is an organizational effort that requires a long-term vision in a business strategy context, if it is to improve productivity and retention rates.

You have to identify what your company needs and develop the right strategy. Only then should you focus on how to measure employee engagement and what activities to implement.

Read the original article here.