Top 30 Innovative Employee Engagement Ideas for 2019

Employers often wonder how to increase profit. Unfortunately, not many of them consider motivating the employees an important factor. However, your profit and success directly depend on the people on your team. The more efficiently they work, the higher the company’s performance. Employee engagement ideas for small companies are especially important.

What Is Employee Engagement?

The success of a company is determined by its employee engagement level. Staff involvement is the highest level of satisfaction and loyalty. An engaged employee not only does their job efficiently and professionally but also motivates their colleagues to do the same. 

They initiate new methods for effective problem solving and achieving strategic goals. The employee works better, puts extra enthusiasm in their activities, promotes fresh ideas, attracts consumers, and increases their interest. The question is: how does an employer improve employee engagement?

The Challenges Employee Engagement Solves

Companies often face problems that you can easily solve if you boost employee engagement.

Difficulties experienced by the company:

  • Employees taking sick leaves too often;
  • Systematic violation of project deadlines;
  • Lack of initiative from employees;
  • Lack of interest in training and professional development.

Why Is Employee Engagement Important?

Why does employee engagement matter? The answer to this question seems rather simple: An engaged employee is interested. They show responsibility and initiative.

If the company’s management listens to the opinions of the employees, this contributes to the effective solving of issues and boosts the team spirit. This is followed by the improvement of financial indicators, optimization of business processes and the formation of an attractive corporate culture. That’s why employee engagement strategies are very important for every business, in particular, helping to:

Increase employee performance

Well-engaged employees work more and better, as plain as that. They are interested in putting forward new ideas for the development of the company and, usually, share the global corporate vision or main business idea either most eagerly or at least to some extent.

employee retention

Increase customer satisfaction

Deeply involved employees are also better at attracting customers and increasing the loyalty of customer-base towards the company. They reflect a company’s top desire to help people out with the quality service through their own personal eagerness. And active, dedicated business representatives always conquer lots of public attention. 

Increase financial success

With the above-mentioned boosts in performance and rates of customer satisfaction, the overall company financial success is sure to rise as well. Levels of business profits are directly proportional to how much effort workers put into solving both daily and major tasks, how efficient they are at what they’re doing as a whole, and how good they are with customers.

Decrease employee turnover

You should focus on engaging your staff heavily if you want to raise your employee retention rate dramatically. An interested, highly involved in the business cause employee is a loyal employee that will think a thousand times before leaving or leave solely due to a specific life/work situation.

Employee Engagement Elements

There are plenty of ways and methods of engaging employees out there – we’re going through a bunch in the section after this one. There are two major, generalized points of effort you can put into the matter right now, however, to kick things off:

 

  • Define the main engaging aspects of your staff. It can be guaranteed professional growth, decent salary, and work benefits, strong managing leadership, etc. You can identify major engagement drivers through in-house pollings and feedback analysis, which brings us to the next point;
  • Interact more closely with employees. No matter your position in the company, be it a top manager, CEO, COO or something else, some good, light-hearted, free-minded communication does wonders. It motivates, fulfills other people socially, and, most importantly, engages employees most efficiently. 

 

TOP 30 Innovative Employee Engagement Ideas That Work

Based on your proactive engagement-driven attitude and good terms with employees, here are some ideas for employee engagement at work you can use to your ultimate benefit.

Improve engagement by adjusting work processes 

Clarify the goals and responsibilities of each employee

When a person does not fully understand what role they play in the company, their involvement drops.

Emphasize the importance of work-life balance

Physical and mental health is important. Sometimes, due to stress or a heavy workload, employees can skip exercise or forget about a healthy diet. This affects their productivity as well as overall wellbeing.

Offer flexible work hours and locations

The right managers are focused on the result, and not on the hours that the employee spends in the office.

Give your people inside information

Employees prefer to know every important detail. 

Let your employees choose the dress code

It greatly affects the attitude towards work.

Introduce new workers to all employees

In many companies, new employees are introduced only to colleagues in their department.

Make a development plan

An individual development plan will set career goals that will provide the necessary motivation and help increase engagement.

Encourage individuality

Encourage personal projects. An employee who wants to do something interesting is more valuable than someone who simply performs their duties.

Show employees that they have a choice

This concerns a variety of issues. For example, the time they can come to work or when they can take a vacation.

Improve engagement using additional financial incentives

Celebrate personal wins

If one employee has completed their monthly or quarterly plan, let it be a victory for the entire department.

Encourage good results

Praise your subordinates more often. If you find out that someone has done an excellent job, reward them.

Encourage employees not only with money

Not all problems can be solved with money. You can offer additional vacations, tickets to concerts or games, gift certificates.

Improving employee engagement with culture and coaching 

Create a unique office environment

Employees feel less engaged in a boring gray office. Try to create a unique and comfortable space around them.

Make work fun

There are many ways to combine business with pleasure.

Communication

Take the initiative and ask people to anonymously share their thoughts and feelings. Conduct a short poll among the employees.

Organize ongoing training

Engagement is 25% higher in companies that offer continuous training.

Celebrate holidays and achievements

Remember employees’ birthdays, as well as other memorable dates: weddings, work anniversaries, and so on.

Open consistent lines of communication

Start a newsletter for employees. Corporate mailing is a common tradition in many companies.

Provide ongoing coaching and training

Organize lectures on relevant and interesting topics. Outside the box, people start to get creative.

Hold Regular Brainstorming Sessions

A meeting does not need to have a goal. Make an appointment without an expected result.

Take care of non-working time

Work processes are not the only thing that’s important. Find an idea that will unite the employees after work.

Help with personal growth

Training new employees will help them understand the goals of the company, its history, structure, and opportunities for growth and development.

Improve engagement by investing in the work environment 

Build relationships at work

Get to know your colleagues. It is important for the leader to not only know the professional skills of the employees but also their interests.

build relationships with employees

Create an atmosphere of enthusiasm and positivity

Charge people with positive energy in the morning. Gather employees to a meeting or just send everyone a letter with a motivating quote.

Implement continuous feedback

Ask the managers to run weekly meetings. The goal is to discuss how the work is going and if anybody has new ideas.

Build more trust

Spend lunchtime together. Invite the whole team out for lunch or order food to the office, and in the hot summer arrange ice cream delivery.

Set a personal example

An engaged manager is more than half the effectiveness and success of the organization. They set high standards and motivate.

Give your employees a voice

Caring for employees increases loyalty to the company because everyone likes it when their opinion is remembered and appreciated.

Arrange themed days in the office

Jeans day? Chocolate day at the office? New Year’s party in the summer? Go crazy with creative ideas for employee engagement: a little madness never hurt anyone.

Create a blog about working in the company

The authors will be the employees themselves, telling about their experience.

Setting Up Employee Engagement Strategy & Goals

Always plan out your efforts targeted at boosting business success. Have a blueprint of everything you’re about to do and go stage by stage to keep it all systematic and you won’t fail. For one thing, you can start by borrowing some tips that fit your particular situation from the list above and prioritizing them. Thus:

  1. Identify the main engagement drivers in your collective as mentioned in the ‘Employee Engagement Models’ section;
  2. Pick the tips from our list that fit the drivers you defined;
  3. Prioritize them based on the typical situation in your team (e.g., start with social efforts and continue on to the more in-depth methods of organizing meetups and holidays and whatnot);
  4. Keep putting effort into boosting engagement and don’t be afraid to experiment with the tips we’ve provided. 

How to Measure Employee Engagement

The main signs of employee engagement:

  • Interest in their work, the desire to do the job as well and as fast as possible. 
  • Understanding of tasks and setting their own priorities. The employee can find which task needs to be solved, and even if the current plans are completed, they will find something to improve.
  • A high level of initiative. Focusing on improvement on their own work and business processes in the company.

The higher the engagement of the staff is, the better the atmosphere in the team, and the higher the level of employee satisfaction. You can achieve that by, for instance, implementing the following methods.

Collect surveys

It’s a pretty efficient way to measure your company’s mood with anonymous polls. The employees can personally and directly evaluate the level of satisfaction with their work, salary, company management, and make their suggestions for changing the business processes.

Meet with employees

Live meetups should be a more interactive addition to the in-house polling. An informal meeting, for instance, allows us to build more trusting relationships and hear your people out in the regular, ‘no-pressure’, non-working environment. 

Interview employees

It’s great when a top manager or CEO simply invites employees for a talk from time to time, no corporate intimidation involved. You can either invite them to your office or approach an employee’s workplace and just ask how they’re doing if they are free enough at the moment to have a chat. An interview can even take place during a water cooler talk. 

Check employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

This is an advanced employee evaluating platform that is based on some deep scientific research and helps to gather feedback to be further analyzed, automate engagement-boosting processes, etc. Check your in-house rates there if you want to stay up to date on the matter. If the employee engagement rate is below 70%, this should be a warning signal for the management.

Employee Engagement Software

In the age of technology, everyone is looking for applications or platforms that can positively affect the work of employees. Each entrepreneur must understand that without the support and good atmosphere in the team, it is impossible to achieve engagement, but with these and good software, it will be easier to reach satisfaction.

What’s Next?

Would you like to increase your profits? Employee engagement is a powerful tool for managing the team, improving financial performance, optimizing business processes and creating an attractive corporate culture. But what if we say that you can motivate employees not only in these ways but also with a program? Nimble will greatly simplify the work of your employees!

Nimble CRM

How Nimble Can Help You

The CRM software not only sorts and organizes documents and sends emails, but also allows you to make notes on specific contacts, which helps to individualize the approach to everyone and make the workflow faster. This is a great way to simplify the work, drive employee engagement and motivate them to do more, which leads to an increase in sales.

Conclusion

The engagement of employees is really important for any company, not only for its growth but also for its reputation. Employees who like their team and work always show more enthusiasm and initiative. That is why employee engagement activities should be provided in every company to increase the level of satisfaction among the staff. This will help your business grow quickly and efficiently.