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15 Employee Engagement activities that you can start doing now

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Artikel from Paula Clapon on, May 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?



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 pdf, download the free eBook and go over it when you have more time to design and implement these employee engagement activities.

 15 Employee Engagement activities

 1. Involve employees in your business planning process

Every 6 months, or even quarterly, present the most important issues in your company and the actions made to address those issues. Involve your team in planning ahead, assessing opportunities and coming up with improvement ideas for your business strategy.

By promoting transparency and offering them a strategic insight into how the company is being managed, you’ll foster loyalty and you’ll also have a prepared leadership pipeline.

2. Create a knowledge sharing system

One of the biggest costs of a high employee turnover rate is the loss of essential information. A knowledge sharing system helps you avoid that cost, to some extent, and it’s also a great engagement driver for newcomers.

You can have a mentorship program, pairing experienced employees with newly hired ones. Create a learning program template that they should follow, giving them enough space to test their own learning methods. Give them a timeframe, a set of objectives and let the relationship unfold on its own.

3. Encourage knowledge sharing in a creative way

Teams are oftentimes isolated within their own project and their own workspace, that they have no idea what the rest of the company is doing.

Create an open sharing space, once every 2 months or so, where every team can present updates on their project and key learning points. Teams will evolve much more rapidly, using the knowledge shared and the different experiences on every project.

To minimize the risk of this turning into a boring, mandatory 2h meeting, make it fun and creative. You can have a theme per each sharing session. For example, this month’s theme is “Mafia movies” and the Sales team decides to present its updates in a Godfather-like manner. Remember, creativity is a key happiness driver.

4. Show them the money




5.   Encourage and provide learning opportunities

Create your own Academy, where employees can access the knowledge and development opportunities that they need. This is one of the top 3 reasons why employees quit companies: lack of learning prospects.



6.  Mens sana in corpore sano

Have your own Office Olympics where everyone can get involved and have fun. Promote wellbeing and the benefits of a healthy lifestyle in a fun, competitive way.


7. Have a hack night

Break monotony with an ambitious working night. Set a clear objective, create your own set of rules (breaks, music, snacks, etc.) and try to be as productive as possible in just one night.

Get everyone together and test your creative and operational limits. I promise it’s going to be really fun! Here’s how the team at HubSpot got together to create 200 hours’ worth of marketing content in one hack night.

8. Create excitement about upcoming opportunities


If they’re excited about what’s next, they’ll do their best and reply with a “No, thank you” to those irritating poaching emails from your competition.


9. Let them create their own onboarding experience

Create a self-guided onboarding experience. People are much more like

ly to remember and assimilate information that they get on their own. Set the ground rules, give them basic instructions, a list of objectives and a timeframe. For example a 60 days plan, with some basic milestones.

Let them swim on their own. Oftentimes, onboarding processes fail to provide actual value and initiate a dialogue. Let new employees create their own onboarding experience and figure out their work preferences.

10. Make onboarding fun

Have a scavenger hunt onboarding. Turn information that is usually considered boring or useless into company trivia and learning how to use tools and systems, such as the internal communication system.

Include other people in the game. For example, have some of the older employees provide answers and get to know the new hires.

11. Create your own internal magazine



12. TEDx [InsertCompanyNameHere]. Sounds good right?

Have your own company TEDx-like Talks where you get to share ideas, boost creativity and encourage innovation.

Make your workplace less about work and more about the people there. Their ideas, experiences and aspirations. Give them a chance to be the source of their own inspiration, boosting morale and creativity for everyone in the company.

You can make it an event of its own or include it in another event that you’re already planning.

13. The League of Extraordinary Managers

Managers are a key business component and an equally important engagement driver.

Create a coaching program for managers and teach them to really care. Coach them towards maximum contribution and satisfaction, align them with the organization’s strategy, mission and values and show them how to recognize attitude, effort and results.

14. “I am my own hero”

Encourage individuals to design and own their career paths, instead of relying on the company or on their manager. Employees need to take initiative and set a career goal for themselves.


For this activity, managers have a guiding role. They can understand and help align employees’ aspirations with the organization’s career development point of view.

15. Give back

Get involved in social and charity initiatives. Giving back creates a positive mentality. It also fosters pride and loyalty.

Get the team together, have everyone pitch a cause and pick the one you want to support. It’s important that you make it personal, that you make it count. You can donate either time and involvement, or money, or both.

Usually, giving time is more rewarding than giving money, especially for gen Y employees, who are highly oriented towards social involvement.

Commit to taking action, don’t wait for engagement to happen


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.


Bottom line



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