10 Employee Engagement Ideas To Keep Your Staff Stress-Free

Looking for Employee Engagement ideas? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Employee engagement during COVID is crucial. Particularly because neither the organizations nor the employees were prepared for it. Without much preparation, we took on the largest remote-working experiment to date.

For some, it was completely new but even for those who had some exposure to working remotely before the COVID-19 outbreak, working from home every single day of the week (with no definite end in sight) can be lonely and isolating. Yes, we don’t have to wake up early every morning and embark on our daily commute to work, however, in reality, the novelty is now starting to wear off, causing employee morale to drop.

According to an article covered by the Economic Times, the number of cases citing Stress, Anxiety, Fear and Depression amongst working professionals has increased 3 times post the lockdown. Alarming isn’t it?

Here are 10 ways you can keep your employees engaged and substantially reduce the feelings of isolation, stress and anxiety:

1. Quizzes

The best way to take your employees’ minds off work is to engage them with quizzes. The subjects of these quizzes could range anything from organization-centred to something extremely random like the ones you find on BuzzFeed. We recommend to keep it light.

But the benefits of quizzes can move beyond just engagement. Quizzes can be gamified to create leaderboards and contests & even survey-fied to capture insights that can further be used to improve processes. For example – personality trait assessment, skill assessments and more. Choose a platform that provides in-depth reporting and a beautiful user interface.

2. Team building games

Inclination towards working in siloes is the biggest drawback of remote-working. Employees interact lesser and lesser with co-workers and the communication is often only restricted to within the teams. Cross-functional team-building activities on a bi-weekly basis can ensure that employees connect with each other more frequently. You can leave the mode of communication open – phone, web-conference, office chat, WhatsApp whatever your employees prefer. Design games that require employees to interact with other co-workers.

3. Mood-o-meter survey

What some organizations do as a practice (including some of our clients) is that they connect with their employees at the beginning of each day with a single question feedback request. “How is your mood today?” The rating scale consists of 5 emojis ranging from grumpy to excited. This information is passed on to each team lead who then take the necessary actions to uplift the team’s morale. Quite simple and ingenious in my opinion.

4. Employee Opinion Survey

A lot has changed throughout the past couple of months. And a lot is yet to be changed in the future as well. Your employees’ opinions matter more critically now. Involve them in the decision making process. Conduct annual opinion surveys now and include the must-have questions outlined in the article – How to design an employee opinion survey in 2020 [10 must-have questions].

Ask for your employees’ opinions on all aspects of your business randing from processes, people, health & safety, management decisions, job security, compensation, suggestions and much more.

5. Random Awards

Rewards and recognitions are a great way to keep your employees’ morale high. Appreciate your employees and their efforts more now than before. If your employees can complete their tasks on time while tackling their daily challenges, they sure do deserve an award!

On a lighter note, we recently conducted an award ceremony where the entire team nominated employees for various award categories and the person with the most mentions won! These were some of the award categories: Mr FixIt Award (Has a fix for every problem), The Fashionista Award (Rocks a style even on Zoom calls), The Crack-Jack Award (Cracks jokes on even the most serious occasions) and many more. Here’s a list of 20 different award ideas for your reference.

6. Pict-o-graphy

Ask your employees to send you pictures while performing a particular task. For example: Ask your employees to send you pictures while doing yoga, or probably cooking a meal, or some new hobby they picked up during the lock-down. Let your marketing team take this on as employee branding initiatives across their social channels. Assign a new task every week and let the entries come in. You’ll be shocked to see the creativity your employees will bring to the table.

7. Weekly pulse

While light-hearted conversations are important, it is also important to identify process, personal and professional challenges faced by employees. A radical change is the summation of minor improvements brought about gradually. Talk to your employees once a week and check the pulse of your employees. Identify the top challenges and take measures to eradicate them.

8. Training & Tests

Upskilling during the lockdown is an important part of career development. Times are changing and so will the required skills to run the business under the new normal. Provide training on various skills and run assessments to authenticate their learning. Create and run process certifications. For example, sales process certification, customer service certification, marketing process certifications, IT compliance certifications and so on. The LitmusWorld platform can enable you to run various assessments without the hassle of manual scoring. Connect with our experts today and explore the possibilities.

9. Townhall

Well, in-person gatherings today are a tale from the past. Virtual gatherings are a new trend. You can now run anonymous QnA sessions with the leaders. The LitmusWorld platform can mask the PII of the respondents for anonymous feedback capture. This enables candid reporting and open communications.

10. Workshops & Motivational sessions

Motivational sessions by external speakers and industry experts can help your employees gain an outside perspective into their problems and give them a will to fight stronger. Get people they know to speak on matters that concern them. This will keep them excited and engaged with the organization’s activities.

Conduct workshops and skill development classes from various external experts. Capture post-workshop feedback to understand the effectiveness and reception amongst your employees and curate the forthcoming sessions accordingly.

Bonus Tip: Coffee with CXO

During these times, experts state that more the management connects with their employees, the more committed are the employees to their work and loyal to their organizations. All 6 days of the week, have your C-Suite leaders connect with the employees at large through web-conferencing or podcasts hosted by the HR Head. Your C-suite leaders have vast experience and come with some amazing success stories that can motivate your employees. They can talk about their personal career stories, organizational enhancements, roadmaps and even answer employee questions.

One of our clients, as an example, follows the following days:

• Marketing Mondays with the CMO
• Transformation Tuesdays with the COO
• Wellness Wednesdays with the CHRO
• Technology Tuesdays with the CTO
• Financial Fridays with the CFO
• Sales Saturdays with the CSO

It is expected that, once the situation settles, the organizations will see a dramatic shift in the way remote working is perceived, from both the employers and the employees perspective. This forced remote working “experiment” is the perfect time for organizations to optimise, standardise and figure out how best to motivate, engage with, and support their employees. If this does inevitably become the norm of the future, it makes sense to ensure that the right processes and practices are in place.

Got questions? Connect with us today! Interested in conducting any of the above activities within your organization? Request a demo today!