Recipe for Employee Engagement

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Effective employee engagement programs accomplish two important goals. They communicate to your employees that you value them and they increase team cohesion. This leads to a variety of benefits. From the employee perspective, connected teams lead to more work satisfaction. On the other side of the coin, employers gain more innovation and productivity.

It can be tricky to hit that sweet spot of planning activities that will make wise use of company resources and resonate well with employees. This may require company leadership to try new recipes.

It is essential to think about both process and content when you are planning team building programs.

The process is the where and the when.

The content is the what.

Paying attention to both of these is what will make your team employee engagement hit just the right note. It is like a recipe for a delicious dessert. You can’t just have wonderful ingredients; you also have to have the right cooking process for the result to achieve melt in your mouth goodness.

As you begin the design process, think about generating reflection questions to assure that you are addressing both content and process. Here are a couple of examples.

For process:

Do after work activities make sense if your workforce prioritizes a different type of work/life balance and want to be home at the end of the day? Is setting aside a long lunch for an activity going to be more effective?

For content:

Which will resonate with your team more, recreational get togethers, wellness activities, volunteering with charitable organizations or some combination of these?

As you begin the process of analyzing and revamping your team building programs so they spark connections and energize teams, give thought to these key elements.

Get Feedback: You want to start building your team activities by getting feedback from your employees. Sending out a short survey with process and content questions will allow teams to feel invested even before the activities start. Of course, essential to success is  providing information to employees on how you plan to incorporate their feedback in the design of the team building program. 

Make things interactive. Having events with an interactive, fun element that promotes mixing with a variety of people throughout the organization can really pump up the energy. It is natural for people to gravitate towards those they know. Starting events off with people moving around or being grouped with people they may not interact with creates an invigorating dynamic.

G2 Solutions designs all of its workshops and retreats with this in mind. We have people building marshmallow bridges, running relay races and sharing their super hero personas. We reference these activities throughout our time together. It creates bonds between participants and gives everyone something to refer to long after the event is over.

Take into account the composition of your workforce. If your workforce is older, they may value the traditional happy hour. If they are younger, they may be looking for social justice initiatives. If your employees span a number of age groups, not only do you want to plan a variety of activities, but you want to provide a framework on why each of these types of activities are important. This will gain buy-in from both sides of the generational divide.

Find the right modality for your staff and pocketbook. Don’t just focus on what is easiest and cheapest. Strive to find what will resonate with your staff while also being kind to the company purse. We know a fully remote company that has a week-long off site in a wonderful location each year. They focus on working in and across teams during the day and then focus on team building activities in the evening. This not only motivates everyone in the company, but instills a strong sense of connection that employees take with them. Of course, this type of retreat may not be in every company’s budget. Maybe your version is taking a half day off each quarter for team building activities or developing short icebreaker type activities before meetings that slowly develop shared history and comradery.

Create continual engagement. Do you know your team building activities for the year? Or, do you schedule one when it feels like it is needed? It is important to have an intentional, coordinated effort. You want to build a sense of connection from one event to the other. This sense of shared experience is what cultivates strong cohesion.

As you take all of these elements into account it may require some out of the box thinking. The gold standard is that your employees look forward to team building events because they come away from them energized, feeling valued and ready to devote themselves to reaching the goals of the company.

G2 Solutions can help you design effective employee engagement programs. Contact us and we’ll show you how.