Internal Initiatives to Boost Employee Engagement

Improve employee engagement with internal initiatives.

Keeping employees engaged is a problem companies everywhere are continually working to solve, with 71 percent of employees admitting that they are not fully engaged, according to Dale Carnegie Training. As such, you’re likely trying to overcome this in your organization as well.

While there are many ways to tackle the problem, one simple idea is to start a new company initiative. See if the following ideas would resonate with your unengaged employees, increasing their investment in their work and the company.

Related: 3 Power Tips: How to Build Strong Inter-departmental Collaboration

A Modern Health Challenge

Employees don’t want to stand on a scale and see how much weight they’ve collectively lost or gained. Instead, they want to track their sleep, move more throughout the day, and find mental clarity. Luckily, you can engage these health-minded employees with a modern health challenge.

Choose your challenge. Consider running a new one every quarter to keep it interesting and avoid employees losing interest. For example, in Q1 you might do a sleep challenge. Why? Sleep is critical to productivity in the office:

“Getting less than 5, but more than 10 hours of sleep results in employees staying home sick 4 to 9 days more than those who sleep 7 to 8 hours a night,” according to SLEEP. In the end, whoever has the longest run of getting the proper amount of sleep gets added to a raffle for an end-of-quarter giveaway.

Other fun health initiatives to try, include:

• 30-Days of Walking Meetings
• Monday Office Meditation
• Stress-Less Challenge (use heart rate tracking for this)

Team Mission Statements

While it’s important that teams work together and use one another as resources, there’s a certain camaraderie that happens within departments. When you work under the same boss, and on the same projects, day-in and day-out, you build a relationship that’s naturally stronger than the ones you have with co-workers on other teams.

Reinforce these strong relationships with this fun company initiative. The idea is simple: each team creates their own mission statement that includes why they do what they do, why they love what they do, and how they plan to continue being successful in the company.

Finally, have them connect their mission statement with the company’s. A company mission statement is traditionally a great way to connect employees with the organization, and having them relate it to their own ideals makes that connection even stronger.

Inspire employees with mission statements from well-known companies like Life is Good and American Express to get started. Then have them display it somewhere where everyone else can see. You can even create a wall where each mission statement is framed.

“Intrapreneur” Initiative

You’ve gone out of your way to hire high-quality employees who have great ideas, take initiative and work hard. As such, it’s likely that many of these employees are filled with ideas for the company, but haven’t had a platform to share them comfortably.

This is where your “Intrapreneur” initiative comes into play: “While an entrepreneur should see the company as a vision from starting point to end; the intrapreneur is a facet of this broader vision. The intrapreneur works within the company to solve a specific problem,” says Murray Newlands, for Inc.com.

This employee initiative needs to start with the top leadership. Together you must decide what are the leading issues for the company; choose the top three to bring to your employees. When introducing the new program, you can also intro the three problems you’re hoping to solve.

Encourage communication

The best part about these ideas is that they also boost Employee Advocacy. They give employees a reason to talk about their job with people outside the office, making initiatives like these a win-win for every organization. Don’t forget to have the right communication tools in place and make necessary resources available, so the initiatives will run smoothly and become a valuable part of your company culture. Encourage employees to speak up by using technology that supports internal as well as external sharing.

Most importantly, allow employees to have fun and let them know their contributions matter. When employees can rest assured their insights are valued and they are allowed to act as individuals, their performance can also soar.