The Best Engagement Activities of 2023
If your organization struggles to keep hybrid and deskless workers engaged, informed, and included, you are not alone.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report indicates that:
- Nearly 6 in 10 employees are quiet quitting because they are psychologically disengaged from their work and feel no supportive bonds with their organization.
- Employee stress has risen significantly post-pandemic due to lack of engagement and ineffective communication with management.
- Over 50% of employees worldwide are actively or passively job-seeking. L-12 Services data, collected between 02/2022 and 12/2023 with over 3,000 respondents, indicates the top three reasons for this are chaotic or low information environments, value misalignment, and wages.
- Engagement matters more to staff than where they work. Gallup's analysis found that engagement has 3.8x as much influence on employee stress as work location.
- 85% of those Gallup surveyed indicated their quiet quitting activities are related to 3 categories: engagement or culture, pay, and wellbeing.
- 41% Engagement or culture
- 28% Pay and benefits
- 16% Wellbeing
It's clear that engagement plays a significant role in job satisfaction and retention, and organizations must focus on effective engagement in the future.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Driving engagement is both art and science; it means more than simply newsletter click-throughs. It means providing information, creating a two-way communication highway, and using communication channels to support your organization's learning or cultural styles.
10 EFFECTIVE ACTIVITIES TO DRIVE HIGHER ENGAGEMENT
1. Understand the culture type of the organization and the influencer sub-groups.
There are a number of ways to learn about your organization's culture type, but for this activity, you want to focus on chaos tolerance vs. order tolerance. (L-12 Services is a licensed Helix Assessment consultant)
This information is critical because it allows you to better understand what types of information need to be distributed to the workforce and other sub-groups.
For example, if your team has a high chaos tolerance, they simply want to know the end goal and timetable, and then they want to get to work. Conversely, if your team is order-tolerant, they want the play-by-play processes spelled out and the dots closely connected. Miss the mark for either of these groups, and you will lose hearts, minds, ears, and eyeballs.
2. Create a communications policy to organize, clarify, and match communication style to the culture(s).
Create a simple but comprehensive communications policy that spells out which channel specific types of information belong on, how information is organized and stored, naming practices, any expectations such as reply times or emoji use, and the preferred culture-type writing/content style needed for your organization. Link any training, such as writing for brevity, related to communications that your workforce can refer to as needed.
3. Adopt brevity as a driving force for all communications.
Part of the engagement struggle is writing for clarity. Too often, communications are long and wordy, which creates overwhelm and disengagement. Show your staff you value their time and attention by writing concisely and providing a feedback mechanism where they can get more information.
4. Focus group a statistically significant sample size of your organization to improve your single source of truth (SSOT) or intranet.
Many organizations struggle with SSOT/intranet use. For those of you who have an intranet (or who have the Office 365 Suite and have access to the SharePoint tool), embrace this as your "one location, zero chaos" tool. The most common problem surrounding SSOT/intranet adoption is the user experience (UX). The reader does not 'see themselves' in the portal, the information is not up to date, the interface is hard to navigate, and other channels do not drive people to that space.
Begin by holding focus groups to learn what would make the experience valuable and create the environment from there. Consider using multimedia such as videos and internal podcasts or visuals such as infographics to make the messaging attractive to all types of learners.
Regarding the SSOT/intranet structure, there are many user-friendly tools that allow for in-house creation, or you can find expert support, including high-security build-ins from our valued partner, Workplace Engineering.
5. Drive individuals to the SSOT/intranet using your communications channels.
Format your e-blast messages and newsletter into 'sneak peek' previews of your communication. Use these channels as drivers to your SSOT/intranet, where you go into more detail about the subject.
Be sure to add graphics and links to those previews, and write in a way that attracts readers and encourages them to self-select into the content.
6. Create accountability for communication distribution within your management/influencer layer.
One of my favorite sayings is, "The fastest way to starve a dog is to assign two people to feed it." This applies here. Be sure to assign accountability measures to your team leads, management, or influencers and let them help you spread the word.
One way to do this is to create a communications task force where internal comms (or your designated communicators) briefs these point people on messaging that will go out each week/month/quarter. In those briefings, templates are distributed to help the point people share the messages and allow them track questions, clicks, and feedback.
7. Worksprints - your virtual cube farm.
Worksprints are a great way for organizations to replicate 'hallway moments' and 'watercooler chat' in an online, virtual environment.
Your staff can replicate team-building moments online in an activity that pulls everyone together in one virtual space at the same time, encouraging collaboration and breaking down silos. For more details on worksprints, read this article.
The overall strategy is flexible and can be tailored to organizations of any size. The only requirements are a group calendar, a host, and a Zoom account (or other virtual meeting platform).
8. Think creatively about creating organizational awareness.
The biggest driver of collaboration and engagement is trust. Trust defines all of our relationships, and in the work ecosystem, it is especially important.
Build trusty by helping workers understand they can depend on their peers, that those colleagues are well trained, and that they are capable of supporting their overall success. When done successfully, individuals will engage each other willingly.
One mistake we see all of the time is to conflate collaborative relationship development with "forced fun" such as happy hours or virtual gatherings. What really inspires engagement and collaboration is understanding who to reach out to and for what purpose.
Consider initiating a Staff Spotlight at a regular cadence to elevate workers and introduce them to others within the workforce. In the interview, ask questions that relate to the individual's strengths, their area(s) of expertise, and ask about problems they solved at a previous job that made them an excellent fit for this one.
By doing this, your audience will connect key personnel to projects and challenges they face every day, and will in turn learn who to reach out to others for support.
9. Model collaboration from leadership on down.
When leadership reaches down past the management level to work with staff, it sets the tone. It is a strong indicator that collaboration is not only encouraged but expected, and it opens the door to a larger dialogue that includes sharing innovative ideas and asking important questions.
When surveyed in Stay Interviews, respondents frequently mention cross-collaboration with leadership as a reason they find satisfaction in their jobs.
10. Capture staff stories and quotes to feature and repurpose for recruitment.
An effective and free way to increase both engagement and pride of employment is to capture stories and quotes from existing staff. Once these comments are organized they can serve two powerful purposes:
- Enhancing and strengthening morale in messaging campaigns, strategic placement onsite or in distributed content, and as Staff Spotlight prompts.
- As a recruiting tool on social media to help shape branding and cultural understanding which allows candidates to self-select into the environment of their choice.
WHY THIS MATTERS
With high employment numbers coming out of the BLS, we are only seeing part of the picture related to the health of US businesses. Burnout, unrest, and employee dissatisfaction are still bubbling below the surface, and as we experienced in 2021-2023 during the Great Resignation, attrition is both costly and unproductive.
To address that, organizations can take action by encouraging engagement, the number one driver for retention, wellbeing, and job satisfaction.
FOR MORE INFORMATION...
Contact us today at 202.415.6987 or info@L12Services.com if you want to enhance collaboration and engagement. Together, we can create an environment that drives success through effective communication.
Follow Lizabeth on LinkedIn and subscribe to her newsletter, or subscribe to the L-12 Services Corp. YouTube channel for videos, tips and more!
