Employee Engagement Ideas for Tech Companies
I love attending various #meetup events. During one such People Manager meet up event last week, I got into a very interesting discussion about employee engagements and how it directly or indirectly impacts the attrition. It all started when few of the people managers complaint that they are unable to get the best out of their employees. But most of the time it is not because of lack of talent, the problem lies somewhere else. Monotonous daily office work, imbalanced work-life cycle, excessive delivery stress, and many other professional reasons can support certain valid reasons for employee disengagement from their firms.
Read on to understand my take on how thru various employee engagement ideas, one can help to increase the productivity of the team.
1. Let them play their feelings: It is proved by one survey that people moving for short vacations frequently has a more productive brain than those not doing so. A vacation or short term group outing can allow employees to distress their minds and have a different perspective on their daily life for a couple of days. This will certainly detoxify their mind from all types of corporate bothering.
2. Pursing hobby: Since childhood, we all are connected to some or the other extracurricular activity. It can be painting, singing, dancing or sports. Tech companies can provide their employees with access to the venues where they can practice their passion. They can also have a sports club with some annual tournament organized to keep their employees engaged with their passion as well as profession collectively.
3. Weekly or monthly brown bag session: I liked this idea and implement it with my team regularly. I call it “Friday Brown Bag" session. It’s a simple knowledge exchange session preferably hosted every Friday. People from various team walk in and get engaged in discussions topics as diverse as AI and public speaking. This is a very effective way to push team members to learn something new.
4. Onboarding: The whole reason we have multiple rounds of interview because we want to hire the best talent from the market. And when they join it is always a great idea to take them through a formal learning channel ( popularly called Onboarding training). I believe, it is a fantastic idea of employee engagement. Ask your team members to act as a mentor of the new joiner. It is not only a good way to make the new joiners feel comfortable with the team, but it is also a very effective way to nurture the coaching and mentoring skill of your team members.
5. Rewards and Recognitions: We all like to receive gifts. Salary is the basic thing that an employee gets after working for a month. Companies should have special Reward and Recognition policies which will keep employees focussed on their work. This also ensures a healthy in-house competition amongst teams to stand out in terms of their performance.
6. Innovation/Hackathon: Events like hackathon should be your way to allow your team members to showcase their innovative skills. As Albert Einstein said, "if you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got", so give them an interesting business problem and ask them to come up with ideas. You never know, you might find a better solution to your long-existing problem thru this hackathon.
To wrap it up, employees nowadays engage themselves with those organizations where they can achieve job satisfaction. It is not only the salary which can assure their satisfaction. The facilities, freedoms, and perks play a very crucial role in terms of employee engagement.
