Creating a company culture that will make your employees excited to come to work is a difficult task. You have constant bills and the pressure to keep improving on your mind all the time.
However, it’s important to remember that employee engagement is what helps to keep a business running. This starts with having the right policies in place to promote engagement.
We hope to give you all of the right tools to move your business forward by creating an environment your employees want to walk into every day. Check out these ten company culture ideas that will improve your employee engagement and take your business to the next level.
What is Employee Engagement and Why is it Important?
If you could turn your horrible morning into a better one, you would surely want that. Work can actually be a place that accomplishes this goal if the right policies are in place. This is what employee engagement strives to do.
Employee engagement is about creating a workplace that encourages everyone to work together to improve a business. The goal is to create an environment that stimulates people to give their best every day when they are at work.
This is why you want employee engagement. It makes the workplace an area where people want to be. When everyone wants to improve the place they spend one-third of their life, it makes everyone better.
You should foster a workplace that grows instead of stagnates, and keeps your business moving. Employee engagement helps retain employees, increase business, and retain customers. It leads to happy people and more money in everyone’s pockets.
10 Company Culture Ideas for Employee Engagement
Now that you know what employee engagement is and why it’s important for your business, here are ten company culture ideas to get the ball rolling.
1. Host Team Events
Bringing your team together when there isn’t work involved is one of the best ways to increase employee engagement. Simple team lunches or after-work events create an atmosphere where employees can get to know each other without the pressures of work.
A lot of companies will do a yearly event, but you should strive to create more frequent events if possible. Something as simple as ordering bagels every Wednesday or catering a luncheon on Friday for the team gets people up, moving around, and interacting with each other.
You can also improve engagement by asking your team what types of team events they would like to participate in. This approach gets everyone involved in the events that are being hosted, and the people who wanted it to happen will be more encouraged to be involved!
2. Start a Newsletter
Having a newsletter to keep everyone informed and aware, can boost your team. This strategy can also give your more creative employees an extra activity at the office. It can be an exciting activity for someone to help bring everyone together.
Including company announcements, fun facts about employees, or quizzes that help everyone get to know each other are some great ways to bring people together. Making a team feel more cohesive is the goal of a newsletter, and it basically writes itself after a few months!
Of the company culture ideas, this one is the quickest and easiest to implement. If a lot of people are interested, then simply rotate who is responsible for writing the newsletter each month.
3. Increase the Frequency of One-on-One Manager Meetings
Creating a stronger connection between your employees and your managers has huge benefits. Meeting weekly (or bi-weekly) can help to foster mutual manager-employee understanding.
With more frequent communication, you wouldn’t want to make each meeting about the nuts and bolts of the business. Simply having the manager interact and learn about the employee’s life will increase the bond that they have.
This bond leads to happier employees and people that feel like they are being heard in the workplace. It increases awareness of how your frontline workers are feeling and it gives the manager a chance to get to know the employees at a personal level.
This is a more individualized employee engagement method, but it can work wonders. Simply taking 30 minutes more a week out of your manager and employee’s time can increase productivity, engagement, and employee satisfaction!
4. Allow Work From Home
With new technology comes new innovation in terms of employee benefits. Working from home is a huge benefit that is relatively easy to implement now because of programs like Skype, Slack, and other online collaborative programs.
Many jobs are already offered online, and the majority of workers are allowed at least one work-from-home day per week at their jobs. This creates an environment where working from home is preferred by a lot of workers and has proven to increase engagement drastically.
Employees that work from home call in sick less often, work more optional hours and are much happier to stay at a job with such a huge benefit. You can always research how to accomplish this yourself.
HR should know how to easily establish the working from home option. Work from home employees will traditionally be happier and ask for less money from the company. They translate the savings in gas, time, and food to you, which may then lead to a lower hourly wage to access these work-from-home perks.
5. Don’t Micromanage Employees
A lot of people are surprised by this one because you typically would want to make your employees as efficient as possible. But having rigid deadlines or talking to your employees every few hours about what is due tomorrow actually increases stress in the workplace.
When you aren’t micromanaging employees, projects are typically finished and completed to a high standard. Employees are always happier when you trust them to finish things on their own. Micromanaging tends to give a manager more power while stripping power away from employees.
With employee engagement being something that is voluntary, you want the power to be in the employee’s hands. This makes employees feel empowered to finish their own work, and it typically results in a better product.
Micromanaging has its place, but try to let your employees finish work in their own time. You may be surprised by the results and increased engagement when they feel empowered by your trust.
6. Make Almost All Knowledge Public
Making sure everyone knows how to make the office function well is essential to employee engagement.
A lot of companies have one or two employees who can complete crucial processes with the other 90% doing grunt work. This creates an imbalance. Empowering your employees with the knowledge to do 100% of the job is going to boost your business.
What helps employee engagement is empowering people with the knowledge that the higher-level employees have. Even if they don’t know how to use it or aren’t interested, try putting the steps for core processes in public documents.
This gives motivated employees the ability to step up without having to get one-on-one training with your top two employees. Giving everyone all the keys helps people move forward in the company.
When they move forward, they feel like they can engage in the company more frequently by suggesting improvements or changing processes to work for everyone. There’s no need to try to issue any secret formulas. However, a simple public document can work wonders for making people feel like they can immediately respond.
7. Help Employees Grow
The task of helping employees to grow tends to fall on the managers’ shoulders. Helping employees grow and become more educated is essential to improve employee engagement. If employees feel like you’re invested in their future, they’ll invest in yours.
This can be done by adding an education discussion to the one-on-one meetings with the manager. Your managers have already advanced to a higher position, so they can help your employees advance also.
Ask each employee what their goals are or what they enjoy most about work. Then, give them the tools to study and grow to work more on the jobs that they enjoy.
Once you know what they are interested in, give them a short, medium, and long term plan to accomplish those goals. If those goals are inside or outside the company, that’s perfectly fine! Hire from within if you’re able, or let them go knowing that they’ll work for you as long as they’re improving.
Yes, this means potentially driving them to another company. If they gain a degree or a crucial certificate, they could leave. But they will leave your company knowing that you helped them get to where they are. This creates an amazing company culture for your other employees.
8. Ask for and Give Feedback Often
A lot of companies have a suggestion box or a feedback box for people to be anonymous. This is part of the way to increase engagement.
Obviously creating an avenue for employees to talk to your upper management is important. Creating plans and improving management based on employee feedback is even more important!
The whole point of having a feedback box is to make sure that employees feel like they are being heard. This means that your management team needs to let them know that things are going to change based on the feedback.
If a process is adjusted, or a piece of feedback is acted upon, make sure your employees know that you’ve done something for them. This will cause them to leave more feedback and provide you with more tools to improve your entire company.
9. Collaborate On Your Team Brand
Creating a team brand can be an extremely fun way to add to your company culture. Every company has a logo or slogan. Let your employees come up with ideas on how to create t-shirts, coffee mugs, or posters utilizing your logo.
This gives the employees something to invest in. Having a company t-shirt that the employees themselves created gives them a sense of pride. It also gives you extra marketing.
When all of your employees are walking around in custom designed t-shirts that they made themselves, it boosts morale. It gives employees something to talk about and bond over both inside and outside of work!
10. Create a Weekly, Monthly or Yearly Tradition
Making an event or team lunch that happens every week helps employees interact with each other and the manager. The more interaction there is in the workplace, the better!
There are thousands of ideas for weekly traditions on the internet. A lot of employees are just waiting for a fun event or way to interact. Give them what they want and create a fun tradition that happens frequently.
This is another place where you can get all your ideas from the employees! People have amazing ideas that are waiting to be shared. People may devise a pastry Wednesday, fake beard Friday, or hour recess on Thursdays!
The possibilities are endless! Even bringing back the tried and true secret Santa can help people come together. Think outside the box or within it. People just love to have a reason to interact.
The important thing is to establish a routine and a tradition so that employees can look forward to these fun events!
Engagement for Everyone
Employee engagement starts with bringing everyone together and making them feel like work isn’t just somewhere to zone out for eight hours.
These company culture ideas will help drive employee engagement. Having fun events, frequent meetings, or amazing perks are easy ways to get people involved.
Look through this list and ask yourself how you want to improve company culture. A better company culture will lead to better employee engagement because people want to come to work and improve their lives!
If you have any questions or ideas you want to share, you can always reach out to us. At Solvo, we are always helping companies improve and grow in the direction they want for a better future.
