If you are looking for an effective employee engagement program that actually works, congratulations! You’ve probably seen hype and sizzle from various programs that don’t last longer than a fortnight. These short-lasting employee engagement programs will do more harm than good, decreasing trust from your employees and leaving them wondering how many other failed programs they should ignore.
We don’t want that. We work hard to help our customers come up with effective employee engagement programs that employees use, love, and even rely on.
We help our employee engagement admins (HR, team leaders, executives, etc.) adapt their employee engagement program to their organizational needs and outside influences that their employees care about. For example, let’s say your team cares about a sporting event… like the big Final Four. Your employee engagement program might incorporate elements of the Final Four, or mirror who is progressing in the competition, to engage your team more.
Or perhaps your team couldn’t care less about the Final Four. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of things you might incorporate into an effective employee engagement program that actually keeps your employees engaged and excited.
Here are three elements af an effective employee engagement program that actually works… if you want to discuss this with our passionate team, employee engagement nerds, let’s get a call scheduled.
Effective Employee Engagement Programs Are Used Over Time
This might sound like a “no duh!” statement, but how many employee engagement programs are abandoned, many pretty quickly? A LOT! Too many employee engagement programs don’t even make it three months from launch. It doesn’t help when the organization tries with another cool-looking program only to find it suffers the same fate: an early demise.
Effective employee engagement programs are used for years. Not just weeks, not just months, but years and years.
Sound impossible? It’s not. But without the right tools and help, it is harder than many think. We’ve had conversations with organizations who have had programs that were exciting for a couple of weeks and then, for some reason, their employees stopped using them.
Effective employee engagement programs should be used again and again over years. They shouldn’t become boring. Your employees should know about them, be excited to use them, and prioritize using them.
If you want to talk about how this is done, see the link at the bottom of this post to reach out to us. We’re happy to chat about creating a lasting employee engagement program for your organization.
Effective Employee Engagement Programs Are Flexible
As mentioned earlier, your employee engagement program may find some new life when it adapts to current events.
Actually, let me rephrase that: Your employee engagement program needs to adapt to current events, needs of your organization, interests of your team, etc.
Can you imagine an engagement program that never changes? A stagnant, boring program that doesn’t address what your team is most interested in? Contrast that to an engagement program that can change as soon as leadership hears about something everyone is talking about (like the Final Four games mentioned above).
One of the reasons employee engagement programs die too early is because they get boring. The world moves forward too fast. If you can keep up with changing interests, you can play into those interests. I remember a company meeting I went to, years ago, when Napolean Dynamite came out. This movie was a big hit for people in my organization. One of the managers got up and mimicked Napoleon Dynamite, how he talked, moved, etc. Everyone loved it.
How would you incorporate this into your employee engagement program? Think about different parts of the movie, the election, the dancing, the drawing…. there are so many elements that could mix into your employee engagement program to use the momentum of whatever is popular to keep your employees engaged in the program.
Flexibility isn’t just good to an effective program, it is essential.
Effective Employee Engagement Programs Get Results
While employee engagement programs should be fun, and of course, engaging, you aren’t necessarily doing this just for laughs. Sure, laughs are good. They might even be a way to measure whether your program is well-received. But at the end of the day you want to make sure the results you get are aligned with business objectives.
What metrics would you consider important for an employee engagement program? Maybe it is an increase in certain measures of productivity. Perhaps you have metrics that track employee satisfaction (or, job satisfaction). Maybe it has something to do with employee attendance, or even compliance (for example, watching all of the safety videos).
Here’s the key to results: The results you get from your effective employee engagement program should be important, valuable, and timely to your organization. If you get results that are outdated, or results that sound good in general but are meaningless to your organizational objectives, you might be wasting valuable energy with a program that just doesn’t matter.
As we bring on a new customer we have multiple conversations to make sure we understand what their real, important organizational objectives are so we can guide them as they create the most effective employee engagement program they can.
These are three reasons we have clients who have been with us for many years, and their employees keep using their engagement programs. If you want something this successful, reach out to us. We’d love to learn about your needs and see how and where we can help!
