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Vivek

What Employee Engagement activity has actually helped your team get better?

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There are lots of tools and workshops that focus on employee engagement aimed at making the team more cohesive. But, which such task or activity has actually seemed to be really useful to you ?

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Melissa Du
The most useful socials we do are are 1) interactive, and 2) purposefully designed to get to know each other better - games like Employee Trivia, or a Storytelling Hour. We don't do "presentation-style" activities, because they don't actually help our team get to know one another better. Finally, another aspect of a useful remote gathering is that it's regular. If the social isn't recurring, then it's a once-in-a-blue-moon activity, and doesn't help team members build those relationships in a meaningful way. (PS - we work with tons of awesome remote companies to do just this. If you're interested, you can find more info at https://www.cadencework.com).
Vivek Katial
We've got people across three time zones and tbh it can be hard as a remote-first company. We use Slack and have set up a bunch of channels for "fun"/"engaging" things. #wins is for business wins, #appreciations where people can appreciate others, #current-affairs for discussing things happening around the world. #random is for random funny things To make sure people aren't feeling left out or stranded, we have also set up some basic rituals that make it a lot easier and to ensure people who are remote are involved things like: - virtual lunches (time zone permitting) - Friday board games with the whole team (this is online - but skribbl.io, draw phone, fishbowl are some great examples) - daily co-working Google Meets where people can just chill and work together / pair - every fortnight we have lightning talks where people share something interesting outside their work - every Friday we do a GBUT session (good, bad, ugly, thankful for the week) - We use donut (https://www.donut.com/) to randomly assign people across the company to have chats with each other to encourage people to mix/mingle aswell. We also (covid permitting) commit to having quarterly in-person meetups as a team so people can hang out and chill in person! We sometimes try to book a big house and do it somewhere pretty like a beach town or something too! We also use tools to track and monitor how long people are waiting for things like feedback and working out of hours in their respective time zones to make sure team well being is going well!
Jaskirat Singh
@vivekkatial This level of effort is very rare. How do the team members perceive it? Are they generally receptive of so many engagement activities in a week? I guess it all depends on how the activities are arranged and conducted. If they are carried authentically, this will work wonders. But the moment there is a hint of being disingenuous, or being forced, it can soon have an opposing effect.
Vivek Katial
@jjassal Thanks! So many of these activities are just embedded in the process -- we also bring in and remove things as needed. Virtual lunches are optional if you're busy its not necessary. The only mandatory ones I guess are the end of / start of week chats as a team Our company is focussed on people and culture so we've really invested alot of time in making sure people are feeling happy and supported. I 100% agree that if there are larger more systemic issues in the organisation around the psychological safety of employees then these types of activities can be considered to be tokenistic!
Samir Moussa
From someone working remotely, we rent an office once a month and plan work, dinner and games. That's worked pretty well!
Jaskirat Singh
Its usually the simple, smaller things on a day-to-day basis that help teammates feel connected and grow stronger bonds. Reaching out to say hello, a thank you for helping, a shout out for job well done, congratulating on personal achievements, celebrating big/small wins in personal life, etc, all add up and make up the work culture. At the end of the day, everyone at work wants to feel appreciated, respected, recognized and feel supported.
Fariz Hakim
@jjassal totally agree with this one! The little things really underrated. And tbh, if you can't even do this regularly, the fancier and bigger parties, workation etc won't help the culture that much.
Luka Vasic
We have monthly lunch & learn. Where members of a team prepare a presentation for the whole company. This month my team for example will be presenting how to grow on LinkedIn to the whole company
Olga Trykush
Team Labs: allows team members to work on something other than their main job tasks every month or so. They could implement their own ideas, change the focus and practice new skills. Team Hackathons: unite your team members to solve a challenge. You can divide the team into two groups, and the one that offers the best solution will get some cool prizes.
Dylan Merideth
Food brings people together
emmastone09
From someone working remotely, we rent an office once a month and plan work, dinner and games. That's worked pretty well! i want it for my site https://pinterestdownloader.net/...
Enoc Armengol
Great questions! one important engagement talking. Knowing when to talk to each other as professionals and as colleagues. Listen to each other and let them be themselves.
James Giroux
The one that I think has helped the teams I've worked on get closer together and work better together is something called "team agreements" or "ways of working". It's a process of surfacing those things we want to hold each other accountable for and that become our preferred way of working with each other. One of my favorites was "we celebrate each others' sass." It was an acknowledgement that each of us is unique in our own way and when we bring our authentic selves to work and celebrate our uniqueness we create safety for everyone. You can get practical too like "we always have an agenda for a meeting". Things like this give each member of your team permission to hold each other accountable when things aren't going as we've agreed while also giving people ownership of the culture and dynamic of the team.
James Giroux
@notanothervivek this doesn't happen overnight but when we took the time to invest in how we work together and developed rituals around that, it made it a lot easier to minimize the impact of undesirable behavior. For example, we started a monthly team retro that we called 'sombrero time' where we asked each other intentional questions about how we were doing, how we were working together and how we felt about the things we were working on. This was on top of our 1:1s and team meetings. By adding this in, we were able to call out behaviors or situations that didn't sit well with us long before they became awkward or a real issue. Did we always get it right? No. There were a few times where it didn't work the way we wanted but because we had been working hard to be more open with each other and create a safe space to work, when that didn't happen, we were quicker to notice, share feedback and resolve things.
John
Pre-pandemic, Team Lunches works for my IT group. My brother's boss takes their IT team to play golf. Now, short 15 minute virtual meetings, works for us.
Ashraful Islam
Giving them the flexibility and space they need. Here @ Devs Core all our employees work when they prefer to work. I think that we can give our best when our minds are at its best. And we cannot control situations of our life. So depending on the individual's life situation, the effort time may vary but this flexibility gave our team a much better result.
Bolaji Anifowose
Retreats have really helped in the past
Vipassana
Get employee onboarding done right and celebrate birthdays and other key milestones. If you are using Microsoft Teams check out AnnounceBot(https://announcebot.in/)- Your Microsoft Teams bot to welcome new team members and wish them their birthdays, anniversaries, and special occasions.