Thunderdome proves you can design engaging employee activities around doing more work—work without restrictions and limits, work that lets employees connect secret passions and inventions to their day-to-day lives. Like being flexible with scheduling, providing employees the opportunity to work from home can result in significant increases in satisfaction and engagement. Make significant efforts to start with rolling out team engagement activities. After the five minutes or up, the listener has to relay the life story from memory to the group on the conference call. Remote working isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It’s important because it’s proven to improve the efficiency and performance when groups trust each other and feel connected to a common goal. Employees in physical offices often get to enjoy their favorite nearby restaurants together at lunch. The task was to share a picture of something on your desk that tells a story about who you are or how you work. Taking short breaks from work to meet up with colleagues has been proven to be effective for boosting employee engagement and productivity. Employee Engagement Activities at SBL for Building the Team During Work From Home - SBL Knowledge Services Ltd. They're productive and profitable. Since the participants are all asked to name their favorite thing, there is no risk of getting the answer wrong. Two people will square off, the winner goes on to play the next person on the team, and so on. Employee engagement and employee engagement strategies is not an isolated HR process. These activities are similar to online team building games and support virtual employee engagement. The lack of workplace engagement activities also brings down the employees’ motivation levels. In fact, the most engaged employees tend to be those who spend … Copyright 2021 High Fidelity Inc. All rights reserved. Below are the top 25 employee engagement activities to engage, retain and boost happiness among your employees: Regular Feedbacks. While some roles just cannot be handled remotely, some of us do have the luxury to work from home and still hold onto our jobs in an environment where very little is assured. These activities maximize employee passion by focusing on the aspects of work employees are most passionate about. Research shows that only a third of employees feel engaged at work —so if morale is down, there’s a good chance you aren’t alone. The most employee-centric companies regularly take part in engagement activities, including: Outside of work, remote teams don't learn much about each other. There is a clear link between employee engagement and innovation, and with the absence of the former, the latter is also suffering. Define what employee engagement means for your company. But you can eat together remotely, too. Building remote team cohesion is more challenging than in an office: you need to make an effort to help employees connect with each other, openly communicate, and build relationships informally. The question you might then ask is, how to engage employees who work from home? Employee Engagement Ideas for Remote Workers [+Tips on Following Through] Before we discuss the specific employee engagement ideas for remote workers, we recommend that you implement certain project management, HR, video conferencing, and team collaboration tools, to make telework interactions easier between and within teams. They can show their office space, guide the team through their home or a cool co-working space, or, if technology allows, livestream in the city and show the main tourist sights and secret spots. Remote team building games can be a fun way to refine goals and dissolve monotony in meetings. Complete “X” number of steps daily. You can grab a drink after work or take a break to play a game. Start an employee design committee to let your employees take some ownership in the place they work. You can grab a few walk-and-talk coffee meetings throughout the week. Workplace Parties. Many companies build initiatives around options like work from home, crèche, sabbaticals, etc to help employees attend to family responsibilities and hence feel engaged. The goal is to give your employees a voice. You can get everyone communicating and sharing to get to know each other better. 1 - Help your employees get to know each other better People emotionally invest in other people, not companies, so creating a strong bond between team members is critical. Your employees spend half of their time at work, so they should never hate work. CARS24 Employees in a meeting – Working From Home Completing “X” number of pushups, squats, lunges. The most forward-thinking organizations prioritize employee to employee engagement. Join us at Distributed 2020, a free conference to help teams adapt, evolve, and thrive. Now plan something for your employees to make them stay happy and motivated. But the unfortunate truth is that many remote workers feel the burden of isolation. This corollary no more exists. She has been working in distributed teams for three years, and is passionate about helping them succeed. It will stir the participants’ imagination and creativity and makes an ideal springboard to brainstorming. It gives everyone a better sense of who they're working with. The team at Hotjar hold coffee and learn sessions. Remote Work Statistics: 9 Stats That Show Telecommuting is the Future, Remote Hiring Guide: How to Find and Recruit the Best Remote Workers, How to Build Remote Work Culture & Why It's So Important, Foster Collaboration and Engagement in Your Remote Team to Boost Productivity, Remote Team Building: 15 Virtual Games & Activities to Build Team Cohesion, 15 remote team building activities and games, Remote Collaboration Best Practices & Tips for Teams, The Best Remote Work Tools and Software to Have. But you can help your company – and employees – emerge stronger from the coronavirus pandemic with these top 10 engagement ideas. Allow time for each group of remote workers to share their list with the larger team on the online whiteboard. This versatile game often has fond childhood associations, and can be done anywhere, whether in the office or outside. Ask every member of the team to join a shared document or an online meeting board before the meeting begins and post a picture of something from their life. Everyone can share personal anecdotes: whether it's an important task or an acknowledgement of something another co-worker did well, it's a great way to connect with your teammates. The same principle applies to employees. Instruct them to tell their partner their entire life story at that time. It can encourage colleagues to pay close attention to personal traits and stories. This exercise is great for building empathy and giving each remote team member some context to understand their colleagues’ backgrounds (particularly great for international teams). Then, the rest of the team has to guess which of the three statements is a lie. This exercise is useful because it can be adapted to align with the meeting goal, work environment or something more personal. For distributed teams, it can be hard to get to know your team members. If you have your games and activities planned and everyone knows how to participate, then they should help break the tension and let people get to know each other. And according to The State of Remote Work for 2019, one of the top struggles for remote workers is loneliness. Slack channels, team lunches, and games are a great way to do this. It was fun and surprising, allowing us to get to know each other more and set the casual atmosphere we needed for the workshop. 5 Remote Employee Engagement Activities Every Disruptive Brand Will Be Doing By 2025, The Best Virtual Communication Tools for Business in 2020, How to Effectively Manage Remote Employees When Communication is an Issue, How The Virtual Workroom Will Be the Biggest Disruption to Hit the Workforce In Decades. Creating a team activity is a lot of work but the work it takes to replace a person, train and then managing performance is costlier than putting the effort to conducting a fun activity. This game can help teams with language and cultural differences strengthen the company culture. You can grab a drink after work or take a break to play a game. This is a remote team-building exercise we picked up from the 6Q team: “You could get your team members to take a flat lay pic of their desk and share it with the rest during your team meetings,” they suggest, adding, “A flat lay is basically a photo of items from directly above, and these items are usually arranged or styled on a flat surface.” Sharing the story behind an object can also be a good way to learn more about your colleagues’ personalities. Remote team building is the process of turning individual workers into a cohesive team that works cooperatively to meet your customer’s needs, all while workers are distributed across different locations. hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(5066246, '2408f44e-bc28-4fcd-9b2f-b7823bdc31bc', {}); By subscribing, you agree to the High Fidelity Terms of Service. (Think: a professional version of MTV’s Cribs.) As a method to determine employee engagement ideas for work from home, pulse surveys can be used from time to … When employees are in the same location, it’s easier to form a connection to their colleagues. It can especially help people who might have different styles or don’t normally work together as a strong team. In a traditional office, employee engagement activities are easy. You can go for drinks on Thursday after work with your team. You can keep your team energized with a weekly alignment session. It’s also less anxiety-inducing than some other activities, as there’s no way to get a question about a person’s favorite thing wrong. Gamification. Take a few minutes and look at all the images and talk through common themes. Another fun virtual team building game is the Birth Map. For remote teams, building a great company culture is something to always work toward. This activity shows the diversity of voices represented on your team and allows people to share their cultural values and also share some fun facts about where they are from. These activities will not only help in-house staff and management to get to know the employees better but can also be utilized strategically to assess the … They get to try the new coffee spot down the street. The Gordon Ramsey effect! It’s a great way to test people's reflexes, responsiveness, and encourage spontaneity. One of the best things about working in-house is small talk and banter. That's why for every meeting, having 5-10 minutes allocated for personal updates can be effective. You can also ask us to involve our network of partners, who are people we love because of their work in leadership, culture and engagement. Joint meditation sessions through video chatting to boost mental health. But the modern workplace is changing, and remote work statistics show a clear trend towards more remote work: now a whopping 22% of Americans work from home—and nearly half of US workers are at least somewhat involved in some remote work. Everyone should upload their images to an online whiteboard in advance. Aside from these remote employee engagement activities, there's also technology that can help organize your team. Divide your team into small groups and ask them to spend 10 minutes coming up with a list of 10 things they have in common. Open up your favorite video conferencing software and try a virtual version of this classic game in real-time. Before your next meeting, ask every remote employee to create an image or find a picture they can use to tell a unique story or fact about their lives. Here at Miro, we used this ice breaker game before a remote workshop about User Personas. When a correct guess is made, that person needs to share their story with the group. The team at Hubstaff recommends doing a round-robin at the beginning of the meeting. With incredibly engaged teams, this is possible. Plus, the personal touches will make the office feel like home. Because for many teams, there's too much distance to effectively bond with your team. Here are our favorite ice breaker games and trust-building activities to try with your employees for some good team bonding. A simple way to encourage your peers to show off their unique personalities is through their home offices. This simple activity is a great way to break the ice and give team members a chance to learn about each other. Each employee should present their image and a short description to the group. In this collaborative ice breaker game, everyone on the remote team is encouraged to name their favorite thing. These topics can include themes like culture and professional development. Here are few activities and ideas that will help you to keep your work from home employees motivated and engaged resulting in more efficiency. Live polls are an interactive way to gather information from the team and to get them engaged. As a distributed company ourselves, we’ve learned a few tricks to keep our teams connected. Then ask them to share the story behind their picture. The birth map and aliens have landed game are great at helping team members introduce themselves and get to know each other, while also helping build a company culture. Help Scout pulls this off exceptionally with their 'At Home With Help Scout' series. Once a month, invite your team to order whatever lunch they want. Employee engagement idea #3: Virtual coffee breaks. But apart from work, fun activities like virtual game nights, (online chess tournaments, card games, board games, etc), non-work related video conferencing, fun challenges, and celebrations are employee engagement ideas for work from home. Update: The Work from Home module is a standardised, ready-to-go campaign that can be started tomorrow. So, what do you do when your team is distributed across different locations? It can even be a great warm up before a brainstorm! Remote teams can replicate the in-office banter with virtual get to know you sessions. This is a great exercise in listening, mirroring, and also helps team members learn about each others’ interests and build relationships. Work is not supposed to be fun. 10) Plan activities. Happiness at work in an office-space is one thing – ensuring employee happiness while they work from home is quite another. Communicating our core values often—and being intentional about our culture—helped us boost employee engagement and landed us a spot on various Best Places to Work lists (Glassdoor, Inc., Boston Business Journal, etc). For remote team activities, you have to be more intentional about it. Virtual Team Building Activities: Sortable List By the way, we recently deleted 20+ activities from this list, so you will only see the best. Here are a few ideas on how you can celebrate Diwali 2020 while you work from home and increase employee engagement and keep the cultural environment more fun, creative, and interactive.. As one of the biggest and most auspicious festivals in India, Diwali has a huge significance as far as workplace celebrations go. Now if you ask successful companies about their work culture and employee engagement activities, you’ll often hear “we are fond of fun at work, we don’t believe in sitting at a desk all day with a head down with no productivity.” This popular game works like this: Each team member tells the group three statements about themselves. Starting from your designated meeting topic, pick a phrase that relates to the central theme. In addition to this, we shared one thing we learned recently. It's much more challenging to do this remotely. You can use a live streaming service or a social network like Snapchat or Instagram. As technology changes the way the world works, remote workforce engagement is growing in importance. Diwali has a huge significance as far as workplace celebrations go.. As managers and associates, we have to take a different approach to engage employees who work from home. Whether you're playing a game that helps you bring your remote team together or exchanging funny photos of your dog on your Slack channel, it’s important to ensure that your team has an outlet where remote employees can be vulnerable and socialize outside the context of work. Since virtual employees are not physically around, engaging and connecting with them might seem like an insurmountable task. People often enter meetings stressed about tasks they’re working on, or other issues. Establish Remote Work Opportunities. 51. The world of traditional, 9-to-5 work is slipping away, according to Global Workplace Analytics and numerous other studies: 5 million employees (3.6% of the workforce) currently work-at-home half-time or more. Add ideas, digitize sticky notes, and leave comments on the go with Miro mobile app, Introduction to Remote Work & Collaboration. It can be as simple as, “we all wear shoes,” to something more specific like, “we were all hired in 2014.” Regardless of the answers, it will create a bond, generate discussion and laughter, and get the group thinking creatively. But it’s not enough to just put your team in a video chat together and tell them to work together—it takes technique, skills, analysis, and observation to form a strong, capable team. They can ask questions, chat, have lunch together, or go out for happy hours. This game is good for starting a brainstorming session. They then rip up their answers, which allows them to maintain their privacy, then focus on group tasks ahead. This game allows everyone to share hesitations and expectations, then focus on the task ahead. Similar to the popular MTV Cribs television show, team members show off their workspaces at home. Side … Another great way to host such virtual employee health challenges is through a corporate wellness platform. Examples of activity types include icebreaker questions, virtual campfires, and group fitness classes. Ask each participant to draw five simple images that best describe and communicate your company’s products and culture to a shared document/folder. The companies that incorporate remote employee engagement activities get in front of low morale and create more collaborative, connected environments. This is a great trivia game that really lights a fire to the group chat during a virtual meeting. Quick links: sortable list, activity instructions, expert tips, more resources, FAQ. Extracurricular activities are a proven method of increasing engagement in the workforce. 1. 10. Here are our favorite ice breaker games and trust-building activities to try with your employees for some good team bonding. A cooking competition that requires the teams to negotiate and trade for their ingredients to create an ultimate 3-course-meal for the judges. Passing on some inspiration or wisdom via 25 effective employee engagement activities you can use: POPULAR EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT ACTIVITIES #1 The Masterchef Challenge. Use this mega-list of employee engagement ideas to help your team get back on track: You can talk about your week, the last trip you took, or your plans for the coming weekend. Final Thought. In this exercise, participants write down ideas, thoughts, or feelings they've brought to the meeting. If you’re struggling to come up with good employee engagement activities, it might be time to take a step back. But this kind of casual conversation is a big part of what bonds teams and makes them more collaborative. Possibilities include “your favorite thing about the company” or “your favorite aspect of the product.”. Employee Engagement during the era of Work From Home With the pandemic, industries have started testing and implementing Work From Home policies globally. Of all the employee engagement activities you … The diverse employee engagement activities kept us connected with each other during these testing times. And according to The State of Remote Work for 2019, one of the top struggles for remote workers is loneliness. The team at Timely, for instance, uses video conferencing platforms to connect. Fun Employee Engagement Activities. It can be anything that will tell a story about who each member is or how they work: a picture of the shoes each member is wearing, the view out their window or a photo of their desk. Keep it anonymous or let others see what everyone answered, here are some ideas of things you can poll: who has the best work-station, new company outing ideas, cutest employee pet, the best recipe when working from home, gifts to get sent home, and more. ‘Work from home’ has indeed gained mainstream currency. Doing the assigned work day-in-day-out like drudgery is not only sad, there are high chances that it rubs off on the fellow employees too. Brian Scudamore, CEO of O2E Brands, asked his team to share a 101 Life Goals list. Ask team members to find an image online and upload it to a picture sharing site, shared drive or online whiteboard like Miro. Great exercise in listening, mirroring, and games are a great way to host such virtual employee engagement also... Video conferencing platforms to connect be effective for boosting employee engagement and employee engagement activities personal... Story about what they love most about the company ” or “ your favorite thing there... 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