Let’s have you consider one of your major fears when planning employee engagement events. Imagine you’ve scouted the internet day and night for interesting employee engagement event ideas and harnessed all your event planning skills and allocated a significant budget. But on the-day, only a handful of employees turn up and the enthusiasm in the hall is notably low. Disheartening, isn’t it?

We’ve compiled some tips to ensure that your employees not only attend your employee engagement events but engage enthusiastically.

Wait! Why do you even need to ensure participation of employees in the first place?

Well, businesses with the high employee engagement levels see a 21% increase in profitability.⁽¹⁾ When your employees are actively engaged in your employee engagement events, they tend to be more committed, motivated, and productive. This, in turn, has a direct impact on the company’s financial performance. No wonder why the concept of “Employee-first Workplaces” is gaining prominence across organizations.

Understanding The Lack of Participation in Employee Engagement Events

It is crucial to address the potential reasons for low participation and engagement of employees. Let’s quickly go through a few of them:

• Absence of any kind of incentives
• Lack of proper communication
• Unplanned events
• Irrelevant activities
• Lack of innovation

Tips to Ensure Active Participation of Employees in Employee Engagement Events

• Cater to the diverse employee needs

Deeply understanding the needs of your employees is important while organizing employee engagement events in the workplace. By needs, we mean the type of event, the mode of event and even language sensitivity. Let’s take the examples one by one. Talking about the type of event, you can have wellness initiatives, skill-building workshops, or community service activities. Ensure that you engage your employees who are working from home by using hybrid event technology. Make sure your event materials are available in multiple languages if required.

The best way to understand the preferences and needs of your employees is by conducting regular employee engagement surveys.

• Give Incentive and Rewards

Consider offering your employees some perks, benefits, and rewards for their active participation. These could be additional paid time off, company swag, access to online courses, wellness benefits, recognition on company’s social media pages or even monetary incentives.

The criteria for incentivizing should be fair and clear; otherwise, it could backfire. Some common criteria could be the maximum number of events attended, contribution in planning and execution, and performance in the team building activities during the event.

• Communicate Well in Advance

Sudden plans and incomplete information always lead to a low rate of participation. Communicate your employees all the necessary details well in advance. This builds anticipation and excitement among employees. It also allows them to provide feedback or suggestions, which can make the event more appealing to a broader audience.

• Include Family Members

For events like picnics, yearly gatherings, or even workshops, you must consider allowing employees to bring their family members. This will make the event more appealing and interesting for your employees.  Don’t forget to communicate the age-appropriateness of the event!

• Encourage Volunteering

This may sound unusual but encouraging employees to take an active role in planning, managing, and organizing events through is a fantastic way to boost employee engagement. When your employees will feel a sense of ownership and responsibility, they will be more likely to be invested in the success of the event. Recognizing or rewarding employees for their effort can further boost engagement levels.

• Organize Team-building Activities

There’s a reason why team-building activities are timeless. Competing with colleagues in a non-threatening environment can inspire a sense of achievement and encourage active participation. Some popular examples of team- building activities include escape room challenges, scavenger hunts, simulation games, and sports tournaments.

• Promote Well

Make sure you utilize various communication channels to promote your event, including email, text messages, internal communication platforms, posters, social media and announcements during team meetings. A great way to build anticipation is by sharing teasers, countdowns, or sneak peeks about what to expect at the event. You can even ask leaders or past participants to create short video messages.

• Ensure Leadership Participation

When leaders of an organization participate in an employee engagement event, it gives an impression to employees that the event is important. Their participation may manifest as delivering opening speech, actively participating in team-building activities, presenting awards, or simply engaging in informal interactions with employees during the event.

Conclusion:

We hope that by following these tips and continuously seeking employee feedback, you can ensure that your events are not only well-attended but also highly engaging and meaningful for your teams.

It’s important to remember that employee engagement events don’t just happen; they require a deep understanding of employee preferences, active planning, and an innovative approach. Sounds overwhelming? You can always partner with an event management company in Noida to assist you in handling all these facets.

We, at Channel Technologies, offer a range of event management services and resources to create a memorable and valuable experience for your team. If you are looking for ideas for fun employee engagement activities in-office or off-site, get in touch!

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