Ensuring that your employees are engaged is vitally important to the success of your organization. It’s something that’s clearly related to all positive business outcomes — and that’s why employee engagement tools are so necessary.

Don’t know much about employee engagement tools? Don’t worry — we’ll cover everything you need to know, including:

• What is employee engagement software
• 18+ of the best employee engagement tools

Let’s get into this.

What Is Employee Engagement Software?

Employee engagement software is an all-encompassing, umbrella term that describes any tool that improves morale and motivation of workers. This can relate to a wide variety of specific subcategories, such as:

• Employee recognition:
• Survey and feedback
• Internal communication
• Pre-employment assessment
• Progress tracking
• Employee training

Employee recognition is the acknowledgment of your co-workers efforts, struggles, and concerns in relation to their job. It’s so important, because employees need to be heard and recognized. Giving them the adequate recognition shows them you care — and they’ll work harder for you.

Survey and feedback is all about attaining constructive, honest opinions, beliefs, and thoughts from your workforce. You must be open to hearing what they have to say, because they have incredibly valuable insights.

Internal communication is a crucial element to employee engagement, as your team needs to stay in constant contact. It’s all about functioning together as a cohesive unit, so that you can perform adequately as an organization.

Pre-employment assessment is essential to appropriately engage workers, as it starts before they’re even working for you. Ensuring you hire the right people is tricky, so having the right screening process in place is a must.

Progress tracking allows you to keep a constant eye on current projects and tasks. As employees generally work with others, and separate departments, having frequent status updates is a must. When employees can deliver and meet deadlines, they’ll be more engaged.

Employee training is the onboarding process that your organization has in place. How well you bring an employee up to speed will make their job much easier. When it’s less of a hassle for them to deliver, they’ll be more motivated and engaged to work for you.

All these specific aspects of employee engagement can be complicated to address. Having an employee engagement tool can help make things easier.

Best Employee Engagement Tools

Below, you’ll find the 18 best employee engagement tools that’ll make your team’s life easier. They’re categorized, based on which specific aspect of employee they address.

Employee Recognition Tools

We’ve outlined 3 fantastic employee recognition tools below. They’ll help you spread positivity throughout your workforce.

Karl

Karl is a Slack-based app that lets you recognize and acknowledge employees, directly within the Slack program, showing kudos. These are small acts of appreciation. It’s a fantastic way to encourage a positive team culture, and show praise for workers that go the extra mile.

With Karl, it’s extremely easy to recognize your employees, and keep track of those doing a fantastic job. Monthly leaderboards help you keep score of who exactly is doing the most. Randomly selected GIFs add some fun to the mix, keeping everything light.

You can stream recent kudos to larger sized screens in the office, encouraging a positive inhouse culture. A robust analytics feature keeps you clued in on how morale is tracking. You’ll be able to act swiftly when drops occur.

Karl is an awesome, lightweight app that syncs effortlessly within your Slack internal communication.

Reward Gateway

Reward Gateway is an employee benefits and engagement solution that helps you attract, engage, and retain your team. This tool allows you to strategically show recognition through communication and providing benefits.

The employee benefits feature offers one of the largest discount programs in the world. Workers can take advantage of savings from a wide variety of stores and outlets, thanks to Reward Gateway.

The employee rewards and recognition feature helps you strengthen your team culture, through recognition and support. You can create customized ecards, review instantly, or automate them.

Bonusly

Bonusly is an employee rewards and recognition tool that empowers your team and enriches your culture. With it, your workers will love the acknowledgment and appreciation shown towards them, improving their engagement, and working harder.

More specifically, Bonusly works by employees being given a monthly allowance. With this, they can choose to give to other employees to recognize their efforts. All bonuses given are shown in a public feed, improving overall organizational morale.

Survey and Feedback Tools

Here, you’ll find 3 awesome survey and feedback tools. Using them, you can give your workers a voice — and uncover valuable insights to improve your organization.

OfficeVibe

OfficeVibe is a team development platform that empowers your team to improve performance, trust, and collaboration. The tool helps your organization better understand itself, by listening to the opinions of the workforce.

There’s a complete suite, with a host of features to get valuable insights. You can put together employee surveys, pulse surveys, and get anonymous feedback. You can completely customize as you create, or use pre-made templates to save time and effort.

OfficeVibe also allows you to host one-on-one meetings in-app, with members of your team. Action items can be set, and you can track progress effectively. The tool integrates right into your technology stack, linking up with apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and the Google suite.

Google Forms

Google Forms is a free online survey creator that allows teams to create high quality surveys and questionnaires. The cloud-based app makes customization and collaboration in real-time easy and effortless.

The data from the surveys can be directly imported into a Google/Excel spreadsheet. Getting the answers your organization seeks has never been faster. You can create customer feedback surveys, questionnaires, quizzes, job applications, and RSVP forms.

Regardless of what kind of information and feedback you’re looking for, Google Forms can help you get it.

People Pulse

PeoplePulse is a cloud-based online survey and feedback software that uses employee insights to grow your business. By listening and acknowledging what your workforce has to say, you can identify ways to improve and become more efficient.

With the tool, you can conduct employee surveys and reports, remote working and wellbeing checkups, and engagement surveys. There are also onboarding surveys for new employees, as well as exit surveys, for those leaving your organization.

You can also get feedback from your customers and clients. There are general reports and surveys, post-purchase surveys, lapsed feedback surveys, and website feedback surveys.

Internal Communication Tools

Communication is key, which is why you need a rock solid internal communication tool. We’ve listed 3 for you below.

Slack

Slack is an internal communication solution that houses all your team’s messaging and interaction under one platform. No matter where your team is, they can all sync up and work cohesively as a unit, thanks to effective communication.

With Slack, you can communicate privately with each individual, or create group channels. Want to create an exclusive channel for only your sales team? You can do that. You can make any type of group chat that you want — public, private, or even with other organizations.

On these channels, you can send text messages, GIFs, emojis, video messages, and even host live calls. You can also share and edit files.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based video conferencing, meetings, and calling platform. It brings your entire team under one workspace, improving communication efficiency and collaboration.

The tool has 4 main features:

• Chat: instant one-to-one and group messaging.
• Meet: video conferences for up to as many as 10,000 different people.
• Call: direct calls, group calls, voicemails over the cloud, and call transfers.
• Collaborate: file sharing and editing.

Microsoft Teams can be used for both small and medium sized businesses, as well as enterprise ones. It also integrates with other great Microsoft apps, like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel — all under the Microsoft 365 office suite.

Flock

Flock is a team messaging and online collaboration software, designed for organizations and businesses. It unifies all your internal communication under one platform, streamlining and improving efficiency.

The tool has a host of different features, including:

• Channel Messaging: create and categorize various public and private communication channels.
• Video and Voice Conferencing: in-app video and voice calling.
• Integrated Search: powerful search engine to locate any and all messages and chat logs.
• Voice Notes: instant voice messaging.

Other features include file sharing, polls, reminders, to-do lists, admin controls, user permissions, and data retention.

Pre-Employment Assessment Tools

Employee engagement starts before you’ve even hired them. Given this, a pre-employment assessment tool can help you screen them appropriately. Below, you’ll find 3 awesome options available.

VidCruiter

VidCruiter is a video recruiting platform that empowers human resources teams to supercharge their recruiting strategy. With it, you can identify, interview, and hire job candidates, completely online.

Video interviews can be either pre-recorded, or done live with a prospect. Pre-recorded interviews involve a bunch of questions that have been selected by your HR team. In their own time, job candidates will respond to these pre-set questions, after which they’ll be reviewed.

The questions can be created in written format, or as embedded videos. Once the applicants see the question, they only have a short window of time to answer/respond to it. Things like prep time, number of questions, and how long they have to respond is completely customizable.

XOR

XOR is a recruiting and HR communication platform that makes employee candidate screening easy. Using the tool, you can accelerate your pre-employment assessment, making it a more efficient process. You’ll get the best possible people on your team with this application.

What separates XOR from other options, is that it focuses on scaling up your hiring process. Text campaigns allow you to fill your open jobs with speed and efficiency. AI-powered chatbots automatically reply to chosen candidates, freeing up your team to focus on other things.

XOR focuses on creating a mobile-first hiring experience, as it’s been shown that candidates respond fast to text messages.

Email drip campaigns are also used to boost candidate engagement. Automated autoresponder sequences saves you time, and re-engages cold candidates

Pymetrics

Pymetrics is a talent matching platform that helps you build the best team you could possibly have. It uses artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and behavioral science, ensuring you find the top employees available.

Instead of using archaic resumes or self-reported questionnaires, Pymetrics uses cognitive-based games that measure emotional attributes. Other games focus on assessing logical reasoning and numerical problem solving. All games are based on current research.

There’s also a “Digital Interviews” feature, which gives you the ability to host high quality interviews. Interviews are structured, based on the data from the games. You can do them in over 27 different languages, so there’s no barrier there.

Progress Tracking Tools

Managing workflows, projects, and tasks is incredibly important — especially when they require collaboration between employees and departments. To help make things easier, try using a progress tracking tool. We’ve listed 3 killer apps below.

Weekdone

Weekdone is an OKR — objectives and key results — software that helps keep your team focused on its goals. It has a variety of different features that make tracking employee progress easy.

Your organization’s OKRs are always visible to your entire workforce, making everybody accountable. Live, real-time progress visualizations are accessible by all on the dashboard.

Weekly check-ins allow you to create weekly plans that encourage goal-setting and overall employee engagement. Reporting and data visualization features ensure that your efforts remain data-driven, keeping you on track.

Weekdone seamlessly integrates with your technology stack. It syncs with popular apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Asana.

Leapsome

Leapsome is a performance and management platform which tracks the progress and performance of your workforce. More specifically, the tool allows you to set various goals, objectives, and key results, as well as other things.

For example, the “Performance Reviews” feature makes creating impactful, growth-minded feedback sessions easy. It can be used to create basic reviews, or more complex ones, like project-based reviews. Templates and automations are available too.

Other features allow you to create and manage OKRs (objectives and key results) and goals. You can also set up 1:1s and team meetings. Leapsome integrates with lots of other great apps as well.

Perdoo

Perdoo is a free OKR — objectives and key results — app that tracks your team’s progress on projects and tasks. It’s a great tool to use to get everyone in your organization on the same page regarding your company strategy.

The “Roadmap” feature allows you to design and communicate that strategy easily, thanks to a drag and drop editor. Making sure that your entire workforce understands your long term organizational objectives has never been easier.

Setting goals is also super simple with Perdoo. The tool allows you to create specific, measurable goals, allowing your team to track progress and reach OKRs and KPIs. Other features include achievements, and check-ins.

Employee Training Tools

Onboarding is one of the most crucial aspects to ensuring employee success and engagement. This is why having an employee training tool is so essential. Check out our top 3 choices below.

Lessonly

Lessonly is an awesome, easy to use training software that’ll take your team to the next level. With it, you can put together awesome e-learning courses for your team. It’s ideal for employee training and onboarding, which is why we’ve listed it here.

Some of the features of the tool includes:

• Learning Paths: allows you to build educational courses.
• Roles: a way for you administration and contributor roles with permissions.
• Tags: organize your e-learning content with tags.
• Lessonly University: premade courses to save time.
• In-Person Training: tracks the attendance for activities that happen face to face.

Lessonly also syncs effortlessly with your technology stack — apps like Salesforce, Slack, and Zendesk. What separates Lessonly from the rest is its HR features, and its industry compliance. It’s a great option for those that value those qualities.

TalentLMS

TalentLMS is a cloud-based learning management system platform that helps you make your team smarter. It’s completely customizable to your needs, easy to operate, and really fun to use. With this tool, your team will embrace training, enjoying onboarding and upskilling.

With TalentLMS, you can construct quality training courses, create tests, quizzes, and even host live events. If you don’t want to waste time, premade courses are already available thanks to the TalentLibrary.

Gamification and automation features also exist, as well as analytics and reporting. Lots of integrations, so you can connect TalentLMS up with your other softwares, like CRMs and internal communications.

This is a great option for those that want a learning platform that’s convenient and is easy to use. It’s used by brands like Deliveroo, cPanel, and Delonghi.

Docebo

Docebo is a learning management system that lets you put together an ideal onboarding program for new employees. Its drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to effortlessly configure and manage your system.

The suite has 5 main features:

• Shape: allows you to create high quality content in seconds.
• Content: a library of existing, industry-leading e-learning content.
• Learn LMS: an AI-powered learning management system for enterprise.
• Learning Impact: questionnaires, surveys, built-in reports.
• Learning Analytics: a complete analytics suite to gauge program effectiveness

The tool’s got a wide variety of different integrations, including platforms like Google Drive, Salesforce, Zoom, and Slack.

What sets Docebo apart is its awesome corporate learning management system, which has 24/7 availability. This is a great employee training platform for larger, enterprise organizations.

Conclusion

In this article, we covered 18 of the best employee engagement tools your team can benefit from using. We categorized them, based on what specific aspect of employee engagement they address.

Did you find the information that you were looking for? Got something on your mind? Drop a comment below.

A work environment where co-workers get along with each other is one that’s conducive to organizational success. The better the relations between the employees, the greater they’ll work together, which’ll only lead to good things.

Having trouble getting along with co-workers? In this article we’ll cover the 10 best practices that you can implement today.

Ready? Let’s get into it.

1. Don’t overshare

While honesty and being open is something you should strive for in the workplace, you also need to avoid oversharing. When it comes to certain topics and issues, like personal ones, it’s best to keep it to yourself.

Ensure you keep discussions with your co-workers positive, and on the lighter side. Save the more intimate dialogue for those you’re closer to, like family and friends. If one of your co-workers has a strong relationship with you like that, then they might be fine.

To initiate this best practice strategy and get started today, sit back and analyze the situation. Look at all the relationships you have with your co-workers. Are there any that stand out regarding oversharing? You need to identify the ones where you might be saying too much.

Once you’ve identified the questionable co-worker relationships, begin by limiting dialogue. Actively try to talk to them less, but don’t outright ignore them. Keep any and all discussion vanilla.

Over time you should find that your co-workers will begin to get along with you better. You’ve respected their privacy and that’ll resonate with them. Keep it up and always remember to avoid oversharing to new employees.

2. Show interest in their hobbies and interests

It’s really important that you take the time to learn about what your co-workers' hobbies and interests are. Become a great listener, actively engage with them, show respect for what they like to talk about. Doing so will encourage them to reciprocate and do the same to you.

It’s also a good way to figure out whether or not you and a co-worker are a good fit. If you happen to genuinely be interested in what they have to say, it might be ideal to engage them.

To start this best practice off, consider asking a co-worker about what they’ve got planned on the weekend. Ask them when you’re both in the break room. This is a nonthreatening way to find out what their hobbies and interests might be.

Try to make sure that you come off natural and not forced. You don’t want to seem awkward, forced, or nosy. You want to appear casually interested in them, not obsessively prying into their affairs.

3. Start creating a relationship with co-workers from day one

It’s extremely important that you start to build a relationship with your fellow employees from day one. Doing so will show them that your efforts are authentic and not forced and contrived. They’ll see your genuine efforts as a sign of respect.

Whenever a new employee joins your office, try to be the one to show them the ropes. If you can, try to introduce them to other people. The better you can onboard them, the easier things will be for them, and the better they’ll get along with you.

To get started with this strategy, keep an eye out for when a new employee joins your office. Offer to show them around, and introduce them to your other workers. Use the lunch break as a way to meet other co-workers. Help them out with any problems they have.

4. Prioritize getting your work done

Although it may seem counterproductive, prioritizing getting your work done is essential to getting along with your co-workers. Spending too much time gossiping and socializing with other employees will no doubt put a strain on your daily workflows.

As a result of this, you might actually be making your co-workers have to shoulder a heavier workload. They are likely to not take too kindly to this, as you’re making things harder for them. As an employee that’s part of a team, it’s your responsibility to take care of your workflow.

Every day, you should know exactly what you need to accomplish, and how long it’ll take. Off that estimate, you’ll know how much time you have to socialize with your co-workers. Obviously this won’t be consistent, as your workload will be greater at certain times of the year.

To get started with this best practice, outline what you need to accomplish at the start of every work day. Roughly estimate how much time and effort this’ll take to accomplish. If you’re busy with work and a co-worker wants to chat, be honest and polite to them, explaining your situation.

5. Make yourself approachable to co-workers

One of the easiest ways to improve your relationships with other co-workers is to make yourself more approachable. This means that you’re not closed off, negative in demeanor and body language. You’re smiling, and you pay attention to your fellow employees.

It’s really about respect. By making yourself more inviting, your co-workers will feel more comfortable around you. They’ll talk with you more, opening themselves up. People are naturally more talkative and social around those that they feel secure to be around.

To get started with this strategy, there are a number of things you can do. You can begin with your body language, demeanor, and tone of voice.

Try to open up your body so that it’s more inviting. Have a good, upright posture — don’t slouch. When someone speaks to you, turn your body to them and look them in the eye. A large part of communication is done with your body, and doing these things will communicate respect.

Your demeanor and tone of voice should match your body language as well. Be positive, and show general interest in others. Avoid being monotone and negative. It’s not just what you say, but how you say it.

If your team communicates a lot online you can use an app like Karl to show appreciation and recognition.

It allows you to give kudos, shout outs, and praise to high performing employees. It syncs in with Slack, but can also be used with other team communication tools. There’s also an analytics suite, as well as a leaderboard — so you can keep track of who’s performing exceptionally.

Other strategies include keeping your office door open, and not wearing headphones on all the time.

6. Be respectful in the workplace

How you conduct yourself in the workplace can have dramatic effects on the relationship with your co-workers. If you are lazy, frequently showing up late to work, or wearing inappropriate, messy attire, you’re not showing respect. If your phone has a loud ring, that’s disrespectful too.

Speaking loudly is also something you should avoid, as people are working. You’re not showing respect to others, and they’ll resent you for it. If you also fail to respond to emails promptly you’ll upset your fellow employees. This is because you’re most likely making things harder for them.

If you want to get along with your co-workers you need to rectify these negative habits. Start by creating and being consistent with a routine in the morning. Wake up early and appropriately groom yourself. Stick with it — you’ll find it’ll become easier and easier — automatic even.

As for being at work, there are a number of things you should do. Put your phone on vibrate only. People don’t want to hear your disruptive ringtone while they work. Also keep your voice down, and don’t use inappropriate language. You might be offending others without knowing.

Lastly, respond fast to emails and other work-related tasks. Delaying yourself will make things much harder for others, which will negatively affect your relationship with them.

7. Avoid negative gossip and drama

When it comes to your interactions with your co-workers you should try to avoid negative topics like gossip and drama. These sorts of things can create clique-like environments within a workplace, turning people against each other. It’s not conducive to a healthy work environment.

Try to keep all of your conversations with your fellow employees generally positive. Talk about what you’re doing on the weekend. Ask about their hobbies and interests. Avoid complaining about the managers, or another individual in the office.

You’ll likely find that people don’t want to associate with you if you’re always discussing negative things all the time. That kind of bad energy is infectious — and it’ll drag them down, too. Soon, you might find that you’re being socially alienated in the workplace because of it.

To combat this, try to make a conscious effort to keep things light. Stick to positive topics, things that make people feel good. Ask about their family, their hobbies and interests, or what they’ve got planned on the weekend. Remind yourself to implement this everyday at work.

8. Be open and accepting to feedback

When it comes to getting along with your co-workers, it helps to be open and accepting to feedback. Oftentimes your fellow employees are who you go to, to vent and complain. They might seem like they don’t mind being an emotional pillow, but it likely bothers them.

Instead of expecting them to nod and agree with everything you say, try asking for their honest thoughts. Being able to accept feedback and criticism is an admirable trait that’ll make you more likeable to your peers.

Next time you are unloading on an employee, asking for their honest opinion. Preface that you want them to not hold back. Be ready to handle what they may have to say about you. It might hurt your feelings, but don’t get upset. They’re only trying to help you.

You can do this when you’re on lunch break, talking to an employee. think about getting their opinion on a dispute, issue, or problem you have. Don’t do this all the time, as you’ll wear them out. Every so often is good — perhaps once a month, on a topic that really matters.

9. Ask and offer help whenever possible

If you want to build a rapport with your fellow employees, then you should ask for their help, or offer it yourself. Asking for their help shows you value them and their expertise, wisdom, insight, and knowledge. Offering help shows you’re interested in them, which is good for relations.

People like to be the teacher — they also like to talk, if you get them going. You can build their confidence up by picking their brain, and help solve your own problems. It’ll make your relationship with them much stronger, which is extremely important.

As for offering them help? Your co-workers will have their own problems, issues, and dilemmas. By giving them a helping hand, you’re making it easier for them to deal with these issues. They’ll appreciate you for your contribution, which’ll strengthen your relationship with them.

There are so many ways you can ask or offer for help. To get started, be empathetic during point projects and workflow tasks. Are they struggling with something? Are you struggling with something. Working together as a team is vital to success as an organization.

You can also look to help — or get help — during your lunch break. It doesn’t have to specifically be about work-related issues. Perhaps it’s something far more personal. Whatever it is, if you or them can provide help, encourage it.

10. Treat others how you’d want to be treated

This is an age-old saying, but it still rings true — it always will. Always try to treat others how you’d want to be treated. If you’re always complaining and gossiping negatively about others there’s a good chance they’re doing the same about you.

If you treat people poorly you shouldn’t be surprised to find out people treat you poorly. And why would you want to be treated badly? No one does. We want to be respected, to be thought of in high regard. It’s human nature — so why not encourage it?

The next time you’re in the office, go out of your way to be nice to people. Don’t force it, but make an obvious effort. Be consistent with it for long enough and you should notice people start to reciprocate back.

Conclusion

In this article we covered 10 of the best practices to get along better with your co-workers.

Employee relations are crucial to organizational success. A work environment that continually butts heads will be inefficient and unproductive. If a business is to succeed it must solve its internal issues.

We hope this article brought some value to you.

Got any questions? Leave a comment below.

Employee feedback is essential to growing and developing the workers of your organization. It’s a substantially powerful tool that'll improve trust and communication between employees and management.

Unfortunately, feedback often falls on deaf ears, ignored and unrecognized. As an organization, it’s vital that you ensure your employees hear what you have to say.

To help you better understand the ins and outs of employee feedback, we’ve put together this article. It’ll cover everything you need to know, including:

• Why employee feedback is so important
• 10 different employee feedback examples
• 5 examples of how to give feedback to employees

Ready to get into this? Let’s get started..

Why Is Employee Feedback So Important?

Employee feedback is so important because it creates a feedback-rich culture. This is an office environment where workers aren’t afraid to ask for insight and input from management and peers. It’s an environment synonymous with high performance.

More specifically, employee feedback can help incite change, fueling positive growth. It helps employees see and understand themselves from a different perspective. They want this because it can help improve their performance. Don’t believe me? Check these statistics out:

• 72% of employees believe their work performance would increase if management gave them corrective feedback. (Source)
• 57% of employees want corrective feedback, not recognition and praise (Source)

Employees want to know whether or not they’re on the right track. The feedback you give them is vital information they as workers find invaluable.

Aside from improved performance, employee feedback can also increase engagement. In fact, 40% of workers are “actively disengaged” when they receive minimal to no feedback.

Employee Feedback Examples: 10 Situations to Give Better Feedback

Below you’ll find 10 examples of situations where you can give effective employee feedback.

Show appreciation and recognition for exceptional performance

If an employee performs exceptionally well, you should show appreciation and recognition towards them. Acknowledge what they did right, what they did well — be as specific as possible. They need to know exactly how their performance affected organizational outcomes.

In many organizations, employee performance is often forgotten. Management can become lazy and forget to recognize, appreciate, and acknowledge exceptional performance.

Ensure that management lets employees know when they’ve done a great job. This reinforces the behaviors that led to that success. Employees will become more engaged when they’re being recognized. They’re valued and thus motivated to continue to succeed.

“Hey John — outstanding work this week. You’ve closed multiple big contracts and we’re now ahead of our forecasts. Well done. I appreciate all the hard work and energy you put into this.”

Acknowledge an employee’s good qualities and traits

Make sure when you give employee feedback that you acknowledge their good qualities and traits. Workers have pride in certain aspects of their skillset, which allows them to perform their job.

By recognizing these things, you’ll build their confidence, increasing engagement and performance.

“John — I’ve noticed that you’re able to address customer and client tickets well. You have a natural ability at being able to communicate and manage people and their concerns and issues. Customer relationship management is crucial to our company’s continued success. Well done.”

Provide support to employees when challenges and roadblocks arise

When your employees face challenges and roadblocks, ensure you provide them with support. These problems will arise, regardless of how well they do their job. Even the most successful of workers will face these issues.

It’s paramount that you acknowledge their resilience and fortitude as they face these things. Doing so will build trust and confidence.

Don’t forget to also acknowledge when they’ve overcome these challenges and roadblocks. They’re only temporary and they will get past them eventually. They need to know that their hard work hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“I realise the past few weeks haven’t been easy as we haven’t got as many leads coming through the pipeline. It’s outstanding how you’ve been able to weather the storm and continue closing deals despite this. I appreciate your hard resilience and perseverance in the hard times.”

Address problematic issues and behaviors within the workplace

Managers must address and stamp out any problematic issues and behaviors within the workplace. Make sure this is brought up during feedback with employees. In doing so you’ll encourage a respectful work environment that is tolerant and non-threatening.

At the same time, managers shouldn’t assume it was done intentionally. Many issues, incidents, and behaviors are unknowingly problematic. The employees committing them are often oblivious.

Don’t use the feedback to punish or to allocate blame. Instead, allow for discourse, discussion — outline workplace guidelines. They need to know what is acceptable, and what isn’t.

“It’s come to my attention that various colleagues have heard you telling questionable jokes in the office. They’ve told me that they find this offensive. Our organization has guidelines regarding this sort of behavior. We won’t tolerate this kind of behavior.”

Address drops in performance at work

Managers need to ensure that they keep a keen eye on goals and performance of all employees. If any drops in performance, or failure to meet goals occur, this must be addressed. The manager’s goal is to find out why this has happened, and provide support to rectify it.

When giving the feedback, make sure you start by referencing and acknowledging previous successes. This shows you’re not outright attacking them, but coming from a place of support. This’ll make it easy to segway into the issue of performance decline, and what to do about it.

“John — you’re the top closer in our sales team. You closed the most deals last year, which we appreciate. However, in the last few months your performance has declined. I was wondering why this is? Has there been a change? An issue or roadblock? Anything I can do to help?”

Follow up when goals are not met by employees

If an employee comes up short regarding a set goal, your feedback to them should address this. Make sure it’s dealt with as soon as possible, and that you identify the issue. This is all extremely important if you want to get performance back on track, and the goal met.

Making sure you link individual employee goals to the overall business goals is essential. This is key to continually achieving positive business outcomes for your organization.

Encourage discourse and discussion in the employee feedback. You want them to have a say, you want to hear their side of things. This’ll help you uncover why the goal was not met, and what can be done about it in the future.

“As an organization we set goals to ensure performance stays on track, consistent with forecasts. They ensure that not only our organization succeeds, but the individual employees such as yourself.

Your most recently set goal was not reached — let’s talk about what happened. What went wrong? How can I help and what can we do to ensure success in the future?”

Acknowledge when employees are setting a great example

When employees do things that should be emulated, make sure you detail this to them during your feedback session. You want to encourage leadership in your workforce by empowering individuals that set an example.

Employees are more likely to behave in a way that’s ideal if they’re being led by a colleague. It’s one of the best and fastest ways to get your workforce on the right track.

“John told me he has improved productivity, thanks to your recommendation. We appreciate that you are encouraging employees to use the new tool — you’re setting the example.”

Bring attention to behaviors that should become consistent habits

Often employees will act in ways that are positive to your organization’s business outcomes. These behaviors should be encouraged so that they may become consistent habits. Use your employee feedback sessions to bring attention to them.

They may not realize what they’re doing — it’s your responsibility to aware them of those behaviors. Ensure that they understand how it impacts positive business outcomes. This’ll make it so that they understand why they should be consistently repeated.

“That new method you came up to improve the email workflows was extremely effective. It resulted in 50% increased productivity. It was a great help to the overall team and we’d like it to be used again indefinitely.”

Reach out when there has been a disconnect

As the world has become more digital, and teams operate more and more frequently online, disconnect can occur. Management should try to rectify the problem and bring all parties up to speed and on the same page.

Employees must understand why the disconnect happened, and what can be done to avoid future incidents in the future. As management, you should also try to avoid making it too personal. Keep it professional.

“The outcome of the latest campaign didn’t reach the preset goals that were outlined. The marketing department was under the impression that you’d have a more significant involvement.

I’d like to hear your opinion on the matter. We should also discuss how this can be avoided in the future.”

Discuss any potential errors that may have occurred

It’s a reality that mistakes will occur. Although employees don’t like to discuss them, without reflection through feedback, they’ll likely happen again. Management shouldn’t look to assert blame, but rather have an effective discussion.

Employees need to understand how the error occurred and how it impacted the organization. You should also ideally go over potential solutions to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s about making sure they learn from their mistakes.

“It’s come to my attention that the emails you sent went to the wrong contacts. This is understandable as we are sending in bulk, to thousands of individuals. I was under the impression that we had in place a consistent process.

I would much like to hear your opinion on how this error occurred. Also we should discuss what can be done to avoid it in the future.”

How to Give Feedback to Employees: 5 Best Practices

Below you’ll find 5 best practices to follow in order to give the best possible feedback to employees.

Handle positive and negative feedback differently

When giving feedback to employees, you need in place a strategy for dealing with both positive and negative issues. Obviously you shouldn’t deal with them the same as they’re entirely different issues.

Positive feedback to employees is all about recognition and rewarding. Whether that’s acknowledgement of accomplishment, or a financial incentive. Management should identify what workers value — use this information to reward them.

A tool like Karl can make it easy for you to recognize top performing employees through Slack. Many teams operate location independent through channel-based messaging platforms. This has been true for so many organizations given the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

Negative feedback is an entirely different deal — this requires privacy and delicacy. You should never give negative feedback to an employee in public. This is something that is of a personal nature. It also should be in person so there’s no issues with honesty and transparency.

Look to encourage constructive criticism through an active two-way discourse. Be specific and avoid blame and hostility. It shouldn’t make them feel punished — it should seek to improve their performance and find appropriate solutions.

Encourage a two-way discussion

When you conduct your feedback sessions with employees, you need to encourage a two-way discussion. This means that not only are you asking questions, but they are too. It allows the discourse to be more active and dynamic, as they most likely have questions too.

By asking questions like “what do you think?” or “How do you feel about this,” you’ll get them involved. Doing this will build trust which will make them more likely to open up and be honest. This’ll lead to better, more valuable insights from the feedback sessions.

Make sure you plan for the meeting and give them a heads up

It’s absolutely vital that you ensure you plan ahead regarding your employee feedback meeting. You need to know what you’re going to ask them about, and what you hope to achieve. You’ll also be able to plan it to fit into your schedule better.

You should also tell them about the feedback meeting, and what it’ll be about. This gives them time to prepare themselves, so they’re not coming up empty during the meeting.

Having a shared meeting agenda can help you avoid issues of confusion and stagnancy during the meeting.

Give feedback more frequently

A lot of organizations will save employee feedback for an annual review to look over everything. This isn’t ideal as you should be frequently hosting meetings to get feedback from employees.

Trying to pack everything into one major session is not ideal. It’ll create a brain drain — it’s too much to handle in one meeting.

Schedule meetings for feedback with employees for issues when they happen

You should always look to be timely and specific when you host meetings and get feedback from employees. Don’t address things months after they occur — be active and respond quickly.

Your criticisms and critiques will be more effective if they address errors, issues, and problems that are presently relevant.

Conclusion

In this article we covered everything you need to know to give better employee feedback.

Employee feedback is a crucial element that managers must take part in. It grows and develops the employees in your organization, improving trust, communication, and performance.

Got any questions? Leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you.

One-on-one meetings are powerful, personalized tools organizations can use to engage their employees. It provides a way to give feedback and garner insight into performance, development, motivation, and growth.

If you’re a manager, director, or executive, you can seriously benefit from learning the ins and outs of one-on-one meetings.

Not sure where to start? Don’t worry. This article will cover everything you need to know, including:

• What a one-on-one meeting is
• Why one-on-one meetings are so powerful
• Tips to run a one-on-one meeting
• How your one-on-one meeting agenda should look
• One-one-one meeting templates

Ready? Let’s dive on in.

What Is an One-on-One Meeting?

One-on-one meetings are a type of meeting that a manager holds with an individual employee. They generally cover career issues regarding, performance, development, motivation, and growth. One-on-one meetings are also referred to as 1:1s, check-ins, and 121s.

They’re typically held once a week, and run for roughly 30 minutes at a time. The purpose of 1:1 meetings is to assess the level of engagement of an individual employee. Are they happy? How exactly are they feeling about their current role?

One-on-one meetings are also used to give updates on current projects and tasks. Are they on schedule? Are there any problems or roadblocks that need to be addressed? At an organizational level, they act as tools to engage and retain a team of employees.

Why Are 1 on 1 Meetings so Powerful?

One-on-one meetings are so powerful because they’re personal, treating every team member as an individual. Each person gets their own time to discuss various issues of their role with their direct report/manager/subordinate.

From an organizational standpoint, 1:1 meetings:

• Strengthen relationships: brings a personal element to all relations within a team and organization.
• Identify problems and roadblocks: brings awareness and solutions to issues before they become too large.
• Detail performance: provides a way to ensure every employee is on track towards completing their workflows, tasks, and projects.
• Show recognition: acknowledges the hard work and effort that individual employees contribute to an organization.

How to Prepare an One-on-One Meeting?

Both managers and employees need to adequately prepare for a one-on-one meeting. Both parties must bring information to the discussion, to ensure all areas are covered.

Choose an Appropriate Schedule

A one-on-one meeting will need to be held at an appropriate time for both the manager and the employee. 1:1s are a type of formal meeting that is held frequently — usually once a week. Sometimes it might be once a fortnight.

Choose an Appropriate Time

How long the 1:1 meeting will go for is also important. Most last around 30 minutes, which gives enough time to cover items on the agenda.

Agree on an Agenda

When it comes to planning a one-on-one meeting, there’s nothing more important than having an agenda. This is basically a schedule of events for your meetings — what you’ll be talking about. Both the manager and the employee will contribute to this.

Agendas will be discussed in detail later on in this article.

Review and Prepare Using the Agenda

Both a one-on-one meeting takes place, you’ll want to go over the agenda in your head. Think of it much like a script for a play, or acting role. You need to truly understand the items, topics, and issues that’ll be discussed. Ensure you are confident you can answer all of them.

Acquire the Right Mindset

One-on-one meetings are not like other meetings. They’re intensely personal, and require more active involvement. After all, there’s only two people involved.

With that said, try to mentally prepare yourself to speak and contribute, as much listen and hear. Both parties will be actively contributing to a 1:1 meeting.

Be Proactive

One-on-one meetings require contribution and effort from both participants — manager and employee. Sometimes however, one party isn’t bringing the involvement and commitment they should be.

This isn’t a time to get angry or shift blame. Instead, be proactive and try to get them in sync, in the loop, afloat. 1:1 meetings are an ongoing activity, so it’s definitely something you can work on and better prepare for.

Don’t Forget to Follow Up

Because one-on-ones are an ongoing activity, it’s important to follow up in between and before future meetings. Every new 1:1 will discuss a different agenda, comprising old and new items. Ensure that you continually add new topics to the agenda as they arise.

Later on in this post we’ll cover having a “shared space,” which allows you to actively add new agenda issues.

Tips to Run an One-on-One Meeting

Having trouble running your one-on-one meetings? Don’t worry — try implementing these best practice actionable tips featured below.

Have an Agenda

Having an agenda is the absolute easiest way to ensure your 1:1s are a success. It’s basically a plan — an outline for what you’ll discuss during the meetings. It may seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised at how many organizations wing it regarding one-on-one meetings.

Simply put? This is not a place to cut corners and get lazy. Having no plan is planning to fail.

The ins and outs of agendas will be discussed later on in this article.

Take Notes

During the one-on-one meeting, you’ll want to make sure that notes are being taken. Ideally both the employee and the manager should be writing or typing things down. Remember — this is a meeting where both parties are listening and contributing.

Taking notes will allow you to better absorb and retain the information given in the meeting. This could be handwritten in person, or typed into a Word/Google doc if online.

Keep it Time-based

Along with having an agenda you should also ensure that it’s being followed in a timely manner. As in, you should allocate a specific amount of time to every item that needs to be discussed.

Typically a 1:1 meeting will go for 30 minutes. Give a fair amount of time for both parties to have their say.

Ask the Right Questions

If your meetings still aren’t feeling right, then it may just be what you’re talking about. You simply might not be asking the right questions.

Your agenda should cover all the important details. Don’t just add topics, create specific questions. You’re looking for specific answers, so the questions you ask really do matter.

Use This Simple Structure

If you’re still stuck trying to figure out best how to run your 1:1 meeting, perhaps try using this structure:

• Their update
• Your update
• Outlook

This is a simple way to look at the format of a one-on-one meeting. One party updates first, the second follows suit, then an outlook to future meetings. If you’ve got 30 minutes then you can spend 10 minutes each, and 5 looking towards the future.

How Should Your One-on-One Meeting Agenda Look Like?

Going into your one-on-one meeting, you need to make sure you have an agenda — a good one at that.

Your meeting agenda are the details and activities you cover during your one-on-one meeting. Basically the content and criteria of your meeting.

Why Do You Need an Agenda For Your One-on-One Meetings?

An agenda brings structure to your one-on-ones, which helps increase the effectiveness of the meetings. It’s like having a plan, an outline that’s known beforehand. The agenda will help reduce awkwardness and stagnancy — you’ll both already know what to speak about.

What Sort of Topics/Questions Should Your Agenda Include?

Not sure about what your one-on-one meeting agendas should include? Remember — 1:1s are used to assess performance, development, motivation, and growth. Any and all topics/questions regarding those issues are applicable.

Here are some rough ideas of agenda topics you might talk about:

• Project updates
• Roadblocks, problems, and bottlenecks
• Budget issues
• Performance review, feedback, and reflection
• Goals
• Wins and successes

Find and identify the topics, questions, and issues most important, that must be discussed. This goes for both the manager and the employee.

Create the Agenda Together

Oftentimes one-on-one meetings fail to be effective because the agenda was created by only one party. The content, topics, and questions of the meetings were created by only the manager, or employee.

Ideally, your one-on-one meeting agenda should be contributed to by both parties. You should have a shared file/location where both can actively create, track, and add new items to the agenda.

Without having a shared space for agenda items like this, your meeting will be ineffective, falling off track. You’ve only got an allotted amount of time, typically 30 minutes. Both the manager and the employee need to know all the questions of each other's minds.

Keep Your Agenda Shared Space Clean and Structured

You’ve got a space/location for both the manager and employee to contribute agenda items. Great. Now you should look to cleanly organize and structure it.

One-on-one meetings are an ongoing activity, and you’ll constantly be adding and prioritizing different agenda items. The idea here is to create a bunch of subcategories that’ll make creating your ideal weekly agendas easy.

Here are some examples of subcategories you should create for your shared space:

• Urgent: agenda items that need to be discussed and dealt with ASAP.
• Not urgent: topics, issues, and items that aren’t urgent and can be pushed back to later one-on-one meetings.
• Problems: any roadblocks that require discussion during a 1:1 meeting.
• Successes: all wins that have been achieved — it’s important to discuss these.
• Goals: milestones, whether personal, performance, or project related.

Bringing this sort of organization and structure to your agenda shared space will help you prioritize the most important issues. Every week you’ll be addressing the most pertinent and urgent of agenda topics, which is how it should be.

Continually Update and Add New Agenda Items

The key to making your shared space work is to continually add and categorize new agenda items as they arise. As you go about your daily workflows, tasks and projects, always consider adding new things to the shared space.

Got a question about your department’s budget? Add it and categorize it to the shared space.

Uncovered a bottleneck, roadblock, or problem with your current project? Add it and categorize it to the shared space.

Feeling a lack of motivation and unfulfillment in your current role? Add it and categorize it to the shared space.

These are all potential agenda items that you should be discussing during one-on-one meetings. Ensuring you add these items immediately, as they arise, will ensure your meetings run smoothly.

You don’t want to be scrambling at the last minute to put all the pieces together. Add items to the shared space ontime, giving both manager and employee necessary prep time. This’ll get the most of each and every one-on-one meeting.

One-on-One Meeting Templates You Can Use

Below, you’ll find 3 awesome templates that’ll help you run your 1:1 meetings.

1. One-on-One Form - ProsperForms

ProsperForms has an epic free 1:1 meeting template you can use. It’ll help you plan, outline, and execute your meeting. The template covers:

• Personal notes: any personal details that might be addressed/covered.
• Team member notes: insight and update from the employee.
• Manager notes: feedback and information from the manager.
• Future notes: outlook towards future meetings, goals, and plans.

This is an easy, simplified template for one-on-one meetings that’ll provide structure and consistency. Using it will help you keep inline with your agenda for sure.

2. One-on-One Meeting Template - Peoplegoal

Peoplegoal offers an awesome one-on-one meeting template for free. It’ll help you put together the most effective one-on-one meeting possible. The template includes:

• Individual Updates: review of feedback, and timeline for follow-up.
• Team Updates: recent and future projects and organizational updates.
• Metrics: how is performance relative to metrics?
• Personal Goals: what are their personal goals? How close are they to achieving them?
• Comments/Feedback: any necessary final comments.

It’s a great template because it covers pretty much everything you need for 1:1s. It adapts to whatever you need it to be.

3. General One-on-One Template - Hugo

Hugo is another option for a free one-on-one meeting template. This is a simple template, designed for 30 minute 1:1s, which is the standard length they usually go for. The template covers:

• Check-In: any new personal updates?
• Roadblocks + Concerns: any issues relating to projects, workflows, and tasks.
• Recognize Wins: successes in the recent time period.
• Updates on Objectives: how are current projects, workflows, and tasks going?
• Action Items: what specific actions must be taken to reach set goals?
• Revisit Later: any items on the agenda that should be discussed in the next 1:1?
• Feedback: any and all potential feedback.
• Follow-Up: when will the next one-on-one meeting be?

Hugo’s free template is fantastic because it’s extremely extensive compared to others out there. It covers just about anything and everything you can think of regarding 1:1 meetings.

Conclusion

This article covered everything you need to know about one-on-one meetings.

One-on-one meetings are an effective way to individually engage, motivate, and retain your employees. By treating each worker as a unique person, you empower them. Make sure you implement the information in this article today, so you’re 1:1’s can go to the next level.

Got a question? Ask away. We love to hear from our readers.

Are your employees becoming disengaged?

Disengaged employees are a significant problem for businesses looking to remain productive and profitable. They not only produce poor work themselves, but drag the whole team down with them. They are simply a problem that needs to be considered, to be dealt with.

If you’re reading this now, then you’re probably looking for solutions. In this article we’ll cover everything you need to know, including:

• Why employees become disengaged
• How much it’s costing you
• How to identify them
• How to re-engage them

So, if you want to improve your bottom line through increased employee productivity, keep reading.

Why Do Employees Become Disengaged?

There are a variety of reasons why employees might become disengaged. Some of them include:

• Bad Management: Lack of communication, feedback and recognition.
• Stagnant Career Growth: Employees feel they’re not given opportunities to climb the ladder.
• Poor Salary: Employees less motivated to do the work required when they’re not getting paid what they feel is fair.
• Bad Leadership: Lacking transparency, leading to poor communication.
• Large Workload: Employees overworked, leading to stress and work-life disruption.
• No Recognition: Employees not being recognized for their efforts and contributions
• Insufficient Training: Employer does not provide the adequate education employees need to adequately perform their jobs.

What's the Cost of Disengaged Employees?

According to a study from Gallup, the cost of a disengaged employee is 34% of their salary. This means, for every $10,000 they earn, their employer misses out on $3,400. It gets scarier when you realize that only 21% of employees are highly engaged at work.

When extrapolated to the entire US economy, disengaged employees cost around $350 billion annually.

This is not surprising when you consider that disengaged employees have:

• 37% greater absenteeism rate
• 18% less productivity
• 15% less profitability

It’s also important to note that as employee disengagement increases, so too does staff turnover. This inevitably leads to more onboarding and training expenses for employers.

Engaged vs Disengaged Employees - How to Identify Disengaged Employees?

How exactly do you identify disengaged employees?

There are many “tells” that cue you in to whether an employee is engaged or not. Disengaged employees behave in specific ways that are detrimental to your organizational success.

Here’s a list of behaviors that you should look for:

• Always Late
• Frequently Absent
• Low Quality Work
• Stagnancy
• Complaining
• Changes Jobs Frequently
• Always Causing Problems

Always Late

Employees that aren’t engaged tend to always be running late. They are late getting to work in the morning, and take too long during toilet and lunch breaks.

Being late on rare occasions doesn’t necessarily indicate disengagement, but if it becomes a habit, there’s probably something there.

Frequently Absent

Disengaged employees not only get to work later, they also take more days off.

Every employee has allocated to them, a certain number of sick days per year, which is their right to use. Employees that are disengaged tend to use more of these days, and be strategic with them. For example, they might take days off during deadlines.

Low Quality Work

The quality of an employee’s work is a good indicator of whether they’re engaged or not. Disengaged employees will fail to meet deadlines, or they’ll simply rush the job, comprising quality.

Stagnancy

Employees that are actively engaged look to continually improve themselves. They seize opportunities available to them, in order to further their career. On the other hand, disengaged employees are complacent — they are content with where they are.

Complaining

If an employee tends to complain a lot, there’s a good chance that they’re disengaged. Now, they might not necessarily complain about their job, but they might take issue with other work related issues.

Their complaints might actually be valid, but if they’ve made a habit of it, they might be projecting. They could perhaps be telling you secretly that they’re unhappy with their employment.

Changes Jobs Frequently

An employee that doesn’t stay in one place for long is clearly one that lacks engagement. Taking a look at an individual’s work experience on their resume will be very telling. They might already have one foot out the door, and you don’t even know about it.

Always Causing Problems

Employees tend to express their disengagement as frustration and aggression. If an individual continually butts heads with management or other workers, they might be secretly telling you they’re unhappy.

Engaging and Motivating Disengaged Employees: 7+ Ways On How to Deal With Disengaged Employees

Below, you’ll find 7+ ways to re-engage your disengaged employees, complete with real-life examples successful companies actually use.

1. Provide a Wellness Allowance

The health, fitness, and wellness of your employees is crucial to how engaged they are at work. If these things are compromised, it could lead to poor performance, negatively affecting your business. This is why many organizations opt to support the wellness of its workers.

A wellness allowance is a financial reimbursement that employers provide their employees with. It’s part of a larger organizational policy, designed to encourage positive health behavior and outcomes. It’s definitely an effective strategy to re-engage distant employees.

The allowance will typically cover costs such as:

• Gym memberships
• Fitness equipment
• Personal training lessons
• Recreational sporting leagues
• Races/events
• Retreats
• Clinics

Some wellness allowances will extend to dietary and stress issues, but it depends on the specifics of the organization. Most will simply cover exercise expenses, such as the list above.

A great real-life example is Facebook — every year they allow employees to write off up to $720 in wellness expenses. All employees are eligible, including part timers and interns who work at least 20 hours per week. All they have to do is provide receipts for eligible expenses.

You can get started implementing a wellness by conducting some research — a poll or survey perhaps. Find out how many employees exercise, and what are the associated expenses. Ask them whether they’d appreciate financial support.

2. Offer a Flexible Work Program

The hours that a job requires can be a major sticking point for many employees. Many businesses keep their workforce engaged by offering a flexible work program. Known as a “flexible work arrangement,” employees have freedom to work when they want.

The concept focuses on improving the work-life balance, improving stress and increasing employee engagement and satisfaction.

Dell is a great real-life example of a company implementing a flexible work program to its workers. Employees are allowed to choose a varied work schedule, and can choose to work where they want. If they want to, they can work in the office, at home, or even on holiday overseas.

To get started, find out whether or not your business can be run with a flexible work program. Can employees work remotely? Do they have to be in office? These are questions you must answer.

3. Support and Further Their Education

As businesses try to keep up with evolving technology, employees continually require new skill sets. If they don’t have the educational resources to learn these things, their job can get hard. This not surprisingly generally leads to a lack of motivation and engagement.

To keep employees motivated and engaged, many organizations will support and further education and learning. They’ll provide a variety of different resources and tools, such as:

• Tuition reimbursement
• Developmental courses
• Speaking events
• An on-site library

Microsoft is an organization that offers all of the above. For tuition reimbursement, employees are assisted to the amount of $10,000 per year. The caveat is that the course has to be from an accredited college/university. It also must be related to their employment at Microsoft.

To get started, uncover what skills are required of your workers, and find out what courses are related. Then ask them whether or not going back to college/university could help them perform their job.

4. Provide Commuting Financial Support

The journey to and from work can often be a problem for many employees, leading to disengagement. To counter this, many organizations offer commuting financial support, to ease the burden.

There are a variety of different ways businesses provide commuting support to employees. Most will take advantage of tax incentives — the ability to write off public transportation costs. Others will even go as far as offering a fuel card.

IBM offers its workforce the “Commuter Benefits Program,” which helps employees to and from work. Every employee is allowed $270 per month for transit, and another $270 per month for parking. Not all forms of transit and parking are eligible — it’s generally just public transportation and bicycling.

If you’re interested in a commuter benefits/support scheme for your employees, you should do some research. Find out how your workers get to work, and how much it costs. Also ask them if the commute to work has a positive or negative effect on them.

5. Pay Them to Volunteer

Many employees feel as if they’re simply not making a difference, only acting as a cog in a corporate machine. This feeling of purposelessness can inevitably lead to disengagement from the organization. This is why many employers offer opportunities to give back.

Volunteer time off is an employee incentive many businesses use to help workers feel good about their job. It works similar to normal paid leave, except it’s specifically for volunteering. It’s not the same though — it’s added on top of the leave employees are legally entitled to.

Salesforce is well known for its volunteer time off (VTO) benefit. In fact, the first day working at the company involves going to volunteer. Every employee gets 7 paid days to go volunteer with a charity or activity of their choice.

If this strategy interests your organization, you should research more about the topic. You’ll find that volunteer time off policies vary from company to company. Some — like Salesforce — offer as much as a whole week, where others only 8 hours.

6. Provide Free Meals

Cost of food and beverages can often be an issue for employees. Preparing healthy, affordable meals is simply not feasible for all, which leaves local alternatives, which can be limited — and expensive. Many organizations see this as an opportunity to boost their benefits package.

Providing free meals to employees is a somewhat new trend that started among the Silicon Valley software companies. Each individual typically gets a breakfast, lunch, and afternoon meal.

The idea behind the strategy is that it’s convenient, saves money, and keeps employees in-house, on campus together. It’s been suggested it has improved cohesiveness because everyone socializes together.

LinkedIn is one example of an organization that believes and practices in providing free meals. They provide free breakfast, lunches and snacks from the on-site cafeteria.

If this sounds like something that’d be ideal for your company, you can start by researching your employee’s food situation. What do they eat? How much does it cost? Do they have to travel during lunch breaks? Is it an inconvenience?

Answering these questions should give you a solid idea regarding whether or not providing free meals is ideal.

7. Help Support Fertility

Things in one’s personal life can absolutely influence and affect their professional career. This is why many organizations provide benefits packages that aim to improve the work-life balance. One such benefit that some offer is fertility support.

Fertility benefits aid employees looking to procreate with the services of an IVF clinic. It might also cover related prescription expenses.

Intel is one such company that provides fertility benefits. Every employee is allocated up to $40,000, plus another $20,000 for necessary prescription medication. The average IVF round costs about $20,000, so this is extremely generous, considering the benefit used to only be $10,000.

If this strategy is something your organization might be interested in, consider conducting a company survey. Discover if there are any employees considering IVF, or if it interests them.

Fertility is not a mandatory benefit like parental leave, so this is something you can really gift to employees.

Conclusion

In this article we covered everything you need to know about disengaged employees. We answered questions like:

• Why do employees become disengaged?
• How much do disengaged employees cost?
• How do you identify disengaged employees?
• How do you re-engage disengaged employees?

Employee disengagement is something not to be taken lightly — it costs businesses thousands every year. Consider implementing one of these 7 strategies to re-engage your distant workers. Doing so could improve positive business outcomes, such as productivity and profitability.

Got any questions? Leave a comment below.

In a world where people are more distracted than ever, employee engagement has never been more important for businesses. The absolute best way to address it, is to create what’s known as an employee engagement strategy.

Interested in building one, but not sure where to start? Don’t worry. Below, we’ll cover everything you need to know.

Enjoy!

What Is an Employee Engagement Strategy (and Why Should You Work On It)?

An employee engagement strategy is a strategic, well-thought out plan for how you engage your employees. It’s how you keep them motivated to do their jobs, and help your business achieve its goals.

More specifically, it involves implementing policies, methods and strategies that improve employee physical, emotional and cognitive wellbeing.

Those three aspects will also be measured, in both qualitative, as well as quantitative ways. Ensuring the employee engagement strategy is data-driven is essential.

Why Should You Work on An Employee Engagement Strategy?

There are a variety of reasons why you should work on developing an employee engagement strategy. Some of these include:

• Employee Morale: An employee’s morale will improve when you provide support for them physically, emotionally, as well as cognitively.
• Employee Productivity: When your workers are sufficiently engaged, they’ll be much more productive.
• Customer Satisfaction: Your customers will be more satisfied when your business provides a better product and service.
• Staff Churn Rate: If an employee likes their job, they’ll be less likely to look for other opportunities.
• Company Revenue: When you factor in better employee productivity, motivation, as well as less turnover, your business will make more money.

Employee engagement is crucial to the success of your business, which is why you absolutely need to prioritize it. With an effective strategy, you can maximize the effectiveness of your workforce, and increase your bottom line.

Here's How to Build a Solid Employee Engagement Strategy (+ Plan)

Building an employee engagement strategy is not complicated. You just need to adequately plan.

The 5 Key Components Your Employee Engagement Strategy Needs

For an employee engagement strategy to be effective, it needs 5 key components:

• Effective Communication: How do you communicate your engagement strategy to employees, leadership, and stakeholders?
• Identification of Action Areas: Determine where to focus your resources, to ensure maximum effectiveness of your engagement strategy.
• Identification of Measurable Outcomes: Specifically identify the metrics you are targeting, that’ll determine the success of your engagement strategy
• An Action Plan: A plan that covers your engagement goals, identifies drivers of engagement, and involves management.
• A Long Term Outlook: How will your efforts to increase employee engagement be sustained over time?

With this knowledge out of the way, you can now begin planning your employee engagement strategy.

Steps to Create an Employee Engagement Strategy

Step 1: Identify Relevant Employee Subgroups

The first step towards creating your employee engagement strategy is to know exactly who you’re targeting. It’s simply too hard to try to target all of your workforce at once. Doing so will stretch your resources too thin.

You’ll want to identify underperforming, unengaged employee subgroups, like your sales, or marketing team.

You should also find out which subgroups are performing well. You can use these as examples for inspiration and guidance.

Step 2: Uncover the Drivers of Employee Engagement

Now that you know who you’re targeting, you’ll need to uncover the specific “drivers” of their employee engagement. You see, not every employee subgroup is engaged with the same methods or strategies. Engagement is not universal at all.

What’s important to one group, is different to another.

The onus is on you to discover what the drivers are for your employee subgroup. Here are some examples of typical employee engagement drivers:

• Autonomy
• Feedback
• Professional Development
• Purpose
• Rest
• Relationship With Managers
• Goal Support

When you’ve identified the correct drivers of engagement, then you can select appropriate strategies.

For instance, if rest is one of your drivers, you can look into providing strategies that emphasize work-life balance.

Step 3: Create an Action Plan

You’ve now got an idea of who you’re targeting, as well as how to target them. Now it’s time to create an “action plan”.

An action plan addresses what your specific goals are regarding your employee engagement strategy. These goals will be explicitly related to both your employee target subgroups, as well as their specific drivers of engagement.

It’ll use the SMART goal setting framework to create these goals. This stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-oriented

The action plan also covers the roles and duties of the managers, who oversee the workers.

Step 4: Avoid Common Pitfalls

When it comes to creating your engagement strategy, there are a few common pitfalls you’ll want to avoid.

• Avoid calling engagement an “initiative”

Initiative is a buzzword in business and management that suggests fickle nature. “Oh, this is just another one of those initiatives. It won’t last a month.”

Instead, consider it an integral part of your culture moving forward. Think of it as a function of your business, much like sales, marketing, and HR.

• Avoid focusing on too many things/groups

Oftentimes, businesses overestimate what they can do. You only have so many resources, so you mustn't waste any. Ensure that you clearly outline the scope of your engagement strategy.

• Avoid not analyzing and evaluating

Analyzing and evaluating your results is just as important as the engagement strategy itself. Don’t be one of those businesses that creates a plan, merely to look impressive. Actually look to get measurable improvements with regards to employee engagement.

Great Employee Engagement Strategy Examples of Popular Tech Companies

Lots of large, successful tech companies have employee engagement strategies. Below, you’ll find 6 real-life examples, to help you gain perspective, and envision your own strategy.

1. Flexible Work Hours - Dell

Dell — one of the largest companies in the world — offers its employees work flexibility. The workers can choose variable hours, as well as the option to work from home, or remotely.

The company justified the flexibility by suggesting that employees do their best work, regardless of when or where.. As long as they get the job done. It empowers the workers, and supercharges engagement.

Because more employees opt to work from home, Dell has saved over $12 million. So, it’s not only a win for employee engagement, but can also lower your expenses.

Helping employees balance life and work is huge for increasing engagement. If you’re not providing flexible working hours, then maybe you should be — it’s a great strategy.

2. Health and Wellness Program - Facebook

Facebook keeps its employees engaged by offering a first class health and wellness program. It covers a variety of issues like:

• Autism coverage
• Cancer care program
• Dental plan
• Healthcare flexible spending account
• Fertility coverage
• Maternity benefits/paid leave
• Medical coverage
• Mental health coverage
• Transgender coverage
• Eyesight coverage
• Wellness reimbursement (gym/fitness/sporting leagues)

Health and wellness is so important for employee engagement, as it comprises a physical, and mental component. When you take care of your employees, they’ll work harder for you. This has to be one of the top engagement strategies out there.

3. Paid Volunteering - Apple

At Apple, one unique engagement strategy they use is to offer “paid volunteering” to its employees. This is when the company pays its workers to go volunteer. This is a way to empower employees to give back to the community.

Apple will pay its employees $25 per hour for up to $10,000 a year. That amount can also be spent on donation matching.

Not only is volunteering a feel good activity, but it’s also something awesome to put on a resume. Not to mention it mixes things up and gets employees out of the office.

Absolutely an epic way to boost engagement.

4. Education Support - Microsoft

To boost its employees' engagement, Microsoft offers a variety of benefits that support, and further education. Specifically, this includes:

• Reimbursement: Microsoft will provide financial assistance for employees to go back to college. The course/degree has to relate to the business of Microsoft in some way. The institution (college/university) also has to be accredited.
• Internal Resources: There are a range of development courses that help employees strengthen their skillset.
• Speaker Series: Every so often, Microsoft will host various influential speakers.
• On-site Library: An on-site library is free and accessible to all Microsoft employees. There is a wealth of reading and educational materials, along with an actual reading room.

Employees are always looking to further their skillset — when you aid them in this task, they’ll love you for it. Definitely a strategy you’d might want to implement if you want to increase engagement.

5. Transportation Support - IBM

IBM employees have access to what’s known as a “commuter benefits program.” This program is basically financial support for transportation expenses to and from work. This includes public transportation, like busses and trains, as well as fuel for driving, and parking expenses.

The exact amount IBM workers get is $270 a month for transit, and another $270 a month for parking.

Helping your employees with their transportation to work is an effective strategy to boost engagement. The to and from journey to work is an added burden, and alleviating this stress is invaluable.

6. Unlimited Time Off - HubSpot

If you really want to get your employees super engaged, maybe you should copy HubSpot and offer unlimited time off.

Basically, there are no restrictions to how much time one can take for themselves. For some, this simply just helps their working week become more flexible. For others, it makes planning a holiday easy.

Obviously it needs to be stated that it kind of works like an honor system. If you take a lot of time off, without doing a whole lot of work, you probably won’t last there. But if you do the work, you can stay at home, or even go on holiday.

The strategy works because it rewards employees based upon performance. Or in other words, it rewards employees for actually working, and not sitting in the office, killing time.

When you provide flexibility like this to an employee, they’ll work like a machine for you. Engagement will be through the roof.

7 Actionable Employee Engagement Strategy Ideas (and How to Implement Them)

Not sure where to start with regards to your employee engagement strategy? Don’t worry — here are 7 actionable ideas you can implement today.

1. Give Your Employees a Voice

One of the easiest and most effective ways to increase employee engagement is to give them a voice. Granting your workers the platform to give feedback is really important.

Many businesses do get employee feedback, but most only do it once a year via survey. This is wholly inadequate, as your workforce needs to be heard regularly. In fact, businesses who frequently get employee feedback have a 14.9% lower churn/turnover rate.

How to Implement

Try to get feedback from your employees frequently — you can conduct surveys every 2 weeks. You could also implement an anonymous ethics hotline as well.

2. Prioritize Employee Wellness

Many businesses have embraced the concept of wellness, putting emphasis on employee health. They do this because it’s been shown that the majority of engaged employees believe their work improves their physical health.

As an organization, this is definitely something you can look into to improve employee engagement.

How to Implement

There are a number of ways that you can prioritize employee wellness. Here are some good examples:

• Gym/fitness allowances
• Free healthy onsite food options
• Free checkups
• Sporting league allowances

3. Support Employee Education and Training

As technology evolves, so too does businesses and the requirements of its employees. Keeping them up to date and educated is very important. That’s why many businesses support their employees furthering their education and training.

How to Implement

Many businesses offer a tuition reimbursement — you can look into that. You can also provide a robust onboarding process, to ensure employees have a complete skill set for the job. Even paying for conferences and workshops can help.

4. Give Employees Work Flexibility

If one thing the COVID-19 pandemic has shown businesses, it’s that working from home is a viable option. Many businesses are now providing its workers with flexibility — allowing them to choose to work wherever they want.

How to Implement

If your business is largely online, you can look to offer a “work from home” option to employees. You can use a team collaboration/communication software like Slack to keep them up to date.

5. Recognize Your Employees

Recognizing with positive feedback is one of the best ways to boost employee engagement. Lots of organizations utilize a variety of strategies and methods to let their workers know they’re doing a good job.

As a business, this is something you should definitely consider if you want to increase employee engagement.

How to Implement

Offer your workers bonuses if they exceed expectations. Provide an employee of the month award for top performing workers. Host an event to recognize and reward your entire workforce. Surprise them with a day off for their good work.

6. Host Internal Events

If you’re looking to boost engagement amongst your employees, hosting an onsite, internal event might be a good idea. It’s a way for all your workforce to get to know each other, and bond together.

Many organizations do host events because it’s an effective way to stimulate employees mentally, physically and cognitively.

How to Implement

There are many types of inhouse events you could host — here are some ideas:

• Breakfast/lunch for the whole team
• Office contests
• Scavenger hunts
• A ping pong tournament

7. Prioritize Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity and inclusion shouldn’t just relate to hiring quotes — your entire organizational culture should be about it. When employees have others like them, it makes them feel more welcome and comfortable. When your workers feel like one of the family, it does wonders for engagement.

How to Implement

Try to hire those from various different backgrounds, like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or religion. Also look to give all your employees, regardless of who they are, a voice. Let them have input and a say. Celebrate the different holidays and traditions of all various groups.

Conclusion

In this article we covered everything you need to know to build a solid employee engagement strategy.

Employee engagement has been shown to improve organizational outcomes, like revenue, or staff turnover. That’s why it makes sense to create a strategy to ensure your workforce is stimulated physically, mentally, and cognitively.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below!

Looking for employee incentive ideas?

As a business, you need to stay competitive and offer the absolute best benefits package. It’s how you attract, as well as retain high quality talent.

A benefits package will be made up of various different incentives you can offer your employees. Knowing which ones are worth their weight, is valuable knowledge.

What are the best ones to implement for your business? Keep reading below to find out!

15 Best Employee Incentive Ideas (Successful Companies Actually Use)

Below, you’ll find 15 of the best employee incentive ideas that successful companies actually use.

1. Employee Discounts - Apple

Apple — the biggest brand in the world — offers its workers extremely competitive employee discounts. If you work at the company, you can get 25% off one “hero” product each year. A hero product is either an iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iPod, or watch.

You also get $500 in stackable credit every 3 years, 25% off every other product, and 15% off refurbished products. There are also discounts for third party products — some promos can be as high as 65%.

How to get started

Figure out what level of discount you can afford to give your employees. Find out what products and services of yours they value the most. ALso uncover whether or not they’d like to get deals for family and friends.

2. Volunteer Time off - Salesforce

One of the more unique employee incentive ideas on this list is Saleforce’s “volunteer time off” scheme. It works by giving each individual worker seven full paid days every year to go volunteer. They can help in local schools, or even help build houses in third world countries.

In fact, an individual’s first day working for Salesforce will be to volunteer somewhere. CEO Marc Benioff stresses it is a core part of the company culture. Judging by the fact they are the biggest SaaS company in the world, I’d say it’s working.

How to get started

As many other companies have now adopted a volunteer time off scheme, you can look for inspiration and guidance. Check to see what employee incentives you offer currently, and find out whether you can fit paid volunteering in there.

3. Parental Leave - Amazon

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, and it offers a progressive parental leave program to employees. Birth parents are offered up to four weeks pre-partum leave, as well as ten weeks postpartum. If you’re just a parent, you too can get time off — six weeks

They also offer a flexible “Ramp Back Program” which aims to ease employees back into rotation at work.

It’s free for all full-time employees — from the very top c suite level, down to the frontlines.

How to get started

Most companies these days do have some form of a paid leave program for pregnant women. You should try to make yours even more progressive, like Amazon has done. Try to extend it to both parents, and consider flexible options to ease back to work.

4. Wellness Allowance - Facebook

One of the cool things Facebook offers its employees something they call a “wellness reimbursement.” Basically, the company will help play for some health-related expenses, whether physical or mental. This might include gym membership fees, lessons, equipment, or even recreational sport leagues.

All workers will have to do is show receipts for eligible expenses, and they can write off up to $720 every year.

It’s eligible to all employees, even part-timers and interns that work at least 20 hours a week. The interns however, will get a lesser amount of reimbursement.

How to get started

It’s important to understand that a wellness reimbursement is not medical cover — it’s more health and lifestyle related. Try to find out how much you can afford to give to your employees each year. Take time to survey your workforce and find out how much their health expenses are.

5. Tuition Reimbursement - Microsoft

If you work at Microsoft you can actually get financial help from them if you want to continue your education. Employees are given $10,000 a year of assistance for expenses related to a course that relates to Microsoft. It also has to be at an educational institution that is accredited.

It’s available to all employees — many have taken advantage and gone back to college to bolster their resume.

How to get started

Find out what education courses/degrees relate to your business, and how much they cost. Ask your employees what degrees they have, and what they might want to go back to school for. Lastly, try to uncover how much money a year you can afford to support your workforce.

6. Commuter Benefits Program - IBM

As modern cities continue to become denser in population, alternative transportation methods have become essential. IBM recognizes this shift and offers its employees a “Commuter Benefits Program.” It basically allows them to write off expenses involved with getting to work.

Each employee is allowed up to $270 monthly for transit, as well as another $270 monthly for parking. So, it doesn’t matter whether you’re catching public transport, or driving in, IBM has you covered.

How to get started

As a business, you should be eligible for a commuter benefits program, thanks to WageWorks. They are a provider of employee benefits and reimbursements — IBM’s commuter program is run by them. If you’re a business that runs purely online, with no physical location, obviously this incentive idea isn’t for you.

7. Headspace Meditation App - Adobe

Adobe offers all its employees free membership to the Headspace meditation app. This is quite significant as it usually costs $69.99 a year to use.

The app includes hundreds of different guided meditations for sleep, stress, and a whole host of other things. There are also 40+ mindfulness exercises, and expert guidance from a former monk.

How to get started

Adobe is just one of many other large fortune 500 companies in partnership with Headspace. If this is something you’d feel would benefit your workforce, you can get in contact with them.

8. Fertility Benefits - Intel

If you’re trying to conceive a child, or are thinking about doing so in the future, Intel can help. They provide fertility benefits up to $40,000, plus an extra $20,000 for prescriptions, if needed.

The benefit used to only be $10,000, but Intel quadrupled it, as IVF can be expensive. In fact, a round (of IVF) costs $20,000 on average, and has a 20-30% success rate. If you’re looking to build a family, know that Intel has your back.

How to get started

Survey your employees and get a feel for the temperature regarding fertility benefits. Is it something they want? Are any of them currently going through IVF?

Only 31% of businesses with a 500+ workforce offer fertility benefits according to a 2018 survey. So it’s definitely something that can help you stand out and attract the best talent.

9. Free Food - LinkedIn

One major employee incentive LinkedIn is absolutely known for is its free food service. Inhouse, they will provide both breakfast and lunch to all employees. There are actual cafeterias on the premise, which caters will work from to provide the meals.

For breakfast, they’ll provide foods like yogurt, berries, different types of milk, fruits, granola, and breakfast burritos. Lunch will have a much more varied and diverse menu.

This is one employee incentive idea that will no doubt supercharge employee morale, and attract talent to your business.

How to get started

The cost of providing free food varies, depending on how big your business is. You’ll need to calculate these costs and see if offering free meals to your workforce is economically viable. You probably won’t need to ask them if they want it, as everyone loves free food.

10. Unlimited Vacation - HubSpot

Back in 2010, Hubspot co-founder and CEO Brian Halligan announced that the company had switched to an “unlimited vacation” policy. It’s now ten years later and they’ve yet to change it.

Unlimited vacation means that employees can decide when and how long they take off work. It can be used to make day-to-day issues more flexible, or for entire holiday trips overseas.

The policy works based on the idea that, as long as you get the work/job done, you can take time off. It also works because a lot of work can now be done online — employees can work fully remote.

How to get started

Get an idea of how much of your workflow and tasks can be done online, remotely. If most of your operation can run without needing to be in office, you should seriously think about implementing this.

11. Employee Share Discount - Accenture

Accenture offers its employees a discount on purchasing company shares — a 15% discount to be exact. This practice is what’s known as an Employee Share Scheme (ESS) and it’s used by lots of businesses today.

The idea of an ESS is that it lets employees own part of the company they help build. It’s an effective way to boost morale and accountability for a workforce. When the business succeeds, so do its employees who have stocks in it.

How to get started

When looking for help with setting up an Employee Share Scheme, there are many educational resources available on the internet. You should read these before you look to get a quote from an accountant or lawyer.

12. 24/7 Ethics Hotline - Cisco

Cisco offers a 24/7 “ethics hotline” which allows employees to report illegal and unethical behavior anonymously. The service is provided by a third-party organization and is a way to protect the individuals from fear of retaliation.

The service works by the anonymous individual communicating with an expert. This expert will then report the concern regarding illegal or unethical behavior. Then, they’ll contact the appropriate management at the company.

Ethics hotlines are growing in popularity because they are convenient, have a positive impact on company culture, and empower employees.

How to get started

Review your current ethics/complaint system and ask your employees if they’re interested in having access to an ethics hotline.

13. Financial Counseling - Intuit

Employees of the SaaS company Inuit are given financial counseling as an employee incentive. Every year, they’re given 30-60 minute consults over the phone about a specific issue. This consultation is with an expert financial coach who has the appropriate credentials.

Some of the issues employees can get counseling for include: taxes, budget management, college funding, debt reduction, bankruptcy, retirement planning, and wage garnishment.

How to get started

Ask your employees whether or not they have trouble with issues regarding their finances. Try the services of a financial coach to see for yourself how effective it could be.

14. Health Insurance - Samsung

Samsung offers its employees one of the best health insurance plans, covering things like dental, medical, and prescriptions. Offering coverage is one of the most powerful incentives you can offer employees.

It’s actually not mandatory to provide health insurance to employees, but it’s highly advised. Larger businesses will get fined by the IRS, but ones with less than 50 workers won’t. Even as a small business, it still can be valuable as an incentive to attract employers.

How to get started

Setting up an employee health insurance plan can be quite complex. You need to contact an insurance broker — these are individuals who specialize in the issue. They’ll be able to help crunch the numbers, and find out if you can afford the coverage.

15. 401k Matching - Oracle

Like most large companies today, Oracle offers its employees what’s known as “401k matching.” This is where the business — Oracle in this instance — will contribute to a worker’s 401k retirement account.

It’s beneficial for businesses because its matches of employee 401k accounts are tax deductible. It also eases the workload of the employer, putting the task of retirement investing on its employees.

Oracle matches 50% of an employee’s first 6% of contributions, which is about standard among most companies. Big brands will use its 401k matching policy as an incentive to attract the best talent. The more competitive the match, the better employees they can attract.

How to get started

Setting up a 401k plan for your employees can be quite technical. You should look to get in touch with a specialist. They will be able to help you understand how much it’ll cost you to set up.

Conclusion

In this article we just covered 15 of the best employee incentive ideas.

If you want to not only attract great employees, but keep them, you need an epic benefits package. One that offers a host of valuable employee incentives — things like 401k matching, and healthcare.

Failure to provide these incentives and you’re going to spend more time recruiting, than actually working.

Got any questions? Leave a comment below!

Employee development is a great way for your company to achieve its goals by focusing on your most valuable asset: your people.

With a proper development plan, you can empower employees and give them the tools they need to grow. You can make sure their skill set is up to date and increase productivity while decreasing turnover rates.

In this handbook, you’ll learn what it is, how it’s used, and how you can create your own employee development plan today.

Let’s get started.

What Is Employee Development In Detail (and What Are Goals)?

Employee development is an effort between the employee and the company to help the employee gain new skills and improve on their existing ones. This often results in a better ability from the employee to do their job, as well as gaining new skills to allow internal growth.

Constant learning and retraining are extremely important in the world we live in today. If your employees remain stagnant in their education, you could be losing your company’s ability to remain competitive in the market.

When done right, employee development is a great investment in your staff.

It can help your employees find new ways to improve your company and renew their passion for their jobs. You, in exchange, gain better retention, productivity and engagement from them.

What Types Of Employee Development Programs Exist?

These five employee development programs are the ones most commonly used among companies of all sizes:

1. Orientation

Orientation is the first and most common form of employee development. In orientation, you welcome the new hires to let them know what’s expected from them and how they should achieve it.

This can include topics like:

• Company’s culture and structure
• Mission, vision and values
• Important company policies
• Tour around the company
• Receiving and filing mandatory paperwork
• Basic administrative procedures

How to get started:

Orientation’s goal is to get your new employees comfortable and ready to work. Make sure to tell them what to bring and give them a general idea of what to expect.

When developing your orientation program, have printed information on the most important things, like your company’s principles and accesses. It’s always a great idea to give your newcomers branded gifts, like coffee cups or tees, to get them excited to start working at your company.

Make sure your orientation is short and fully prepares your new hires for their first day at work.

2. Mentoring and coaching

Mentoring is when an employee, typically with more experience, is in charge of another employee to help them develop a skill. Coaching, instead, can be performed by employees or trained professionals.

Their objective is the same: to help an employee learn something one-on-one. They’re very effective since the trainee receives personalized training and can ask questions that they may not feel comfortable asking at a classroom. It’s also great at fostering strong relationships and collaboration at the workplace.

How to get started:

Whether you want to start with a coaching or a mentoring program, you should start small. Find which group of employees needs a specific skill. Then find the best people, whether inside or outside of the company or not, to teach that skill.

Once your program is set in motion, evaluate how long it takes to teach that skill and how cost-effective it is compared to a regular classroom.

3. Technical (hard) skills development

This type of training focuses on improving the skills that directly impact your employees’ ability to do their job. This is a great way of making sure your employees are up to date with their knowledge and to make sure their processes are effective and productive.

How to get started:

First, identify the learning areas of opportunity of your employees. These can be coding and online security for your IT department, SEO and content writing for your marketing department, and even basic computer skills for your less tech-savvy employees.

You can then hire experts on the field to train your employees on the skills they need to have. Adjust your frequency and variety based on your employees’ needs and turnover rates to make sure all of your employees are properly trained.

4. Mandatory training

Your employees will most likely need to follow certain government regulations. Depending on your industry, these can go from following simple procedures, like taking the trash through the back door, to more complex certifications, like the ones needed to operate heavy machinery.

Mandatory training can also be used to educate all employees on sexual harassment and discrimination.

All types of mandatory training can prevent employee issues and costly lawsuits while training your employees on the most important aspects of their jobs.

How to get started:

Usually, mandatory training is provided by the governments themselves. However, you need to make sure your company is in full compliance with government regulations.

Get legal help and ensure all of your employees go through their mandatory training at the right frequency.

5. Soft skills development

Unlike technical skills, soft skills are general skills that can be applied to all employees. Some of these skills are:

• Leadership
• Self-motivation
• Responsibility
• Teamwork
• Problem-solving
• Conflict resolution
  

These soft skills are incredibly valuable and can make a difference regardless of your industry and your employees’ job.

Soft skill training is also a great opportunity for employees from multiple departments to interact and build relationships to ensure future collaboration.

How to get started:

Soft skills can be hard to teach effectively. That’s why, once you decide on the skills you want your employees to learn, you need to decide if you should do it in-house or in an environment better suited for this type of training.

Look for experts in the field with psychology and human behaviour degrees, and take a close look at the program to make sure it fits your needs and your company’s culture.

Employee Development Ideas & Best Practices: How to Master It?

There are multiple ways to help your employees develop and grow in your company. Here are some of the best practices and how to apply them today:

1. Foster a learning culture

Your company culture needs to foster a learning and self-improvement desire. This desire will help your employees to acknowledge their learning gaps and motivate them to find ways to fulfill them.

Implement it today:

Start with building performance reviews around learning goals. Have managers meet with employees individually to find out what they need to learn and to keep up with their learning process. Make sure your employees have the tools they need and an appropriate time frame to acquire a new skill.

You can then implement internal training programs across different departments to help your employees learn from each other.

Keep employee feedback channels open to find out how to improve your training sessions and monitor their success.

2. Transform managers into coaches

Managers are constantly told to be good leaders, but, more often than not, they aren’t given specifics on how to become one. A manager with great coaching skills will help your employees grow and can increase their productivity and engagement.

Implement it today:

Since your managers need teaching skills, you can start with a development program for managers. This program should include all the soft skills a coach must have, like teaching, motivational and inspirational skills.

Hire managers based on their capacity to help other people as well as their performance and give them chances to interact with the employees they manage. They should be aware of all the employee development programs you have available and recommend them to the right employees.

3. Give your employees a career path

A good employee doesn’t work just for the day, it works towards a career. They want to improve and grow within your company. This hunger for growth can be incredibly beneficial for your company. On the other hand, if you don’t offer them a clear path for growth, they’ll quickly move to a company that does.

Implement it today:

Start outlining clear career paths that start from entry jobs and go all the way up to upper management. Give your employees good training that gives them the skills to keep growing.

However, all the training and career paths in the world won’t work if your company doesn’t follow through. That’s why you need to make sure to look for talent inside the company first, before getting it from outside. If management positions are about to open up, open up management training to let your employees fulfill them.

If you find your company isn’t hiring enough from within, invest in better employee development training and improve on the programs you already have.

4. Show your company’s commitment to its employees

Employee development plays a large part in employee engagement when it’s done right. If employees are continuously trained and helped to develop, fewer employees will want to leave your company. Nonetheless, when done wrong, your employees may feel like your company is asking too much from them.

Implement it today:

Make sure your employees have access to the options for employee development and that you communicate how much you value their personal growth.

This can be done by having fun training sessions, treating training as a reward for great performance, and offering clear advantages to taking it, like better positions and special recognitions.

Ensure to encourage growth among your employees and show them what they can get out of it. That way you’ll make sure to train the best talent.

How to Create an Employee Development Plan (Step by Step)

Creating your employee development plan doesn’t have to be hard. Here’s a step by step guide:

Step 1: Consider business goals

Before drafting your employee development plan, you need to consider your current short and long-term goals. Where is your company heading? Are you looking to expand and hire new people? Do you need more sales?

Once you’ve identified your goals, you can identify the skills and knowledge needed to fulfill them.

Taking time to consider your business goals will ensure that your development plan is beneficial to your employers and helps your company go where it’s heading.

Step 2: Communicate with your employees

The best source you can get to know your employees’ needs and aspirations is your employees themselves.

Establish a clear line of communication to get to know the current challenges they’re facing, where they’d like to go and what skills they’re lacking. Find out what career path they have in mind and the obstacles they’re facing.

By talking to your employees, you’ll be able to create the perfect development plan for them.

Step 3: Define the skills your employees need to develop

Once you’ve narrowed down your company’s and employee’s goals, it’s time to factor in your employees’ potential and willingness to develop. Compare profiles and figure out which needs are the most pressing and how many employees would you expect to take the courses.

Now that you have a good idea of the profile of employees that’ll participate, you can start defining the skills they’ll need for both them and your business to succeed.

Step 4: Create a plan for before, during and after

Now that you have a list of skills and the type of employees that’ll develop them, find out the best way for your employees to acquire those skills. Can you work with a current employee to teach the rest? Will you need to hire someone else? How long will this process take?

Define what success looks like and create a plan with specific time limits and goals to fulfill specific learning opportunities.

Once you have the plan, it’s time to put it into action. Set the grounds by defining when and how the courses are going to be developed. Prepare any physical material to evaluate their learnings and look into schedules to make sure the development process won’t impact productivity.

Once the training starts, make sure your employees understand what they’ll be learning and what they can get out of it. Then, after the training is completed, monitor how they’re applying their new skills.

Take time to evaluate the effectiveness of each training session. Document the process, the challenges and the results.

Step 5: Measure the results

Now that your employees are back at work and you have your data on the results, it’s time to measure how their new skills are helping your employees. Keep up with them and ask them how they’re using their new skills. Do they feel better prepared? Are the skills useful? Which parts are they not using?

Good employee development helps your staff feel appreciated and invested in the company. Make any changes you need to ensure their new skills are useful and their commitment to the company is renewed.

Looking for an employee development plan template? These 3 templates will help you out

To get the most out of your employee development plan, you need to document every step of the way. These three templates can easily adapt to your needs:

1. Online employee template, by Process.st

If you’re looking for an online option, Process.st has the best option. Once you create an account, you can easily edit it to your needs.

This template helps you at every step of the way by giving you areas to identify goals and monitor the development process. All you need to do is to decide which areas you’ll be using and filling those up. Then you can save it for future references!

Check it out here.

2. Individual development plan, by the University of California Berkeley

Individual plans are great to file under your employee’s name and keep track of their development. This individual development plan helps you and your employee draft their career path on a short, mid and long-term basis, listing the skills they need to develop to get to where they want to go.

Download it here.

3. Employee Development Plan + ebook, by Talent Leader

Talent leader offers you a great ebook that goes in depth into how to create goals and define skills for your employees’ development. When signing up to their newsfeed, you’ll get the ebook and the employee development template, for free!

Sign up here.

Conclusion

Employee development can be one of your most valuable tools. By investing in your people you can give them the chance to raise upon the ranks and get the best managers for the job. With a good employee development program, your employees will feel cared for and your company can ensure to have the best talent available for the job.

Remember: a happy employee is a productive employee. And, when you let them develop with proper training and coaching, you’ll both yield the results.

Effective employee relations help you in multiple ways. They promote productivity and collaboration, reduce turnover rates, and establish great channels of communication. They are a great way of making sure you’re taking care of your employees.

But, where do you start? Who can you learn from?

What Is Employee Relations (and Why Should I Care)?

In simple terms, employee relations are an organization’s effort to have and maintain positive relationships with its employees. This is typically managed by the company’s HR department, which helps create some of these positive relationships by handling conflict resolution and developing employee engagement.

Employee relations is an extremely important aspect of employee management.

Why?

Because happy employees are productive employees!

Good employee relations increase productivity, engagement, and loyalty in the workforce, reducing turnover by giving employees a better work-life balance, a healthy environment and better growth possibilities.

That’s why multiple companies have a dedicated employee relations manager. This manager acts as the intermediary between employees and managers to promote a healthy relationship between them. That way, this manager can be in touch with the employees’ needs, helping create and enforce new policies and programs to benefit them.

These can be better schedules, more complete training, employee benefits and fair compensation to name a few.

Employee Relations Issues: 8 Examples and How to Cope With Them

These are the ten most common employee relations issues and how to fix them with good employee relations practices:

1. Low wages

It’s very common for employers to struggle to pay top wages. After all, the main purpose of a company is to generate as much revenue as possible.

However, low wages can have terrible effects on employees, and, without a clear way of making more money, employees can feel stressed and morale can drop. This can be aggravated when it becomes unclear why some employees get a raise and some don’t.

Solution: Clear pay raises structure

To establish good employee relations, a company must have a very clear structure of how and when an employee can get a pay raise. To achieve this, every company needs to identify and reward the most important aspects of an employee’s job, have a clear timeline of when the employee can ask for a pay raise and what’s needed from the employee to get it.

That way, an employee has a clear career path and is in a level playing field with the rest of the workforce.

2. Attendance and punctuality issues

If your employees have a fixed schedule, you may encounter issues with attendance and punctuality. Sometimes, an emergency, an accident or their own personal lives may ruin their perfect attendance, and that’s understandable.

The issue, however, comes when their lack of attendance and punctuality becomes a regular occurrence. They may arrive late simply because they can ask someone to punch in for them or because they know there’ll be no real consequences. This, in turn, affects your company’s productivity and reliability.

Solution: Clear policies and communication

These types of common issues can be resolved with a good communication relationship with your employees. They should be able to contact the business in case of any impending attendance issues to quickly reach a resolution. In turn, you should also have clear attendance and tardiness policies in place for them to follow.

3. Conflicts between employees

When working with multiple people, conflict is bound to happen. People will have different points of view and frictions will be caused by them. The way you handle these conflicts will be key for your employees’ satisfaction and your company’s success.

Solution: Clear management processes

Since you know conflict is inevitable, you should be prepared for it. Don’t wait for conflict to shed light on an issue. Instead, avoid conflict by having clear guidelines in your employee’s handbook.

Once conflict arises, have a neutral party mediate between the employees and reach for a solution that’s based on your guidelines and your company’s values.

Finally, write it up. Every conflict’s reason should be analyzed to find out ways to prevent it from happening again.

4. High turnover

Keeping employees is cheaper than hiring new ones. In a company with high turnover rates there are losses of productivity accompanied and higher training costs.

Although it’s not always easy to find out why employees leave, The effort is definitely worth it and can tremendously impact a company’s costs.

Solution: Engagement strategies

Although HR is usually responsible for hiring talent, the people relationship manager is responsible for keeping them. This can be achieved through the development of engagement techniques, like the creation of a good company culture, great incentives and competitive benefits.

To improve these strategies, an exit interview must always be conducted upon the resignation of an employee to find out the reasons they have to resign and what could’ve changed it.

5. Non-Compliance behavior

You may have people who engage in passive-aggressive behavior or outright avoid doing their job directly. There can be several reasons why this can happen, from bad employee relations to simple laziness. Dealing with these actions can pose a serious challenge for the company and establishes a precedent with the rest of the employees, so it’s important to get it right the first time.

Solution: Clear rules and consequences

Part of establishing good employee relations is determining how your company would act towards employees in hard situations. That’s why it’s very important to have a clear and handy employee relations policy for these situations, where it determines which steps the company would take against a non-complying employee.

It should promote safety and collaboration between employees as well as a guideline on how to act against non-compliers.

How much tolerance will your company have against them? Which are the steps towards escalating the issue? When would you involve a guard? The answers to these questions must be clearly known within your staff and your HR department.

6. Health & Safety

Health and safety issues can easily arise without detailed guidelines and rules, especially if your company works with dangerous products or machinery. These types of issues can lead to very expensive lawsuits if the company is found to not be in compliance with government regulations or is at fault in any other way.

Solution: Enforceable health and safety policies

The first thing you need to make sure of is your company’s compliance with OSHA or any other relevant government regulations. Make sure that these regulations are enforced by the staff and encourage them to report any case of noncompliance.

If a health and safety incident takes place, make sure detailed documentation of the fact is taken, preferably by using visual evidence and witnesses of what happened.

Finally, make sure to have regular safety training and monitor compliance among your staff.

7. Lack of productivity

Lack of productivity can be caused by a number of reasons, from lack of proper tools to simple unawareness. This can be quite costly for your company and can compromise your product or service reliability.

Solution: Identification, motivation and training

The first thing you need to do is to identify the source of the lack of productivity. Is it coming from a person or a department? Is it a general lack of productivity from the whole staff? You need to make sure that the cause of productivity is originated from the staff and not from any external factors.

Once you identify the reasons, your Employee Relations Manager can rectify them. This can go from simple motivation techniques to proper training or problem resolution. With a proper study of the matter, you can quickly identify and rectify any issue by keeping your staff engaged and productive.

8. Discrimination

Unfortunately, discrimination is still a common employee relation issue. If it goes unresolved, not only can it result in costly lawsuits but on a loss of good public faith for your brand.

Solution: Employee inclusion

Your company should not tolerate any sort of discrimination towards another employee. This goes from obvious shunning to simple jokes, even if they aren’t directed towards anyone in particular. Create a clear inclusion policy, listen to any discrimination complaints and promote an environment where people are evaluated exclusively by their job performance.

It’s often better to remove an employee that refuses to comply with these inclusion policies than to tolerate their behavior, regardless of their rank or job performance.

7 Employee Relations Best Practices Used By Popular Companies

These 7 companies are famous for their employee relations. Here are the reasons why and how you can apply them to your company:

1. Google - Healthy culture

Google is a pioneer of good employee relations. The company is famous for its culture and the ways it tries to break barriers and hire the best people to give them full autonomy over their work. At their headquarters, employees can eat multiple types of food for free, play video games, get massages and even sleep.

Learn from them:

Although not every company has the budget to give their employee free massages and sushi every day, you can prioritize the individual. Google has proved that people work better when they’re given autonomy and treated as people instead of numbers.

With a great culture, you’ll not only get more productive employees but attract the best talent as well.

2. FedEx Corporation - Employee feedback

Google is a pioneer of good employee relations. The company is famous for its culture and the ways it tries to break barriers and hire the best people to give them full autonomy over their work. At their headquarters, employees can eat multiple types of food for free, play video games, get massages and even sleep.

Learn from them:

Although not every company has the budget to give their employee free massages and sushi every day, you can prioritize the individual. Google has proved that people work better when they’re given autonomy and treated as people instead of numbers.

With a great culture, you’ll not only get more productive employees but attract the best talent as well.

3. FedEx Corporation - Employee feedback

The Rolls-Royce company isn’t just a symbol of wealth and success to clients, it helps its employees to achieve it too. The company favors high-quality training and apprenticeships. These are so effective that over 30% of the senior managers at Rolls-Royce started as trainees. By making training essential, the company can easily promote from within, hiring managers that already know the company’s practices and philosophy.

Learn from them:

Hiring new employees is more expensive than keeping the ones you have. This also accounts for hiring managers.

If your company gives a lot of importance to quality-training, you will not only be able to promote from within, but your employees will also be more likely to stay for longer, even making a career out of it!

4. Nissan - Productivity

Nissan is famous for successfully taking the best out of Japanese and British working philosophies to develop their own philosophy: kaizen. Kaizen’s philosophy is based on continuous improvement in all areas, from the assembly line to upper management. Employees are hired and evaluated using Kaizen.

This allows for a clear definition of success and rewards productivity above all other areas.

Learn from them:

Just like Nissan, your philosophy should reward productivity in all areas. Make sure to provide your employees with a clear pathway towards success and let your philosophy permeate all areas of your business, from top to bottom.

5. MSL - Hiring process

MSL pioneered a systematic way of hiring the best talent. With panel-based interviews, great advertising and good psychological tests, MSL can assure to get the right person for the right job.

The result? Not only has MSL been studied for psychology and HR purposes, but Fortune named the company as one of the World’s Most Admired Companies in 2013 based on their contribution to the world of human resources.

Learn from them:

Hiring people isn’t just about asking a few questions and hiring based on feelings, there are multiple resources out there to give you the ability to ask the right questions and learn the most amount of information from your prospects to decide who to hire. By assuring you hire the right people for the company, you can increase productivity and retention.

6. Bain and Company - Retention levels

Bain & Company is internationally recognized as one of the best places to work in the world. It has remained part of the top ten of Glassdoor’s best places to work and gained multiple HR-related awards. This makes Bain able to continuously attract and retain top talent.

Their secret? Investing in people. Bain & Company fosters a great work culture that promotes equality and engagement through competitive wages, great policies, amazing training and mentoring, and flexible work schedules. This allows them not only to get the most amount of productivity from their employees, but hire people to stay.

Learn from them:

Just like Bain, your company should help its employees with their work-life balance. You can even directly learn from them by reading the articles they’ve written on investing in people. Make sure your employees have everything they need to succeed and are valued by their contributions. Encourage a community environment where people support each other and make an effort to offer good benefits to them.

7. SAS - Health focus

SAS is another industry leader that consistently ranks among the best places to work for. SAS takes care of its employees’ physical and mental needs by offering gyms and recreational facilities and giving its employees time to use them during working hours. This pioneering way of caring for employees reduces stress and turnover rates and helps employees feel better and more energized throughout the day.

Learn from them:

You may not be able to build gyms for your employees, but you can still find ways to promote physical and mental health. You can organize physical activities during the weekends, promote mindfulness activities during business hours and even partner up with gyms for discounts. These efforts lead not only to healthy employees but to less absenteeism, better working dynamics and increased productivity.

Conclusion

Establishing great employee relations has huge advantages and reduces your company’s costs. All you need to do is to treat your employees like the people they are, making them feel valued and appreciated for the work they do and listening to their concerns.

With great employee relations, you’ll be taking good care of your employees, and they’ll be taking good care of your business.

Do you want to develop and use values that’ll truly inspire your team?

Your company needs to have its own culture.

Why?

Because your culture can build up and shape the morale and the environment surrounding your workers. With a good environment, your workers will be highly engaged and motivated.

But developing your values isn’t as easy as sitting down and writing some inspirational lines. Your values need to be unique, easy to understand and aligned to your company’s image.

In this article, we’ll show you how to write company values and how to use them to inspire your team.

Let’s start!

What Are Company Values?

Company values, also known as core values, are the principles your company is built around. They’re used by your company as behavioral principles to know how an individual, a team and your company as a whole interacts with other individuals, teams, and companies.

Good company values affect your business as a whole, from you hire people to how you treat your competition. With clearly defined goals and values, you can hire the right people and differentiate yourself from the competition.

If the company values aren’t followed, they, at best, will be completely useless and, at worst, can be perceived as hypocrisy by your clients and employees.

Why Should You Have Company Values?

Company values are the basis of your company’s team culture. By defining your core values, you define your company’s identity and what it stands for.

Since your core values affect every aspect of your company, they’re extremely in multiple areas.

How?

Core values help your company take decisions

Say your company is handling an aggressive marketing campaign from their competition. Should your company ignore the campaign? Should it directly respond to the competition? What will your company say if it does respond?

Company values will guide your company’s behavior in any crisis.

Core values help your clients differentiate your company from the rest

Take Rolex and Casio. Rolex’s identity is built around luxury and class. Casio is built around affordability and reliability.

Having clear values will help your company’s identity to be clearly defined by the public.

Company values help inspire your employees

Is your company built around quality? Then your employees can find places where quality control is missing and implement it. Is your company built around your client? Then your customer service employees can come up with ideas for your clients to be happier and better treated.

Your core values can help your employees identify what your company is missing and inspire the solution in them.

But how can you create core values that properly inspire your employees? Let’s start by looking at the best in the business.

Popular Company Core Values Examples to Get Inspired

Google Company Values

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
3. Fast is better than slow.
4. Democracy on the web works.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
7. There’s always more information out there.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
9. You can be serious without a suit.

What can you learn from them?

Google’s core values are the basis of its famously open and focused culture. They also provide a very clear guide on what employees should look like: focused on the user, specialized on what they do, fast and committed, regardless of if they’re behind a desk or not.

Google’s values have also been tweaked and redefined over the years, evolving along with the company. Your values should also evolve and grow along with your experiences and your needs.

Amazon Company Values

• Customer Obsession
• Ownership
• Invent and Simplify
• Are Right, A Lot
• Learn and Be Curious
• Hire and Develop the Best
• Insist on the Highest Standards
• Think Big
• Bias for Action
• Frugality
• Earn Trust
• Dive Deep
• Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
• Deliver Results

What can you learn from them?

Amazon puts its vision right in their “Jobs” website. This makes it clear to anyone looking to work at the company what Amazon is looking for when hiring. Amazon clearly looks for people who are strong-minded, customer-focused and driven by results. The values also clearly delign how a leader should look like.

Your company values should tell your employees how they should work if they want to grow in your company.

Uber Company Values

• We build globally, we live locally.
• We are customer-obsessed.
• We celebrate differences.
• We do the right thing.
• We act like owners.
• We persevere.
• We value ideas over hierarchy.
• We make big bold bets.

What can you learn from them?

When replacing the old CEO, the new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, also replaced Uber’s company values. Khosrowshahi asked for value submissions and then developed them with 20 working groups.

If you’re creating new company values, involve your employees and have them suggest to you how the company should behave. This will create engagement and ownership, which will help your employees embrace and adapt to your values quickly.

Apple Company Values

• Accessibility
• Education
• Environment
• Inclusion & Diversity
• Privacy
• Supplier Responsibility

What can you learn from them?

During 2015 and 2016, the FBI asked Apple to create a piece of software that would unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino attackers. This placed the company in a dilemma: would they cooperate with the FBI, willingly creating a backdoor to use in every iPhone or would they challenge a direct order from the government?

Your company’s core values should also help your employees make the right decisions, even in the hardest situations.

Nike Company Values

• Inspiration
• Innovation
• Every athlete in the world
• Authentic
• Connected
• Distinctive

What can you learn from them?

Nike’s core values highlight what they aim to produce: innovative and distinctive products for athletes. Although they have one of the most memorable slogans of all time (Just Do It), their values further define not only who they are and what they do, but who their clients are.

Even if you already have a well-defined and recognizable brand, values can give depth to your company’s identity to both your employees and your clients.

Netflix Company Values

• Judgment
• Communication
• Impact
• Curiosity
• Innovation
• Inclusion
• Courage
• Passion
• Integrity
• Selflessness

What can you learn from them?

In their introduction, Netflix points out how companies claim to have values, only to be ignored. They then talk directly to their potential employees to say that, the better they follow their values, the better their chances are of thriving at the company.

Don’t have values for show. Craft your values so they truly reflect your company and reward the employees that better reflect what your company stands for.

40+ Examples of Company Values You Should Know

Looking for ideas? Here are over 40 examples of values your company could have. We wrote them in third-person but you can feel free to change them to fit your needs:

1. Do the right thing: Behave well, even when no one is watching.
2. Explore: Find new problems and new solutions.
3. Don't wait: Take every opportunity and fix every issue before doing anything else.
4. Be kind: Treat your teammates and your clients like you’d like to be treated.
5. Be free: Take a break when you need to.
6. Make something better: Face every challenge and improve your environment at every chance you get.
7. Think globally: Don’t be afraid to take your ideas to the next level.
8. Be hygienic: Cleanliness is key.
9. Flexibility: Find the best balance between work and home.
10. Optimize for the future: Don’t look for quick fixes.
11. Be a patriot: Love and respect your country.
12. Have empathy: Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
13. Believe in tech: Trust the machines you work with.
14. Philanthropy: Help those in need.
15. Win-Win-Win: Find the best course of action for you, your team and your client.
16. Be Practical: Offer solutions that work and are feasible.
17. Be Informal: Don’t use jargon when you can use simpler terms.
18. Be your own CEO: Take charge of your own situation.
19. Be Loyal: To your team and your values.
20. No Bureaucracy: Remove the red tape.
21. Speak Up: Offer creative and constructive criticism.
22. Be Democratic: Trust the majority when making decisions.
23. Put the customer first: The customer’s needs are above everything else.
24. Be punctual: Deliver on time.
25. Act with integrity: Be honest and pursue truth and justice.
26. Self Motivate: Find new ways to keep yourself motivated and productive.
27. Put Your Team First: Look for what’s better for everyone, not for a few.
28. Empower: Motivate and build up your co-workers.
29. Bring your ‘A’ Game: Stay at the top of your game with an optimistic attitude.
30. Be a believer: Believe and commit to your company’s success.
31. Be Admirable: Become the kind of person people look up to.
32. Build Social Value: Bring value to the community.
33. Give Joy: Make people feel good around you.
34. Stay Open: Listen to others, even when you don’t agree.
35. Be fast: Do your job quickly and find simple solutions
36. Be Helpful: Look for opportunities to help other people.
37. Play: Celebrate and have fun while working.
38. Breathe: Pause to think and find a good solution
39. Exceed Expectations: Go the extra mile when working.
40. Keep Learning: Find ways to improve and learn from your mistakes.
41. Be Generous: Share your time, your knowledge and your expertise with others.
42. Be Passionate: Love what you do.
43. Be Decisive: Produce results quickly and effectively.
44. Live our Mission: Apply our mission in every action.

How to Craft Your Own Company Values

Crafting your company values doesn’t have to be hard. Here’s how:

1. Build a team

Bring together the people that are better equipped to define what your company stands for. This team can consist of the founders, the workers with the most experience and the people that embody your company’s vision.

2. Brainstorm for value ideas

Talk about what your company represents and where it’s heading. Feel free to involve other employees and ask them what they like about the company and how the company could be better.

Ask questions like:

• What are our main goals?
• Which treats do we value the most in our employees?
• What do we need to grow our company?
• What kind of people should we hire?
• How can we make this company better?
  

After a while, you’ll start to notice trends. Take note of those and keep brainstorming until you and your team feel like you’ve done all you can.

This is the most important step so don’t rush it. Take your time.

3. Define your values

Once you have your trends, start defining which values reflect them the most. Find ways to combine values that are too similar and make sure your values are simple and easy to understand.

Don’t have values just for the sake of having more. The more you can condense them, the better.

4. Implement your values

When presenting your newly-defined values, make it as memorable as you can.

Don’t just roll them out in an email. Try to make it into an event where your employees can learn and practice the new values.

Make sure they know exactly what each value means and how it can impact day-to-day operations.

5. Adapt and evolve

Your values should grow and change with your company.

If you feel your values are no longer relevant, don’t be afraid to revise them and start all over!

Conclusion

Good company’s core values can guide and inspire your team. They can help you stand out among the crowd and become memorable to your clients.

If you want to ensure your values are effective, make sure everyone in your company is living by them, not just walking past the plaque every day!

Looking for employee engagement ideas?

Unengaged employees may grow bored and frustrated within a couple of years and look for a new challenge. That’s why employee engagement is incredibly important to make sure your talent stays in your company.

But, how can you keep your employees engaged? How much should you spend on employee engagement anyway?

Why Should You Work on Employee Engagement?

Successful employee engagement improves morale and reduces staff turnover. Engaged employees are more efficient and productive, and are more likely to go the extra mile. This also translates into better customer retention and higher profits.

There’s a lot of competition for talent. If your employees leave, at best they will be very expensive to replace. At worst, your competition will start getting your talent.

As Richard Branson said: “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients.”

25+ Best Employee Engagement Ideas to Motivate Your Team

These are over 25 ideas to start motivating your team. From expensive to completely free, you’ll find ideas that can adapt to your company and your budget!

1. Praise your employees

Positive feedback is a great way of giving someone an immediate reward for a job well done. It’s simple, free and it can lead to a great work environment! Recognizing someone’s good work is very important to help people see that they’re an important part of the team, not just another cog in the machine.

Praising shouldn’t be left to managers. Everyone should feel comfortable congratulating each other when they feel like they deserve it.

How to get started:

Praising other employees can feel weird or uncomfortable, especially if you don’t really know what to say or how to approach them. Luckily, you can use tools specifically designed to praise your employees the right way!

Karl is an amazing way of recognizing and giving shoutouts to employees who go above & beyond.

With Karl, it’s not only extremely easy to congratulate someone, it’s also easy to keep track of your best performers! You can personalize your kudos with GIFs and customize them to suit your team. You can keep them as formal or as informal as your work environment.

Karl is specifically designed to spread positivity and promote your company values, making sure every employee can give or get kudos to everyone else. With powerful analytics, you can gamify the process, reward people that get congratulated a lot and find people in need of feedback; all in just one glance!

Check out Karl now.

2. Prioritize work-life balance

Having a healthy work-life balance can seem impossible for some people. Most people spend the majority of the time they’re awake at work and commuting to and from work.

However, a proper work-life balance is critical to keep employees happy, healthy and engaged.

So how can you help?

How to get started:

You can start by showing as much flexibility as your company allows. Flexible hours and home office days can be quite helpful to a lot of your employees.

You can also increase the number of sick and personal days your employees can take. Having the possibility of taking a day off can ease your employees’ minds, just by knowing they have them!

The definition of a healthy balance will vary from person to person. A bachelor may be completely ok with only having their weekends to themselves, but a parent may want more time with their kids. Ask your employees what they need and help them feel your company values their life in and outside of work.

3. Show actual care

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’re caring by throwing around worn-out phrases. However, caring goes further than just asking “how are you?” and saying “take care”.

Genuine care can indicate to your coworkers that they’re a valued part of the company and not just a number.

How to get started:

Find out what your employees and coworkers need. Offer them to take a break when they need one. Listen to their goals and act on them. If someone tells you that they started going to the gym or drinking more water, a little gift like a company-labeled water bottle can do wonders for them.

Find out their wants and needs and act on them.

4. Hire by your company’s culture

If you have a clear company culture and hire people according to it, you’ll continue bringing people in that will integrate seamlessly with your company. That way, you can form a proper community of like-minded individuals that work with each other.

How to get started:

Make sure your company’s mission, vision and values are clearly defined. Then establish those principles into the hiring process by translating them into questions to go beyond the surface and find out if the prospects fit within your company.

5. Start a newsletter

A newsletter can be a fun way of bringing people together, informing everyone of where the company is going and highlighting employees and their contributions. They can be the basis of fun activities as well as a source of information for everyone.

How to get started:

To make sure your company’s newsletter isn’t boring, make it your own. Have a fun title for it and make it interesting. Most people will not want to read info on a technical level. Instead, use your newsletter to announce upcoming activities where your employees can participate. Feature your employees’ creation, like memes or comics about the company.

That way, everyone will be looking forward to reading the next issue!

6. Have more fun

Fun activities can be so memorable that people will continue to talk about them for years. They’re great to take a break off work, establish bonds between your employees and make them feel like their company is paying them to have fun!

How to get started:

Take half a day of the month to do something fun. Have a Taco Tuesday with fun games and themes. If you’re afraid that an activity may look cringey in action, take the activity outside of the company. Take your employees to paintball or an adult arcade.

Whatever you do, keep it fun and do it during company hours!

7. Have a company mascot

A company mascot is a cartoon spokesperson for your company. A great mascot acts as a fun embodiment of the company’s values and helps your employees identify themselves with the company.

How to get started:

When creating a company mascot, find one with a unique design that represents your company’s values. You can start with a design contest among your employees and have them vote for their favorite!

Keep it original and cute and, once you have one, make sure it’s front and center in tees, plushies and other products that your employees can use and wear.

8. Have an anonymous way of getting honest employee feedback

Your employees can be the best sources of information to know how you can improve your culture and environment. That’s why you need to make sure your employees have ways of communicating with you!

How to get started:

You can start with a simple service like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to create an anonymous survey and gather their responses immediately.

You can ask questions like:

• How satisfied are you with the work you’re doing?
• How satisfied are you with your salary?
• How could we improve your work environment?
• How would you describe the company’s culture around you?
  

You can then add a tool for employees to ask questions and make suggestions online to keep that line of communication open.

Make sure you show your employees how you’re following up on them!

9. Educate your employees with online courses

There are so many free online courses out there that your employees would love to take but don’t have the chance to. An educated employee can become a great asset, finding better ways to solve problems and becoming better at what they do.

How to get started:

Research free online courses that your employees can take right at your company. Establish times of the week for your employees to take their courses and follow up on them.

You can come up with a rewards system to incentivize your employees or have meetings where your employees can give quick presentations on what they learned. That way, everyone benefits!

10. Team outings

People thrive when they work with their friends. One of the best ways to make friends is by sharing a meal or taking a walk. They can lead to great conversations and multiple bonding opportunities over their shared efforts and struggles.

How to get started:

You don’t have to take your whole team to a restaurant every day. Instead, try to keep people from having lunch at their desks as much as possible. Make sure the lunch area is comfortable and inviting.

Have ways for them to schedule a one-on-one with other employees to take a walk and chat. Sometimes, even a quick trip to the store can lead to a great talk!

11. Promote mental and physical wellbeing

Mentally and physically healthy employees are crucial for good employee performance. Improved mental health translates into focused employees that rarely get sick and do efficient work. And in stressful environments, taking care of your employees’ health can reduce stress and turnover.

How to get started:

Research what you can do in your company to take care of your employees. Depending on your company’s size, culture and budget, some options could be:

• Great health insurance packages
• On-site yoga and meditation activities
• Healthy snack options for the whole office
• Company involvement in charity runs
• Collaborations with gyms for cheaper memberships for employees
• Ergonomic work areas
  

Above all, nurture a good culture. A positive work environment can do wonders for your employees’ mental health!

12. Open consistent lines of communication

Strong communication goes beyond chatting with people in the office. Your employees need tools to ensure they can reach the right employee at the right time.

How to get started:

Make sure your managers set up weekly meetings to check up on their teams. Have a system in place, like Slack, to make sure everyone can establish communication with other employees as soon as they need to.

13. Show employees how their job advances the company’s vision

Your company should have a vision and yearly goals. Showing your employees how their job is advancing the company gives them a sense of ownership and belonging. It can also increase their motivation since they know what the end goal is and what they’re working towards.

How to get started:

Use flowcharts to show individual employees how their work impacts the company as a whole. Sit down with teams and have a conversation about how their work reflects the company’s mission. Then print posters listing down how their work influences and affects the company.

14. Have inclusive problem-solving meetings

Letting your employees have a crack at solving problems, even when it’s outside of their department, helps them bond and feel more engaged. On the other hand, since everyone has a different point of view, the extra input can help develop creative solutions!

How to get started:

You can easily adapt this approach to your company by having an in-office, relaxed jam or an outing. Find a structure that lets your employees share challenges that they have and give input on other people’s challenges.

Finally, take note of good problem-solvers. They can become great assets!

15. Show them what it’s like to work in a different department

Showing your workers what’s like to work in a different area can give them a better perspective of the company. The workers also get to show what they do and how they do it to other employees, which can be very rewarding!

How to get started:

Establish a day or half a day where employees visit different departments and get “training”. Let the employees choose which department they’ll be visiting and, if possible, have them complete a small task at the end of their training. And remember, the main goal is to increase engagement and cooperation, not to actually train them!

Keep it simple and keep it fun.

17. Gamify some goals

Videogames are incredibly popular, in part, because of their use of constant rewards. So, why not transform your employees’ work experience into a game?

How to get started:

Define which tasks you can gamify. You can start simple by adding a leaderboard to a process or encouraging friendly competition in a sales environment with a reward system. If you want to take it to the next level, hire an expert or certify someone in gamification to better define and apply it to multiple processes.

17. Make sure new hires have an assigned mentor

Newcomers need to ask questions and learn quickly. The best way to do it is to have someone assigned to answer all of their questions and introduce them to the company’s culture and values.

How to get started:

Before a newcomer starts working, assign someone to be their mentor or buddy. They should be an exemplary worker, friendly and knowledgeable. Go through the onboarding process with them and make sure they can answer all of the questions the newbie will have.

18. Have framed team photos

Having photos of your team encourages bonding and better working relationships. So why not showcase them?

How to get started:

You can start by simply encouraging each team to have a wall where they can hang their photos. Make sure you hire a photographer in every company event to print and frame photos of teams working together and having fun. Also, ensure that newcomers get their photo taken and displayed with the rest of the team!

19. Raise employees’ salaries

Sure, not every company can afford to raise salaries, but doing it can directly impact morale, service and revenue. For example, Dan Price famously raised their employee’s minimum salary to $70’000, leading to tremendous success. Raising salary not only increases morale, it also increases revenue.

How to get started:

Figure out if you can reduce costs and keep your employees in mind when your company is succeeding. Maybe you can start giving a small fraction of the overall company’s revenue to your employees. Opt for better pay over lavish parties for them. At the end of the day, nothing trumps cash!

20. Celebrate people

More than holidays, celebrating people helps them feel appreciated and important to the company.

How to get started:

From birthdays to promotions, from welcomings to achieving milestones, there are always reasons to celebrate your employees. Find excuses to buy them cake and have people say a few words to the employees that are celebrated. Nothing makes someone feel more special than having a toast in their honor!

21. Make sure your employees have the tools they need

Although this doesn’t sound like a typical engagement idea, it is quite important. If your employees don’t have the right tools, their engagement will go down, regardless of how many parties you throw.

How to get started:

Don’t just give your employees the tools they need, listen to their suggestions on the tools they’d like to get. Grow the budget for new tools along with your company and don’t hesitate to invest in tools that can make your employees’ job easier.

22. Host yearly awards events

The larger the company, the easier it’ll be for achievements to get lost in the moment. That’s why taking a special night to celebrate them can really show appreciation to hard workers.

How to get started:

Pick a date and decide on who you’re going to reward and what you’ll reward them with. You can pick categories like:

• The employee with the most experience
• The best-performing team
• Top performer
• Peer-to-peer recognition
• Best customer service
  

Make sure to also single out people and make the reward process as straightforward as possible!

23. Celebrate employees when they leave

Building bridges with employees is very important, even when they leave. Celebrating employees for their time and effort when they move to a different company or retire shows the rest of your employees your company appreciates their work.

How to get started:

Make sure to include the people with whom they’ve worked the closest to verbally express their appreciation. You can celebrate them by having people share funny stories of their experience over cake or dinner. You can also include a parting gift for the employee.

The longer an employee stays at the company, the bigger the celebration should be!

24. Support volunteer programs

Being able to give back is very important when it comes to engagement. It helps employees feel like they work in a place that values more than the revenue they can generate. They can also bond with their coworkers and form relationships during their volunteer work.

How to get started:

Find a cause that fits with your company’s values and encourage your employees to volunteer, even if it’s during business hours. Make sure they’re wearing the company logo and give them all the tools they need to do their volunteer work.

25. Define what employee engagement means for your company

Coming up with employee engagement ideas doesn’t have to be hard. If you’re struggling, why not just ask your own employees for ideas?

How to get started:

To better get your point across, start by making a list of what engaged employees look like. For example:

• Engaged employees would love to recommend the company to their friends.
• Engaged employees are punctual and meet their deadlines.
• Engaged employees are proud to say where they work.
• Engaged employees have all of their tools to do their job.
• Engaged employees work in a comfortable environment.
  

Once you’ve defined what an engaged employee looks like, your employees will have an easier time to find out what’s missing. You can then implement that input into your workplace.

5 Employee Engagement Activities Used by Popular Companies

Now that you have some employee engagement ideas, it’s time to see them in action!

1. Google

Google’s culture is legendary. At Google, it’s normalized that people spend 20% of their time doing something other than work. Having playrooms, nap pods, massage parlors and other recreational options on campus foster creativity and engagement.

What you can learn from them

Don’t be afraid of normalizing people relaxing at work. Let people take breaks when they need to while working towards objectives.

2. L’Oréal

L’Oréal developed the world’s first employee onboarding app, called “Fit”, to help newcomers understand and embrace the company’s team culture. The app helps over 10,000 newcomers per year by giving them “missions” they can complete in real life to practice what they learn.

What you can learn from them

Make sure newcomers have an amazing onboarding experience by not only giving them everything they need to start working, but by making sure they understand your company values.

3. Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines takes its purpose of connecting people into their company’s culture. They make the environment is fun and engaging by allowing employees to design their uniforms and giving them more autonomy. With things like a flight attendant going viral over rapping the safety information, they’ve become famous for their fun work environment.

What you can learn from them

A fun work environment can be as easy as encouraging your employees to be themselves. That way, employees feel like valued individuals, even in gigantic companies.

4. Dreamworks

Besides having personalized work environments and big company parties, Dreamworks Animation employees are encouraged to share their personal and professional projects with each other. This lets people from multiple departments collaborate and boosts their creativity.

What you can learn from them

Proper communication is a great way of forming bonds and encouraging friendly collaboration. Foster an environment where employees can find friendly feedback among their peers.

5. Salesforce

Salesforce offers its employees 56 hours of paid time to volunteer in their communities, as well as opportunities to join equality groups and dedicated mindfulness zones to meditate. The company has also taken strong stances on workforce development and equal pay.

What you can learn from them

Salesforce is a company that clearly lets their values guide their decisions. If your employees have clear opportunities to follow your company values and to give back to the community, they’re more likely to feel engaged and proud of their work.

Conclusion

Not every company can afford to spend large amounts of money on lavish parties and company getaways. However, keeping your employees engaged can be as easy as showing appreciation and listening to their feedback.

Implementing employee engagement strategies is a great way to not only keep your employees for a long time, but keeping them happy and passionate!

Slack is one of the most useful tools for companies and teams alike. That being said, however, you shouldn’t just settle with the basic app or website; you can also make use of some of the incredible apps available out there to improve your overall Slack experience.

For more information, read on to learn all about our favorite 24 Slack apps.

You Probably Already Know, But… How to Install a Slack App

While you might already have some expertise in installing Slack apps, it’s worth quickly going over the process here.

Step 1: Click on your team name

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll need to click on your team name in the upper lefthand corner of the screen.

Step 2: Apps & Integrations

After you click on the team name, you’ll notice a drop-down window, with a section titled “Apps & Integrations”. You’ll want to click on this.

Step 3: The Slack App Directory

Here, you’ll find several apps and add-ons which you can integrate with your Slack account. Once you’ve discovered one that your team will use, you can simply click on the “Install” button to add it to your Slack account.

Please note that, if you’re not the one managing your team, you’ll have to request to add Slack apps to your team channel. While some applications will be immediately applied to all of your channels, others may require you to select which ones you want to integrate the app with.

The Best 24 Slack Apps to Use

Now that you know more about Slack apps and how to install them, let’s begin to discuss the various Slack applications you can use to improve your Slack interactions!

Building Your Team Culture

Team Culture has been making headlines for being the foundation of all great businesses. Here are some Slack apps that can help to boost your team culture.\

Karl

Karl makes it much easier for employees and leadership to show appreciation and acknowledgement for a job well-done.

Common slack tools involve incorporating GIFs into messages, and tagging employees who have done exceedingly well in certain projects. Karl even gives employers the unique opportunity to provide “kudos” for smaller accomplishments, as well.

The /kudos command allows you to send “kudos” directly to someone on the channel.

Another one of the great things about this Slack app is that you can use it for free for 60 days. Afterwards, you’ll only need to make a paid account and pay $0.99 per employee per month.

Donut

Donut is a Slack app that is known for improving workplace culture through the fostering of new relationships - while also improving old ones - by pairing employees together, welcoming new employees to the team, and more.

Donut helps to maintain and create workplace relationships by pairing people with other employees that they haven’t communicated with before. And by being paired with other mentors from within the organization who may have a specific skillset, your employees can even pick up and learn some new skills!

In order to use this Slack app, all you have to do is create a new channel, either for new hires or for pairing employees. One of the most popular commands to use with Donut are classic slack commands such as /remind - which allows you to remind your employees to shadow new members. You can also use /invite @donut to invite Donut to one of your channels.

There is a free trial and package available for this app; however, you may also want to sign up for one of the paid packages.

Improving Your Team’s Health

Health isn’t all about eating avocados and taking bubble baths! Below, you can read all about how you can incorporate health into the workplace through the use of these Slack apps.

ThinkLadder

ThinkLadder aims to improve engagement and overall happiness in the workplace, in an effort to positively change workplace culture.

ThinkLadder is all based on cognitive behavioural therapy, and it sends out daily insights to help change the way that you and your employees think.

Common Slack commands are /insights and /thinkladder-help. You can also send insights to your channel at any moment, simply by typing @ThinkLadder into your chat!

As of this writing, you can actually get ThinkLadder for free!

Employee Well-being (Health Hero)

Health Hero aims to help customers and clients to make healthier decisions by tracking health goals - and this feature can easily be extended to staff and employees.

This Slack app will send you reminders and messages, to make sure that you’re staying up-to-date with your meal and fitness tracking. You can upload pictures, and are even encouraged to connect with other employees and motivate each other.

Should you like to see a list of commands in Health Hero, you can enter /healthhero into your command bar, where you will now be able to see commands such as registering, adding health apps, and more.

This app is free to try, and afterwards, you’ll need to pay for your account subscription.

Taking Productivity to the Next Level

While you can’t be expected to just sit down and work like a machine to obtain results, there are still some tools that you can use to increase your productivity.

Google Drive

Google Drive is known for allowing users to store their data in a single convenient space. Once you’ve connected it to Slack, however, you will be able to view, use, and comment on your files from within the Slack app itself!

Google Drive offers a generous free plan (30 GB free space). You only have to set up a Google account.

Google Calendar

When you connect Google Calendar to Slack, you can now stay connected to anything - ranging from events you want to attend, to your work schedule for the week. Google Calendar can also be used as a Slack app for teams.

Google Calendar allows you to stay up-to-date by sending you reminders before meetings, and allows you to review any of the events you’ve added to your calendar. The app also allows you to seamlessly tell your colleagues where you are - so that you can always update your status when you’re in a meeting, or otherwise.

Popular Slack commands for Google Calendar are /gcal today and /gcal tomorrow slash commands. These will give you information about your calendar both today and tomorrow, respectively.

Google Calendar is part of Google’s suite of tools, and is completely free to use. All you have to do is set up a Google account upfront (if you haven’t already).

Airtable

Airtable provides users with new and efficient ways to keep projects organized and keep teams on track.

This is accomplished by organizing project data into columns, updating calendars, and helping you to manage spreadsheets - allowing you and your employees to always stay up-to-date with projects, and in real time.

With Airtable, you can set up automated notifications, share surveys, manage form entries, etc. And when you’ve combined it with Slack, this app will now send your channel notifications, whenever changes are made to your databases. Not only that, but you’ll also be sent a link which brings you directly to the content that has been changed.

Airtable has a completely free version - however, you can also use paid subscription options to increase records per base, attachment space per base, and revision snapshot history.

Mastering Internal Communication

No relationship succeeds without communication - and the same can be said about communication between staff members.

Zoom

Zoom is a video conferencing solution that allows employers and employees to work remotely, or join group conferences.

When integrated with Slack, you can now add everyone to your video conference from the same chat. To do this, you can either send a Zoom link to your Slack channel, or use the command listed below.

To use Zoom, you just have to type /zoom into your command box. Those who are in your channel will receive a message, and can easily press “Join” from there!

Zoom starts at about $15 per month for Zoom Pro.

Standup Alice

StandUp Alice ensures that everyone always knows what’s going on during projects. Standup meetings are (mostly daily) meetings that teams are able to use to share progress updates with each other.

Standup Alice reminds teams to send their standups at scheduled times, and allows for the management of multiple work teams. You have to provide the bot with details about your standup - once you’ve done that, StandUp Alice will then follow through daily.

If you’re interested in StandupAlice, you can contact the company for pricing details.

Lunch Train

Lunch Train will help you and your team make plans for lunch! The goal for this is to improve workplace relations, as well as overall communication.

Lunch Train is quite simple to use, and sends out an invite to team members asking them if they want to join for lunch.

To use this tool, use the command /lunchtrain. The app will then send an interactive message out to those who are part of the channel/group. You can specify it by following this format: /lunchtrain to [channel] @ {time}.

Lunch Train is a free application that can be installed at any time.

Boosting External Communication

Let’s be honest: you’re not going to go far, unless you can connect and efficiently speak to external sources.

Intercom

Intercom aims to make it easier than ever before to respond to messages or leads, and is a messenger service that is completely scalable.

Intercom provides automated messaging, and allows for customers to view information like their order status and “help” guides from within the Intercom chat.

Intercom also allows you to evaluate your leads’ qualification data by typing /qualify into the command window. By using this Slack app, you can reply to conversations directly inside the Slack app.

Intercom starts at $39 per month for the basic package. From there, you can also get packages at $99, $499, and $999.

Slack for Gmail

Gmail for Slack functions similarly to the way it does on its original platform; the main difference between the two is that, when incorporated into Slack, you can now also send your Gmail messages directly to Slack.

When you install the application, you can go into individual emails and then share them to your Slack channels. When you send your messages, you’ll be able to attach your own files and messages to the emails, as well.

Gmail for Slack is free for companies to use. All you need is a Gmail account!

Slaask

Slaask is completely Slack-based, and focuses on making communication easier with its live chat system.

You can communicate with anyone who is browsing your website right from within the Slack app. Furthermore, Slaask allows users to use video chats, screen sharing, and more with their customers.

The base package for Slaask starts at $29 per month, and increases to $49, $99, or $199, depending on which package you decide to go subscribe to. If you’re unsure about which package is right for you, though, you can register for a free trial.

Managing Projects Like a Boss

Managing projects doesn’t have to be all about organizing dates and events. Now you can take advantage of these Slack apps to make project management easier than ever before.

Trello

With this integration, you can now add your Trello cards directly to Slack. The aim here is to aid managers and team leaders with the overall management of their teams.

In order to send insights to Slack, all you have to do is copy and paste a Trello link into your Slack chatbox, which will then give members of the chat access to information about comments, descriptions, other members, and more. Trello is also able to help you organize your projects to maximize production and efficiency.

To invite Trello to your channels, you just need to type the command /trello. To add people to a card, type /trello add [teammates] [card name]. You can also search within Trello by using /trello search [term].

You can use Trello for free, or you can upgrade your membership and pay $10 or $20 for more features.

monday.com

monday.com ensures that everyone in your team or channel is on the same page and aims to keep your employees informed about your projects.

Your Slack channel is updated whenever you change a status, create tasks, or complete your projects. This integration with Slack allows you to create new tasks and to manage changes made to your account from within Slack.

To create tasks from Slack to monday.com, type the command /monday-pulse into the message box.

This integration requires a paid subcription.

Todoist

Todoist allows employers and employees alike to finalize and follow through with their to-do lists. To date, this app has helped to complete more than 150 million projects.

Todoist works by intuitively asking you to add all of your tasks to your to-do list; your employees will do the same, and as they work their way through their respective lists, your Slack channel will be kept up-to-date and informed of each development in the process.

When you want to update your Slack channel about your to-do list, you just need to type the command /todoist. This will create a new task on your Slack channel - where, for example, you can create meetings!

You can use Todoist right now for free, or you can also buy bigger packages for $4 or $6 per month.

Working Hard, Playing Hard

You can’t be expected to work without having any play! That’s why below, we’re going to highlight some ways in which you can make your workplace more fun.

Birthday Bot

This application ensures that no birthday slips by unnoticed. This small gesture is able to create a more positive work environment overall, as well as work to improve your team culture.

BirthdayBot works by sending messages to your team channel whenever it is someone’s birthday. You will also be given a notice in advance, so that you can have a chance to make plans for employees’ birthdays.

To get information about the birthdays, you just have to type in “share feedback”, “show bdays”, or “show next bdays” in your BirthdayBot chat. To remove a birthday from Slack, you can type “forget my bday” to your Slackbot, or “forget @(name) birthday”.

The standard price for using BirthdayBot is $0.75 per month, with the Pro version coming in at $2 per month.

Spotify

Spotify is an application which allows users to find and listen to their favorite music. It’s a fantastic music player, but the app also collects your listening data so that it can suggest new songs to you each week. And /spotify, the Slack app, naturally integrates this platform into your Slack account.

Spotify my Slack is an addition to the usual Spotify app, in which you can effortlessly send song and music suggestions to other team members, as well as quickly retrieve information about the music you’re listening to.

To use Spotify my Slack, you just have to type /spotify into your command bar.

For some features, you’ll want to get a Spotify Premium account, which costs $10 per month.

Automating Your Business

Are you looking for the best way to make your daily work life easier? That’s where these apps come in - all of which will greatly improve your business’s automation!

IFTTT

By installing this nifty application, you can connect multiple apps together to increase productivity. The company's name stands for “If This, Then That”, and its motto is “Everything works better together”... and their app has certainly proven that this is true!

IFTTT works by allowing users to connect their Slack account to different web apps; for example, you could choose to turn on the lights for food or grocery deliveries when IFTTT tells you that the delivery person is close. You could also use IFTTT to connect your Google Calendar to Mailchimp, which will create events as you develop campaigns. The combinations are nearly endless.

IFTTT is the free alternative to some of the other applications that we have on this list.

Zapier

Zapier lets you connect all of your business tools (by using their API, and without any coding required).

Zapier provides easy automation by sharing information between your various applications. When connected to Slack, Zapier is able to provide you with - for example - the ability to send messages to your Slack channels from other apps. You could also send emails to your Slack channels from Gmail, if you so chose.

This app has a base package which comes at no cost. More extensive packages, on the other hand, will range from $20-$600, depending on your needs.

Automate.io

Much like the other automation apps on this list, Automate.Io shares information between multiple applications, and as such, can effectively create streams of data within mere minutes.

Once connected to Slack, this app can connect your Slack app to any other Cloud-based application on your phone or browser, from which you can send customized notifications, create workflows, and more. You can easily connect Automate.Io to some of the following Slack apps: Trello, Salesforce, Google, Zendesk, etc.

There is a free version of Automated.Io available; however, it provides you with a limited number of bots and actions. For this reason, you may want to choose one of the more expensive packages, which range from $20 to $100 per month.

Conclusion

If you’re really brainstorming and trying to improve your virtual workspace, then one of the things you may currently be considering is how to improve your Slack game. Improving it will allow you to foster more meaningful relationships, increase productivity, and so much more.

That’s why we’ve gathered the best 24 Slack apps to improve your Slack game and listed them out here. Are you using any other Slack apps that also make your life easier? We would love to hear about them in the comments below!

While the success of a company is measured by a number of factors, some factors have been proven to positively affect a company’s success in several ways. For example, employee satisfaction has been shown to improve the overall happiness of employees and the productivity and sales of companies around the world. Below, we’ve written all about employee health and ways you can incorporate various tactics into your own business.

What Is Employee Health? (And How Can You Evaluate It?)

Employee health refers to the overall wellness of your individual employees. It can be separated into physical and mental wellness. In recent years, companies have been prioritizing employee wellness because it’s linked to increased productivity, fewer sick days, and more.

According to SMF, employees who had lower life-satisfaction scores also experienced more sick days. In fact, they took an average of 1.25 more sick days than those ranking higher in life satisfaction scores. The same website has reported that the ROI for investing in workplace wellness programs has been as much as $3 per $1 spent.

One of the best ways to evaluate and improve your employee wellness is to follow competencies such as responsible communication resilience, engagement or vibrancy. This way, you can build employee wellness in the workplace.

Why Is It Important to Care about Employee Health?

While we briefly covered this issue, employee health is essential for companies looking to improve the overall atmosphere of their business and increase their sales and productivity.

Forbes has published articles about the impact of employee satisfaction on overall productivity in the workplace. In fact, teams that foster close relationships and wellness have experienced 21% more profits than other companies. Here, we can see a clear correlation between companies that are willing to invest in their employees’ wellness and the ones who make more sales. The companies mentioned in this study experienced a staggering 60% smaller turnover rate and a 41% reduction in sick days.

While some companies avoid investing in wellness programs because of the initial cost, it’s certainly proven to be cost-effective in the long run.

17 Actionable Ways for Your Business to Improve Employee Health (Which Were Stolen from Successful Companies)

Now that you know more about what employee wellness is and why it’s important, it’s time to hear about the best in the business!

Tactics to Improve Employees’ Mental Health

Wellness goes way beyond the household, and it isn’t just the responsibility of your employees to improve their own mental health. To learn about ways to incorporate mental wellness strategies into your business, keep reading!

Opportunities for Development - Resolver Inc.

Resolver Inc. is a software company that provides organizations with complete solutions. This company primarily focuses on corporate security, governance, risk, compliance, and information security.

Resolver provides its employees with the opportunity to grow into more fulfilling positions. This tactic is such a priority that they provide $2,000 to employees looking to expand their career. This strategy appears to work because more than ¾ of their employees have been hired internally, which means they were promoted into more fulfilling and high-paying roles.

You can incorporate this strategy in your own business by providing your employees with incentives to develop their professional skills and opportunities to get promoted. When your employees have the chance to earn more money and land more fulfilling jobs, they’ll experience a considerable difference in their mental wellness. According to Women’s Health Magazine, the importance of having a fulfilling job is so important that an increasing number of people are leaving their jobs to go to companies that prioritize happiness.

Fostering Friendships at Work - Axonify

Axonify primarily works with frontline employees, in order to ensure that daily tasks and projects are being properly performed and completed. Axonify works with companies like Levi’s and Walmart. These companies believe that working with your frontline employees will also benefit your backline employees.

Axonify encourages employees to get to know each other and mingle at work by fostering and promoting events that encourage friendships. It accomplishes both goals by buying employees lunch if they eat with someone they don’t already know.

You can use the same tactic in your own office. If you’re not willing to buy entire  meals for employees, you may want to consider investing in snacks for your kitchen or in employee nights out at restaurants.

Childcare and the Workplace - Kronos

Kronos is well-known in the tech world for its ability to tailor its solutions to the needs of employees and managers alike.

This company takes family to heart and pays employees up to $500 per year for childcare. This money goes a long way for daycare, babysitters, etc. You can also incorporate childcare into the workplace by a space for daycare in the office.

Having Fun - Intuit

Intuit is known for providing companies and individuals with financial solutions. They use a combination of trained staff, technology, and automated tools to ensure their clients are getting the best service possible.

Intuit’s overall company culture prioritizes its employees. According to Forbes, 61% of employees in the United States are burned out. To prevent this trend from occurring in their own companies, Intuit makes sure to provide their employees with ways to have fun in the workplace—by hosting activities, dinners, and more.

A definitive way to incorporate more fun into your office involves providing pool tables, board games, etc. This tactic allows your employees to truly relax when they take a break and engage with those around them.

If you want to incorporate this tactic into your business, consider investing in entertainment throughout the office. Some companies may buy a TV, while others will create a sports team.

Management is Like Family - Ultimate Software

Ultimate Software is a tech company that’s developed and sold UltiPro, which is a cloud management system that’s used across a number of industries.

The leadership and management at Ultimate Software makes the company very special. Employees are reportedly able to talk to their leadership about anything, including their personal lives. Perhaps this tactic is one of the reasons why this company has now grown to employ over 4,000 people since it first started in 1993.

If you’re looking for more ways to ensure that your employees can talk to your company’s leadership about more than upcoming sales and projects, you can do so by starting with yourself. You may want to make the effort to go around and get to know your employees beyond their roles in the company.

Career Advice - Salesforce

Salesforce is an American company that provides customer-relationship management services. It’s also known for selling a number of applications that are customer-facing and promote marketing analysis, application development, and more.

The reason so many people love working for this company is that they don’t just build professional friendships in the office. Managers at Salesforce are known for caring about their employees, and they even sit down with them to help them plan out their careers. By doing so, management is helping them build a life that’s more fulfilling and focuses on their overall happiness.

To incorporate this tactic into your own office or business, you may want to consider getting to know your employees better and learning about what inspires them.

Praising Successes - Cisco

Cisco develops, sells, and maintains networking hardware, software, and other necessary technology equipment. From 5G to Cybersecurity, Cisco has solutions and information for any topic in the industry.

A major bonus for Cisco employees is that they receive significant amounts of acknowledgement for jobs well-done. They generally feel like their opinions are always valued and like they have opportunites to share their ideas. But they feel listened to, and they’re even praised for sharing. This consideration goes a long way toward making employees feel comfortable at work and creating a safe workspace.

If you want to find new ways to acknowledge your employees, you should pay attention to what they’re suggesting and acknowledge when they’re doing a good job. You can even send out emails or make announcements, in order to make sure everyone knows he or she is doing a good job.

Allow Employees to Drive the Business - TaskUs

TaskUS primarily focuses on outsourcing customer support. This company provides solutions for consulting, customer experience, and back-office support.

TaskUs understands that employees are the driving forces behind successful companies. So it allows its employees to create their own experiences with their colleagues. For example, they’ve gone skydiving.

To start using this tactic in your business, consider asking your employees what they think makes the business thrive and how they see the business developing. You can also ask for ideas for team-building activities.

Reflecting Values at Work - Fanatics

Fanatics sells sports merchandise that’s already been licensed. It first opened in 1995 in Jacksonville, Florida.

Consider the heavy influence on sports in this company. It makes sense that they want their employees to be passionate and knowledgeable about sports. So they encourage  employees to pursue activities they love  (e.g., watching sports) and providing them with tickets to sporting events, in order to relieve stress and prevent burnout.

Based on this example, you might want to consider ways to incorporate more fun into your own business and promote events that reflect your business’ values. This effort will make it significantly easier for employees to come to work, and it will make the overall atmosphere of your business more enjoyable.

Lay Back on Supervision - Dynatrace

Dynatrace is well-known in the tech industry because it provides superior software intelligence platforms for IT departments.

This company focuses on trusting its employees and easing up on supervision. It makes an  effort to prevent stress in the workplace and promote employee confidence. Workers are allowed to manage their own workload and figure out how to make their hours work for them.

To use this tactic in your own business, you may want to consider whether you’re allowing your employees to control their own lives and workloads. If you’re not, consider reducing your amount of supervision.

Tactics to Improve Employees’ Physical Health

It can be hard for employees to juggle their physical and mental health, which is why installing physical wellness programs in your business can have such a positive impact.

Flexible Work - MasterCard Canada

MasterCard is known for accepting people from any income bracket and providing lower interest rates than other credit cards on the market.

MasterCard is one of the many companies that prioritize flexible work schedules to improve employee happiness. They accomplish this goal by straying away from the usual 9/5 routine and allowing their employees to make their own schedules. According to FlexJobs.com, 87% of people they surveyed would be more likely to love their jobs if they had flexible work schedules.

You can incorporate flexible work schedules into your business by allowing your employees to work from home and encouraging them to work more flexible hours.

Incentives for Exercising - Sparkrock

Sparkrock provides accounting software to nonprofit organizations and K12 school districts. It also hosts an annual conference called Fuel Good, which focuses on new approaches in technology and customer-facing solutions.

Sparkrock incentivizes exercise by providing their employees with $5 for every day they ride their bikes.

You can incorporate a similar philosophy into your own business by providing your employees with incentives for going to the gym. In other words, you can provide your employees with fitness challenges or incentives to bike to work.

Gyms and the Workplace - Pace Technical Services Inc.

Pace provides IT solutions and cloud services for various companies. They aim to provide small and midsize companies with proactive solutions

According to an article by Forbes, some companies are focusing more on exercise programs, in order to help improve their employees’ mental and physical wellness. In a survey, 11% of one company’s employees reported having enough energy the day before. In an effort to increase employee engagement and wellness, companies like Pace have incorporated gym programs. Pace provides up to $200 per year to employees who are members of a gym. Your company can incorporate this tactic by providing either physical rewards (e.g., , kitchen appliances) for going to the gym.

All About Training - Google

Google is one of the most successful tech companies in the world. Its search engine can provide a world of information to anyone with internet access.

It’s no secret that Google has excellent programs in place to help support employees and their overall wellness or careers. Some headquarters have incorporated ping-pong tables, nap pods, LEGO stations, laundry rooms, and more. Google also incorporates training from fellow employees, so the ones who have specialities or experience in specific fields can provide training to other employees.

If you want to incorporate this tactic into your own business, you may want to consider what your employees have to offer. You can realize this goal via interviews, surveys, and more. From there, you can create the opportunity for employees to teach each other. You may also want to look at amenities you can offer, which could include washing and drying services.

Opportunities to Improve Income - Workiva

According to the Workiva website, the company “provides reporting and compliance solutions for accounting, finance, adult, and internal controls.” Based in Iowa and founded in 2008, the company was able to build its annual revenue to just under $250 million by 2018.

Not only has Workiva been able to build its own revenue, it also helps employees rapidly build their incomes. For example, some employees have seen as much as a 55% increase in income in the last 8 years. While this situation can be considered both mental and physical wellness tactics, individuals  with higher incomes experience lower rates of obesity, heart disease, and more.

A definitive way to improve your employees’ income involves offering a higher income. If you don’t want to start this way, you can also provide them with opportunities for career advancement, which will also result in higher wages.

Wellness Centers at Work - Edifecs

Edifecs works primarily in the health field. In fact, this company produces products and solutions for healthcare information management .

Edifecs makes sure to incorporate its own values into the daily lives of its employees. While the company allows employees to work remotely, its physical office is also complete with kitchens, a gym, and a wellness center. At this center, employees can get free massages.

While you don’t have to build an entire wellness center in your office, you can learn from this company by focusing on your employees’ physical health more often. For example, you can invite a clinician or psychologist into the office once a week to maintain the wellness of your employees.

Focus on Amenities - Overstock.com

Overstock.com is an ecommerce company that provides common household products and furniture at a discounted price.

Overstock focuses on providing its employees with amenities that will improve their overall wellness. The company has a gym, cafe, game space, and greenhouse, in order to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to keep up with their health.

You can also focus on amenities by starting out small. For example, adding coffee machines or coffee shops could be great places to start. You may also want to consider investing in some weights or a gameroom.

Conclusion

Employee wellness has recently been making headlines because of rumors that it has a lasting, positive impact on various businesses. While some are skeptical about taking this step, the statistics make a clear argument for investing in employee wellness. By prioritizing your employees’ mental and physical health, you can experience happier workers, less turnover, and increased productivity.

You’ve probably learned about positive reinforcement in psychology classes. Did you know this concept can apply to workplace interactions?

Positive reinforcement involves adding a “reinforcing stimulus” after a specific behavior to make it more likely that the behavior will occur more in the future. If the reinforcing stimulus is a positive or favorable one, people are more likely to commit to that behavior over and over.

It’s a mutually beneficial psychology tactic that works for the sake of a healthy workplace environment. It can make employees communicate better, work more efficiently, and strive towards common goals. But how can one implement positive reinforcement?

In this little guide, we’ll be looking at different examples of positive reinforcement in the workplace and how positive reinforcement in the workplace makes a difference in business outcomes. Let’s take a look.

Some of these examples of positive reinforcement in the workplace may surprise you!

1. Give regular feedback for high-quality work.

Businesses that don’t bother with giving feedback leave their employees in a very stressful position. When will they know if they are doing something right? Is their job security at stake? Is there no way to improve?

Regular feedback on a weekly basis that is very personal to that specific employee is not only good for the mental health of that employee, but it also gives you a resource to look into when considering a promotion or termination.

2. Make sure you’re offering opportunities to advance.

Nobody likes a dead-end job. Nobody likes a job that’s unclear about their advancement opportunities, either.

In the interviewing stage, make it clear how likely the employee is to make a promotion during their stay with the company. Also, consider how difficult or easy you’re currently making it for your employees to advance-- are you providing them with opportunities to grow?

3. Offer performance bonuses.

Performance bonuses are awarded to employees who go above and beyond expectations and reach tangible goals. Performance bonuses offer an incentive to work more diligently and productively, and they also facilitate some healthy competition between employees. Make sure your bonuses are worthwhile and tantalizing-- a weak bonus won’t do much for incentive at all.

4. Offer a competitive salary.

The most basic form of positive reinforcement in the workplace comes down to an employee offering their skills and a business paying them money. The cycle goes on for the lifetime of the business relationship.

Offering a competitive salary is a basic but very effective way to implement positive reinforcement in the workplace. Make it clear why your business is worth considering over the competition.

5. Offer retreats, staff parties, travel opportunities, etc.

Bells and whistles could be a great way to improve positive reinforcement within your business. Offering opportunities to get outside of the office or actually have fun at the workplace on more lax days will encourage productive behavior. If this position involves occasional opportunities to relax and get to know one’s coworkers, why not keep the job and work to advance?

6. Use individualized reinforcement tactics.

All people are unique and no two employees are the same. Every human being has different desires, needs, and wants. As a result, we are all reinforced by different things. Make sure the specific reward you are using for positive reinforcement is having a tangible effect on a specific employee.

For example, some people find monetary gains to be highly reinforcing. Some people may find community and retreats to be more attractive.

7. Avoid connecting reinforcement with punishment.

When rewards and punishment are applied to a reinforcement attempt, they actually both lose their independent impact. For example, a manager could hold weekly meetings to hand out rewards and reward productive employees. Unfortunately, they also hold weekly meetings to punish employees who are doing less than well. This, unfortunately, will remove the reinforcing effect and no one will benefit from the meeting, whether they are doing well or not.

8. Link external reinforcement with digital feedback.

Positive reinforcement can work on a digital platform as well as in “real life.” If you use collaborative software such as Slack for your team, you can use digital incentives to produce positive reinforcement.

KudosBot lets you send kudos to employees who are doing particularly well. You can also invest in digital goal-trackers or visual graph aids for positive reinforcement online.

9. Give your employees opportunities to voice opinions

Sometimes positive reinforcement can be as simple as giving your employees a platform to speak their opinions on different work-related subjects. It’s true that the management and leaders within the company have an amplified voice and get to make more tangible and highly important decisions. However, your team members outside of management aren’t just little workhorses with no input-- your team has insight into parts of your company, a project, or a product that you and your management members simply don’t have.

Give your employees a chance to voice opinions and thoughts on different parts of a project, and go out of your way to ask for it.

10. Offer vacation days.

Knowing that you’ve worked hard and earned a week of vacation can be incentive enough for some employees. And for the employees that aren’t so excited about taking a vacation, offering PTO simply says that your company is worth working for and has valuable assets.

Companies are starting to see the real value in boosting workplace morale.

“Morale” can be broken down into a very simple concept-- It’s the idea that a business’s workforce can be confident, enthusiastic, and loyal to the business they work for. A company with low morale often also has a very high turnover rate, low productivity, and a general reputation for being a bad place to work.

Boosting workplace morale doesn’t have to involve cheesy team-building competitions or morning chant rituals. Workplace morale can be boosted with just a little hard work and a genuine desire to improve workplace conditions and company culture.

Before we dive into our list of great ideas on how to improve workplace morale, let’s look at how morale correlates to productivity.

How Morale Improves Productivity

Morale goes hand-in-hand with employee experience and quality of life. If you yourself were to be poorly-paid, badly treated, and in a work situation that made you miserable, would you have very much morale or brand loyalty for the company? Probably not.

Improving morale isn’t just an effort of ethics. One symptom of high morale is productivity-- something that businesses can reap the rewards of.

In a stable environment where employees are happy and able to focus, it becomes much easier for them to do their jobs. That, in turn, leads to more work being done and in less time.

So clearly, improving morale is beneficial for everyone-- employees and business owners alike.

These workplace morale-boosting ideas can virtually be used by businesses of any size or niche!

1. Use a workplace morale survey.

Not sure how to measure how well your morale attempts are working? Simply ask your employees how they are.

Workplace morale surveys can be implemented via Slack, email, in person, anonymously, and everywhere in between. They’re great for allowing employees to be candid about what they like and don’t like about their jobs, and just how much of that is due to conditions or culture.

2. Be a little spontaneous.

Good surprises are always welcome, and they can certainly improve the atmosphere of your workplace. Don’t be afraid to be occasionally a little off-the-wall. Let your team go home early once in a while. Throw a party for some achievement the team made. Be generous with bonuses or sponsor company barbecues. The little things are what count.

3. Make it a point to get out of the office more often.

Being stuck inside for 8-9 hours a day is obviously not ideal for one’s health, especially mentally. Team building can be something as simple as a full day out of the office or weekly retreats to a gym or a lunch and learn.

This should be less of a “free day” and more of an intentional workday, just outside of the typical confines of the office. Take this opportunity to communicate with your team and build rapport with coworkers you may only usually see in passing.

4. Always encourage your employees to use their PTO.

Too many businesses try to squeeze as much work out of their employees as humanly possible. This is one way to burn out your employees, get a very high turnover rate, and have very low company morale.

Instead, encourage and remind your reps to use the PTO that they’ve earned. Do not impose guilt onto your team members for using their absolutely earned vacation days. If you let your employees refresh and mentally rest while they’re gone, they’ll likely return with a wealth of ideas and incentives.

5. Be honest about what they can expect in regard to promotions.

Leading someone on is not a good thing, and that’s true for employees who expect a certain level of ease in achieving promotions, the likelihood of promotions, and how much they can expect in raises after being with the company for a certain amount of time.

Give your onboarding employees very clear guidelines for what they can expect in terms of getting promoted and what would be expected after the fact.

6. Invest in your employee training as an ongoing process.

People tend to leave their positions in sales due to poor training and learning opportunities or complete lack thereof. You simply cannot expect a new employee in a new position in a new company to just “figure it out.”

Invest in onboarding training, opportunities for your employees to gain more training if they need it, and places to ask questions without fear of reprimand.

7. Actually talk to your representatives.

Better morale has a lot to do with the relationship between management and the team itself. Leaders need to take the time to get to know their reps. This will help with understanding different communication styles, as well as different working style.

8. Always give positive and effective feedback to your employees.

Feedback is everything. You’re going to want feedback from your employees, and they definitely want feedback from you. Getting feedback from an employer helps an employee not feel anxious about how they are performing and their job security. Make sure this feedback is provided regularly and is highly specific.

9. Use performance and goal-based bonuses.

This is simple-- give out bonuses to high-performing team members. This can create healthy competition and incentives to reach team goals. Bonuses should be monetary but can be complemented with a “kudos” system as well.

KudosBot Can Help You Measure the Effects of Morale-Boosting Ideas

KudosBot is an online service that enables teams to praise team members and celebrate wins. It currently works through Slack and provides an easy mechanism to give kudos and integrate company values with it.