The name of the game at work is now, more than ever, looking for creative ways to engage employees. The Great Resignation, the pandemic, work-from-home, the national mental health crisis – everything has created a fever pitch around keeping people involved. 

Here are a few things we've seen, either from our own experience or our clients, that are relatively affordable ways that you can keep your folks involved. The best part – you could do each of these TODAY.

Invite employees to participate in job interviews

Here are some statistics from our survey work. 95% of employees would like to maintain or grow their involvement with the company interview process. 35% of employees actively wish they were more involved with the interview process. When we carve out our results for people who are under 35 years old, the answer escalates dramatically. Basically every employee wants to be involved with interviewing, and allowing younger, earlier in their career employees to be a part of the interview process is a great way of engaging them. At Holistic, we have random employees interview potential teammates, more for the purpose of sharing about the culture and getting to know the person than any sort of de facto evaluation. Our position is, if these folks are all going to be talking about the company at the water cooler months from now, they might as well have that conversation before the person joins. It has worked wonderfully.

Start a book club

Holistic has had a tremendous amount of success which is with the book club, which is in its third month. We assign two employees from different sections of the organization to be the facilitators each time. They get to choose the book. There are no limitations. We even bought everybody a Holistic book club mug and some bookmarks. To learn more about our book club, click here.

Form a cross-functional committee

Cross-functional, inter-level, or pan-organizational committees are a great way of engaging employees, giving them face time with leadership, giving them exposure to other key people in the company. We recommend this constantly for organizations. Whether this is some sort of DEI committee, like a belonging committee, or a committee tasked with a particular task, like a return to work committee, these types of committees are great ways to engage employees up and down the organization and keep them involved on a meaningful project. A few other potential ideas for cross-functional committees deal with holiday gifts, retreat planning, handbook review, benefits consideration, or just general focus groups about the employee experience.

Launch a giving benefit

There are a lot of ways to offer giving benefits. Our friends at Percent Pledge have one of the best examples. At Holistic we do something called Holistic Gives, through which each employee gets $200 that they can use annually to donate to a charity of their choosing. It is a wonderful program, as it allows our employees to really get some exposure, use our platform and our resources to support a cause that is important to them, and generally speaking feel more connected to the community and the world.

Lead an excel training

You will be stunned by this one. We are consistently surprised as to how many employees are desperate for Excel training. Excel is one of those things that virtually everybody agrees is a valuable skill to have, and yet, very few people feel confident in their skills. Moreover, there is likely somebody or a few people in your midst who are Excel experts. Allowing them to lead internal trainings and some key fundamentals of Excel is a brilliant idea. Here’s a list of the things you should know if you want to be functional in Excel.

Define your platform and allow employees to use it

Holistic has had a lot of success leveraging our platform on behalf of our employees. We have turned over our newsletter completely to our employees twice, once in response to SB8 in Texas, and once to reflect on the current political and social climate. We just opened up the newsletter and let people say whatever they wanted. Another way of opening up your platform is by leveraging your social media, either via takeover, celebrating people's posts, or just generally speaking letting employees have a little bit more control over what a company says. The idea behind this is that you subjugate the company's interests behind the interests of your employees, and show confidence in the employees to share what they want on your platform.

We’re all looking for ways to engage employees. Hopefully, some of these resonated with you all. If you have ideas that you like to share, shoot them to us at info@holisticindex.com. And definitely let us know how it worked when you try to do some of these things.

Additional links:

To read about our services where we will actually help you start a book club, click here.