Employee Engagement Campaigns: 12 Unique Ideas

You found our list of the best employee engagement campaigns.

Employee engagement campaigns are operations that aim to drive employee involvement and enthusiasm. For example, “Humans of our company” and “Battle of the elements.” During these campaigns, employees participate in fun and interactive activities proposed by organizational leaders.

These activities help to improve company culture and raise employee morale and are similar to virtual engagement ideas and employee engagement activities.

This article includes:

• employee engagement digital campaigns
• employee engagement campaign examples
• employee engagement social media campaigns
• internal employee engagement campaigns

Here is the list!

List of employee engagement campaigns

From Mister Rogers calls to battle of the elements to internal blogs, here is a list of employee engagement campaign examples that will motivate your teammates to give 100% effort.

1. Humans of Our Company

Many people are familiar with Humans of New York, the photo project that posts portraits and interview snippets of random passersby. Audiences responded so well to the series of strangers’ stories, that the page inspired several impersonators in other cities.

You could launch a spinoff of your own in the form of humans of our company. To kickoff the campaign, reach out to at least one employee a week, ask for a photo, and conduct a short interview via email, phone call, video chat, or in person.

Here are some questions you can consider:

• Who is the most influential person in your life?
• What is your greatest struggle right now?
• What’s the happiest moment of your life?
• When in your life were you most scared or anxious?
• What is the best advice you ever received?
• What is the strongest memory from your childhood?

For more profile interview inspiration, you can draw on these lists of icebreaker questions and get to know you questions.

Because people enjoy talking about themselves, your employees are likely to cooperate enthusiastically.

This activity highlights the humanity of your workforce and allows colleagues to get to know each other on a more personal level, paving the way for team bonding.

2. Mister Rogers Calls

At TeamBuilding we do a virtual team building activity called Mister Rogers calls. Employees who want to partake join a special channel on Slack. On a weekly basis, the Donut app matches up random teammates who then schedule a short midday video chat during the upcoming week.

This exercise is a great way for our remote team to meet and mingle cross-departmentally. Coworkers who have never met can socialize and bond over non-work topics like travel, cats, and the band Hanson. The app will match employees as frequently or infrequently as you prefer, and you can always adjust settings based on company workload.

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3. Mission Possible

Every brand has a mission statement and core values, but sometimes employees forget or neglect those beliefs after successfully passing the interview. You can remind your crew of your organization’s driving principles by challenging employees to live the company’s mission.

First, set a specific timeframe for your campaign. Next, issue the challenge to your staff. When announcing the campaign, it is helpful to include your values and mission statement, and give examples of possible activities. Within departments or in teams of no more than ten, employees will engage in activities that exemplify your company’s vision. For example, if one of your company’s values is lifelong learning, then one department might attend a pastry-baking class together.

Teams can share photos,videos, and screenshots of the actions on social media, or on an internal channel such as an employee forum or communication software. When the campaign ends, acknowledge the groups that carried out the greatest number of deeds or the most impressive gestures and reward those exemplary teams.

4. Battle of the Elements

The best employee engagement campaigns encourage teammates to make permanent positive changes. Battle of the elements challenges employees to adopt healthy habits. The activity centers around the four basic elements: fire, water, air, and earth. Each element corresponds to a healthy change.

Battle of the elements teams:

• Fire = give up smoking
• Water = drink more water
• Air = get outside more often
• Earth = eat healthier

Each participant will pick a team and set a specific goal. For instance, a fire team member may vow to only smoke one cigarette per day, while an earth teammate commits to eating eight servings of fruit and vegetables daily. For every day the teammate achieves the goal, the participant will earn one point for the team.

The campaign will run for a set amount of time; we recommend one month. At the end of the challenge, you will tally up the points and average the sum to find the team percentage. The element team with the highest percentage wins the campaign and will receive a prize.

5. Move More Mondays

Office gigs have long had a reputation for being sedentary jobs, but virtual offices are even more couch-potato friendly. Home office workers do not even gain the few consolation steps required to cross the parking lot or stroll to a colleague’s cubicle. Only the most health-conscious telecommuters satisfy daily exercise goals, and even these fitness gurus can slip when workloads run wild.

You can encourage your colleagues to exercise by instituting Move More Mondays. At the start of every week, schedule a 30-45 minute video call and run through a team-building fitness routine together. You can run intensive campaigns over a set course of time like six weeks, or you can spread out the activity by designating the first Monday of every month as bootcamp. The idea is to spur remote teammates to be more physically active so that circulation improves, stress decreases, and endorphins boost mood and energy.

Here is a list of team workout ideas.

6. Hall of Fame

Glory is not the sole motivator for every worker’s performance, but recognition is satisfying and can boost productivity. Most young professionals- 44% of Gen Z and 36% of millennials- would spend more time learning if managers acknowledged those efforts, according to LinkedIn’s latest Workplace Learning Report.

You can use employee engagement campaigns like Hall of Fame to create a space for peer to peer or supervisor shout-outs. Simply designate a portal such as a digital whiteboard app, social media page, or online chat channel as your hall of fame. Then, invite staff to praise and talk-up coworkers. To elevate the activity and encourage participation, you can regularly select the most glowing post as pick of the week, and award the poster and subject of the post with a small prize such as a dessert, a useful office accessory, or a rare piece of company swag.

For similar activities, check out this list of employee of the month ideas.

7. Taco Tuesdays

You may remember the Slack app HeyTaco! from our list of team building apps. HeyTaco! allows employees to send each other taco emojis as praise and thanks, as well as the occasional digital gift such as a picture of a jar of hot sauce or a taco in a cape. Teammates who receive tacos can exchange the emojis for a prize like a team lunch or tickets to a local sporting event.

Each member of the team gets five taco emojis to send per day, but chances are not every employee will consistently use the app daily. To encourage participation, you can run an ongoing campaign called Taco Tuesdays where you challenge all teammates to send all five tacos during the second day of every workweek. You can even run competitions to see who can send all five tacos the quickest.

Taco Tuesdays are a great example of employee engagement digital campaigns that connect remote teammates and nourish virtual company culture.

8. Secret Admirer

You can ensure every employee receives attention and acknowledgment by launching a secret admirer campaign. First, gather your pool of participants. Since this activity can be low-cost or no cost, you can either take volunteers or mandate total employee participation. Next, use an online generator to randomly pair names. Once you assign the secret admirers, each participant a name. Over the course of the next couple of weeks or month, employees must seek out opportunities to publicly recognize and praise the chosen coworker. Compliments must be genuine, and participants must hype up the admiree at least once during the timespan.

9. Shout it from the Mountains

Shout it from the Mountains is one of several employee engagement social media campaigns you can run among your workforce. In this campaign, teammates will sound off about your organization’s bragging points by sharing posts about their favorite aspects of the company on social media. Examples may include worthwhile projects, work relationships, or cool equipment.

The point of this exercise is to generate positivity and gratitude and take stock of what makes your workplace great. Public posts can garner brand awareness and a good reputation for your company, but workers may suspect that the campaign is all for publicity if you specify that posts must not be private. To avoid coming off as opportunistic, you can offer employees the option to either share with the community at large or post contributions to a closed group on the platform.

Whatever route you choose, you will want to reference your company’s social media policy and clear the campaign with your social media department prior to announcing the challenge to your crew!

10. Dress Rehearsals

One of the perks of working for any company is getting to know information about upcoming products and initiatives before the general public. Some organizations are so large or segmented that employees may not be privy to interesting innovations.

You can hold dress rehearsals to soft-launch new products and services and meaningfully connect employees with the company’s new offerings. For instance, perhaps a food distributor launches a new line of chocolates and invites warehouse workers to a fun and interactive blind taste test. Or maybe a soda manufacturer stocks an experimental flavor in the office break room. An entertainment company might host employee screenings to pre-premiere new movies and TV shows.

These informal beta tests allow opportunities for staff to weigh in and offer opinions on new features, fostering feelings of organizational pride and ownership. Plus, staff will feel like VIP’s by getting to be the first to try a new experience. Inviting family members and friends to join the fun and festivities is a great way to drive engagement and win extra points with employees.

11. Internal Blog

Launching a company blog is one of the simplest internal employee engagement campaigns. You can use a platform like WordPress or BlogIn to create your blog. Content guidelines can inform employees about the blog’s intentions and structure ideas, so you should start your project by laying out do’s and don’ts. Perhaps you want to keep the blog strictly industry-related, or maybe you want to offer the freedom to write about any interesting or affecting topics. For instance, maybe employees offer healthy eating-tips and stress-busting meditation instructions, promote charitable causes, or share intriguing stories like the wild world of Hot Wheels collectors. Even if you are open to subject matter, you should lay forth suggested word counts and explain the submission process.

You can highlight interesting posts by sending out snippets in an internal email. When you stumble across a high-quality post, you can source the content for your external company blog or marketing materials, with the author’s permission. If submission volumes are low, then you can incentivize staff to contribute by posing prompts and offering prizes.

12. Survey Says

One of the most helpful tools at a professional’s disposal is the employee engagement survey. By polling your staff, you can gain insight into the company’s morale, motivations, and opinions. These surveys allow employees to provide feedback and share ideas, giving the average teammate the power to shape the company.

Instead of sending out a survey once a year or so, you can create a series of surveys that normalizes the act of sharing constructive criticism and honest feedback.

One mistake organizations sometimes make is not acknowledging or acting upon the information in the survey. If nothing about the operation or culture changes, then employees may feel as if the exercise is a formality and may not respond. Same if you say, “we hear you,” but never change.

The best course of action is to target the low-hanging fruit and employ the easy fixes first to show your employees you listened. For instance, if teammates complain about a constantly icy sidewalk, salt the walkway immediately and research long term solutions like installing eaves. If colleagues bemoan the lack of available healthy snacks, then place a fruit bowl in the breakroom. You can write your surveys to include easily-implementable changes to stack the deck in your favor and set the campaign up for success.

Check out this list of employee survey questions.

Conclusion

Employee engagement can directly influence productivity, mood, and creativity, all of which can ultimately affect a business’s bottom line. By launching imaginative employee engagement campaigns, you can grab your staff’s attention and reassure your employees that you care about their wellbeing, happiness, and opinion. Campaigns are a proactive approach to ensuring that your workplace is a stimulating and enticing environment.

Next, check out these employee engagement books, this list of HR skills and these employee engagement strategies for work.

We also have a posts on employee engagement frameworks, employee engagement benefits and 4-day workweeks.

Plus, a resource on employee engagement statistics and facts.