Employees are the backbones of your startup and most startups fail to generate maximum employee engagement. Many studies have also shown that only 15-20% of the organizations across the world are motivated and driven to work for their company. Use these employee engagement hacks to increase the productivity and motivation of your employees instantly!

Start running contests inside your organization and leverage your Linkedin profile to publish about the winners of the contests. You can run virtual team trivia contests, desk decoration contests based on themes (work from home setup contests), online office games, etc, but I love the idea of Hackathons.

Virtual Hackathons are a marathon of competitions where teams compete to build a new product or bring a new idea to life in a fixed time frame (1-2 days max). These are one of the most thrilling and existing activities you can conduct for your employees. 

Pick a specific theme, provide everything they will need and announce it across your team and finally keep a nice prize for the winners. Here are a few suggestions for contests and hackathon prizes: concert tickets or sporting tickets, extra paid time off, subscriptions of employee’s choice, cool gadgets they can use daily, special gift cards, sponsored trips, full redeemable shopping vouchers, upgraded gadgets like laptops or tablets.

Since all of us are working from home and for the foreseeable future will be working the same way, to increase engagement of new joiners in your organization conduct ice breaker sessions. No, it doesn’t take a lot of time and you don’t need to do it on zoom. Use gatheround to conduct the ice breaker sessions. The tool will randomly match all your employees and ask a set of interesting questions which will bring out the personality of all the employees and help them connect and get along.

Organizing Fitness and Yoga activities is also one of the best things you can do to increase employee engagement. Research studies, again and again, have proven that fitness activities among employees increase their motivation and productivity by 2-3 folds. You can either bring in experts to conduct these for you or you can pick someone from the team who is a fitness enthusiast and is ready to take this up. 

If your organization uses Slack for work communication, then you can do so many things in the app itself. If you open their apps directory you will find a plethora of games and fun activities you can do with the team in the app itself. Employees can play these fun games in their break period to avoid burnout and then get back to work! Give this a try.

Value employee feedback. It’s very important to build a company culture where employees are not hesitant to express their thoughts and opinions on different issues. There should be a system to conduct anonymous surveys and build formal feedback channels. 

Trust your people and empower them. It’s difficult to stop micromanaging for most entrepreneurs but when it becomes a norm, the employee engagement goes for a toss. The best resort here is to trust your employees and give them achievable deadlines and good headspace where they can use their maximum creativity and deliver the best results.

Always recognize good work. It’s a no-brainer. If your employees achieved the desired results or gave their heart and soul into a project, make sure you recognize their work and appreciate the efforts. You can either introduce an incentive-based program or provide uncalled surprise bonuses to people who did some kick-ass work in the past months or an awards program where you can publicly appreciate their work on company boards and also on company social media profiles and your LinkedIn profile.