How To Build Employee Engagement With Team Workshops And Events

Quarterly and annual team workshops and events have gotten away with being ‘throwaway’ for far too long. Team events should either meaningfully improve employee engagement or team performance or both.

In this video / blog I want to address how to move the needle and build employee engagement with team workshops and events.

What Is Employee Engagement?

I know for many that employee engagement is their daily bread but for those of you who are a bit hazy – I’m going to define engagement as being work engagement as outlined by Utrecht University. Work engagement is characterised as team members displaying:

• Vigour (energy, resilience and effort)
• Dedication (for example, enthusiasm, inspiration and pride)
• Absorption (concentration and being engrossed in one’s work)

Unlike this article on why team events matter, the business case for focusing on employee engagement has long been closed.

The Harvard Business Review surveyed business leaders back in 2014 and found that 71% of them thought that employee engagement was critical to the success of their organizations.

Since that time there has been an explosion of research and literature on employee engagement and a wealth of investment in employee experience and culture from ambitious, forward-thinking businesses.

“Thanks for the lesson, but how do team workshops and events fit into this?”

For a simple visual of how workshops and events can help I’ll use a recognised model in Carey & Elliott’s Engagement Bridge^TM

As featured in their best-selling book “Build it – The Rebel Playbook For World-Class Employee Engagement” the Engagement Bridge^TM below is a simple, yet powerful way of looking at building engagement in your organisation.

 

As each layer is added (or further strengthened) the engagement bridge gets stronger and the more employees it carries.

 Team Workshops And Events & The Engagement Bridge^TM

In this section I’m going to work through the Engagement Bridge^TM moving from the foundation layers up to the top outlining how you can build employee engagement with team workshops and events.

Wellbeing

Team Wellbeing Workshops address everything from healthy eating to moving pain free to building mental resilience.

Larger, keynote wellbeing workshops are a great addition to your next conference but just as powerful are the smaller, more regular, habit building workshops supported by follow up culture building wellbeing challenges.

Engagement Leads know that employee wellbeing underpins everything and cannot be ignored or swept under the carpet with snack boxes and gym memberships – this makes wellbeing workshops a great way to tackle the challenge.

Open & Honest Communication

Team building providers often default to ‘building communication’ when trying to make the business case for investing in them. But what does building communication mean?

We think that workshops and events should facilitate open and honest communication by building trust and gamifying the ‘difficult bit’ to build confidence and skill in this area. We’ve done this with both fun Lego master builder events and team personality profiling workshops.

Purpose, Mission & Values

When it comes to communicating and celebrating your business purpose and mission or bringing your values off the page to live them not just read about them, team workshops and events come into their own.

Supporting charity, helping the community, becoming more sustainable can all be addressed as a team in an experiential and memorable way. Also through use of metaphor you can “build”, “connect”, “respect” and “be human” at your next conference through a suitable team workshop or event tied to the key messaging you need to convey.

Management

When it comes to building employee engagement, Management is arguably more important than Leadership. Leaders can impart their vision and paint a beautiful image of the future but, it is through Managers that most employees experience your organisation’s true culture on a daily basis. According to Gallop, 50% of employees leave because of their manager.

Personality Profiling Workshops can help to equip your Management Team with the insights, awareness and soft skills required to sustain and nurture employee engagement in their people.

A dry, profile report and a boring 3 hours in conference room as a facilitator shuffles through a set piece delivery isn’t going to cut it however. We believe that clients’ need a workshop tailored uniquely to your business, underpinned by a respected profiling tool with real, actionable outcomes agreed by all.

Recognition

Last but not least workshops and events have always been a brilliant way of saying thank you with Awards Dinners, Hospitality, Summer Fun Days, Christmas Parties. It has historically been the case that these activities are done when a business has “done the numbers”. In a world where employee engagement is regarded as critical to long term success it might be that you are not the numbers because you’re not doing the recognition workshops and events enough.

What Next?

The old way of treating people at work has failed. According to Gallup 30% of employees are engaged in their jobs and in such a competitive world this simply isn’t enough.

Team workshops and events, when designed in partnership with you, should help you to offset these alarming statistics.

Targeted workshops and events should help you to measurably build employee engagement in order to empower your staff to innovate more, deliver better customer service and beat the competition.

If you’re ready for more from your next team workshop or event then we want to hear from you!

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