How to Keep up Your Employee and Business Wellbeing during Covid-19 | Part 2

by Katharina Gittsovich in , — April 2021
Our two colleagues from Talentor Latvia have identified 9 engagement activities that will not only boost employee engagement, but also support long-term business goals. Read their

by Olga Karuna and Alise Skrastiņa

In the first part of this article we already presented 4 great activities to boost your employees' engagement. Here we are with another five suggestions:

Internal communication

9 Engagement Activities to Boost Your Employee's Engagement - Part 2

5. Organize counselling sessions to cope with remote work

Many employees love flexible work, but not all are prepared to work fully from home – especially if their family is also there. Spouse having virtual meetings, children asking for help and so on – all of these aspects can create a lot of distraction that can create frustration and lower engagement. Even though it’s challenging, there are some tools that might help employees to cope with the need of working remotely.

For example, it might be worth to consider parental counselling for employees who have children at home – sessions where they can share their problems and ask for advice will give information and tools needed to create calmer work settings at home. Additionally, psychological consultations can have positive impact for those employees who struggle without social interaction with other people, depressions or other mental health issues. Nutrition masterclass is also a viable option for many employees and can provide beneficial information on how to prepare healthy food fast for themselves and their families, meaning that they will have to spend less time for cooking and can focus more on their job responsibilities.


6. Implement project management tools

Digital project management tools are great way to follow up the status of projects, keep employees accountable and see what each of involved parties are responsible for. Such tools as JIRA, Asana and many more come handy not only during remote work but also in general, because they ensure transparent project management flow and allow project managers to act quickly when issues arise. Digital tools will also help to spend less time on reports, virtual meetings and discussions, because all the information will be stored un updated within one place.

Project management

7. Involve employees in long-term responsibilities

Involving your employees in long-term projects or responsibilities is important to create sense of stability and show that their work is important for your organisation. Current global market situation might raise employee concerns about potential layoffs even if there are no viable risks. Small, repetitive, short-term job tasks can create feeling that employees are at risk of being let go, therefore long-term responsibilities are vital for ensuring employees value in the future. Additionally, some cross-department long-term activities can also have a positive impact on strengthening employee collaboration on wider level within organisation, as well as promote knowledge sharing among different functions.

8. Host regular live Q&A sessions

Transparent communication with your employees is the key for positive engagement and employee retention as well. One of the worst things that disrupts motivation and engagement is information vacuum about the current situation in the organisation. When employees do not know what is happening with the business, what is the strategy to cope with crisis (if there is one) and what is the overall organizational temperature, it creates stress, anxiety and have negative impact on the trust. There might be a lot of important questions from the side of your employees, but not all are ready to ask them publicly. We highly suggest creating regular live Q&A sessions where management answers on previously sent in anonymous employee questions. Such activity will show that management is open to talk about the situation in the organisation and let employees to be heard. Even if first few sessions have less questions than expected, with time employees will feel more confident to ask for information they feel is important. This can have positive impact also on day-to-day communication as well.


9. Informal management meetings without CEO

Collaboration between managers is vital for achieving business goals. Informal management meet-ups can have beneficial effect on knowledge sharing, problem solving and collaboration aspects which all are important for engagement. We suggest encouraging your managers to host monthly or quarterly informal meetings where they can discuss issues in their teams or other problems without the involvement of CEOs. Such activity creates space for sharing different situations and solutions that managers have come up with for problems they have encountered. Additionally, they can create topic pool where they have the best expertise and discuss different tools and activities that could be adapted within other teams, and in the next meeting reflect what worked and what did not. This type of activity will strengthen cross-functional collaboration and improve leadership skills.

Shutterstock 511307179

The scope of internal communication solutions to empower team leaders to discover the full potential of their employees in terms of engagement, productivity and retention is quite diverse. Therefore, we recommend choosing well-considered set of applied activities in the certain period of time and don’t forget that importance of employee engagement can’t be overrated.