Creating a positive work environment virtually isn’t always easy. To keep your team members enthused about their work and committed to your company, engagement should be a constant area of focus. However, keeping on top of engagement initiatives is no small undertaking, no matter the size of your organization.
One of the simplest ways to overcome this is by making use of an employee engagement calendar. Armed with one of these, you’ll have a clear framework for enhancing employee morale, inspiring loyalty, and giving your business the best possible chance at long-term success.
What is an Employee Engagement Calendar?
If you’re serious about implementing an employee engagement strategy to motivate team members, an employee engagement calendar will prove invaluable. With a calendar, have an indispensable framework that can be used to track progress, measure success, and determine how well your employee engagement strategy is performing.
Why Employee Engagement is So Important
An employee engagement calendar helps bridge the gap between employer and employee. Once you’ve created one, you can use your calendar to encourage employees to participate in new initiatives and planned events.
Employee engagement is vital to any business, but arguably more so for companies that operate virtually. It can be hard to establish a positive and productive work environment when you do business remotely, but employee engagement can help overcome this.
By prioritizing the mental health and well-being of your workforce, you can look forward to increased morale, productivity levels, and improved performance. This brings immediate benefits like satisfied customers and healthier profit margins but also helps with employee satisfaction.
Employee engagement is beneficial to everyone within your organization. You can use it to build a stronger company culture by introducing new hires to it during the virtual onboarding process. Worried about retention rates? Employee engagement can be used to recognize the contributions of long-serving workers.
Tips for Keeping Employee Engagement Calendars Effective
A good employee engagement calendar will guarantee continued motivation and drive productivity levels through the roof. Need some tips on maintaining momentum? Read on for some essential advice.
How Relevant is Your Calendar?
Avoid being too general when putting together your employee engagement calendar. It’s fine to use a broad template to get things started, but things ultimately need to be tailored to your company and its culture. What are your company’s key values and ultimate goals? These need to be reflected in your engagement activities.
Ask For Input
Encourage employees to get involved in the creation process. This alone can be considered an engagement exercise, while it also promotes a culture of transparency. What’s more, it ensures you have a slate of events that are actually relevant to the people who work for you.
A Flexible Approach is Best
While an employee engagement calendar is a valuable asset, don’t look at it as a fixed schedule. Some events will need to be adjusted to accommodate for things like employee availability and unforeseen emergencies. A little flexibility will ensure everyone benefits from what you’ve got planned.
Take Advantage of Available Technology
An employee engagement calendar is only useful if you have the right tools in place. Online calendars can be used to streamline scheduling, while communication platforms make it easy to connect remote teams. Looking for a full-featured video conferencing platform to keep your employees engaged? With Gloww, you can create interactive presentations in moments thanks to user-friendly templates and an impressive array of intuitive features.
24 Fun Employee Engagement Calendar Activities for Each Month
Even though you’ll be making a few changes down the line, forward-thinking will ensure you get the most from an employee engagement calendar. Whether it’s icebreaker activities for welcoming new hires or virtual team trivia sessions for team bonding, there are plenty of ways to keep your teams engaged throughout the year.
January
1. New Year Kick-Off Meeting
Start as you mean to go on with a kick-off meeting to welcome in January. Review past successes, flag areas for improvement, and establish business goals for the year ahead.
2. Vision Board Creation
January should be a time for looking forward. Encourage your teams to think aspirationally by creating virtual vision boards to express where they’d like to be a year from now.
February
3. Love for Learning Workshop
Focus on professional development during the shortest month of the year with virtual workshops. Ask for input to help you identify shared interests and key skills that your employees are keen to develop.
4. Collaborative Love Playlist
February is a time for romance, so make things festive by encouraging employees to create a playlist loaded with tracks for Valentine’s Day. Want to avoid the usual ballads? How about anti-love songs instead?
March
5. Women’s History Trivia
In many countries, March is Women’s History Month. Still not sure how you’ll be honoring the event this May? Why not host a Women’s History Month trivia session?
6. St. Patrick’s Day Trivia
Plenty of people can claim Irish ancestry, so it’s little wonder that St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated across the globe. To find the real Irish among your workforce, host a St. Patrick’s Day trivia event. You can even hand out gift cards to the winning team or player.
April
7. Earth Day Initiative
Are you trying to make your business more sustainable? Make a point of promoting Earth Day in April. If possible, think about organizing a webinar with a guest speaker to raise environmental awareness.
8. Celebrate Creativity and Innovation
On April 21, it’s World Creativity and Innovation Day. Boost employee engagement by putting a fresh twist on brainstorming sessions. Task your teams with coming up with creative solutions to the biggest obstacles your business is facing.
May
9. Health and Wellness Challenge
Make May a time to encourage healthier habits with virtual yoga sessions, fitness challenges, and more. May is also the declared awareness month for mental health, so putting together enriching webinars and offering support channels is something to consider.
10. Virtual Team Lunch
Finding it hard to replicate a traditional work environment? Bring the social aspect back to remote work by making May the month you host your first virtual team lunch.
June
11. Outdoor Challenge Day
Now that summer’s arrived, encourage your employees to embrace the great outdoors. Renew those fitness challenges and health goals, or add an al fresco twist to your next online luncheon.
12. Online Summer Games
Ease into the sun-soaked season with online summer games. Host a summer-themed team activity session that’s packed with sun-soaked versions of your favorite team-building games and activities.
July
13. Mid-Year Review and Celebration
With the year half done, it’s time to reflect and celebrate your successes. Keep it casual with an informal get-together with your entire team. Spotlight your biggest achievements, give shout-outs to top performers, and establish objectives for the next six months.
14. Summer Wellness Challenge
It’s easy to indulge during the warmer months. Make sure everyone’s remembering to take care of themselves during the summer with a few wellness challenges. Keep it simple with things like healthy eating suggestions and daily steps challenges to increase engagement levels.
August
15. Virtual Team Happy Hour
It’s International Beer Day in August, so what better time to host a virtual team happy hour? Put together a bespoke cocktail menu and create a themed meeting template to set the right tone.
16. Movies Based on Books Trivia
It’s International Book Lovers Day on August 9, so some literature-inspired challenges will go down well. Not everyone’s an avid reader, so why not make a few adjustments to this movie trivia game and frame questions around books that have been adapted for the silver screen?
September
17. Superhero Team Activity
It’s Batman Day on September 16, so why not celebrate the Caped Crusader in style with a superhero-themed activity? Loaded with emoji quizzes, spot-the-difference challenges, trivia questions, and more, there’s something for everyone.
18. Back-to-Work Celebration
Make sure your team isn’t suffering from the post-vacation blues by celebrating a return to work with fun activities. Get nostalgic with themed quizzes about past adventures, spice things up with a virtual dance party, or keep the spirit of summer alive with an online get-together bursting with beachy vibes.
October
19. Haunted Halloween Team Activity
Want to get everyone in the mood for the spookiest season of the year? A Halloween-inspired team activity is a great way to engage employees in October.
20. Virtual Costume Contest
Halloween is the perfect time for adults to indulge in a little dress-up. Host a virtual costume contest, host a poll to find everybody’s favorite, and dish out prizes to the top scorers.
November
21. Thanksgiving Fun Feast
Now we’re into November, things start to get heavy on the festivities, so there’s ample choice of employee engagement activities to boost morale. Keen to beat the lull before Christmas? How about a Thanksgiving team activity?
22. Gratitude Circle
You can fold this into a virtual Thanksgiving celebration or host one separately if you’re short on time. Each member of your team is given the spotlight to share what they’re most thankful for. You can keep things focused on work, or give people free reign to give thanks for just about anything.
December
23. Ugly Sweater Day
It’s Ugly Sweater Day on the third Friday of December. Encourage employees to pull on the worst piece of knitwear they can find and run a poll to decide who’s committed the worst fashion faux pas of the year.
24. Virtual Christmas Party
Say farewell to the year and embrace the festivities with a virtual Christmas party. Play trivia games inspired by holiday favorites, get creative with a round of Scribble, and encourage everyone to share their most treasured Christmas memories.
Employment Engagement Just Got Easier Thanks to Gloww
Employee engagement is an ongoing process, so you’ll need the right tools to ensure success. With Gloww, you’ll find all the tools you need to engage your teams and ensure they stay that way. Our full-featured conferencing and engagement platform can be tailored to your requirements, while there’s a vast selection of templates to make your life easier.
For more on this topic, here’s how you can create a healthy work culture. We also have a list of virtual team building activities, as well as 5-minute team building activities in case you’re pressed for time, and team building activities that are specifically designed for large groups.
Discover the benefits of Gloww yourself and get started today. Want to get even more out of Gloww? Explore our pricing tiers to learn more about our advanced features for premium users. Got a question? Get in touch today and our team will be happy to respond.
