Prefer to watch instead? Diva shares how to engage employees in this video.
Recently I’ve been ideating with a couple of enterprise brands around how to engage their internal audience. With entire workforces working remotely and some consumer-focused efforts being put on hold, these brands are seeing a challenge in keeping their employees engaged. While employee engagement is not a new topic, it’s one that many brands could benefit from having a renewed focus on.
Plenty of brands take advantage of Marigold Grow to engage with their external audiences, so why not extend that to your internal audience? You need to retain your talent for your company to succeed, and one way to do that is to treat your employees to the same quality of experience that you offer your consumers. Practice what you preach, rather than providing your teams a sub-par offering.
Low effort, high reward
Aside from generally engaging your workforce, think of some of the mechanics listed below as a more interesting way to deliver content that already exists within your organization. Employee feedback has been resoundingly positive at companies employing initiatives such as these noted here, so read on for our top tips!
Here are three key areas and accompanying mechanics to consider when engaging employees.
Driving a Virtual Community
Bridge the gap with User Generated Content (UGC) experiences
Pandemic or no pandemic, colleagues in medium-to-large offices often feel disconnected from one another in their different functions. Even more so when they are operating as a global team over multiple time zones.
How to combat this? Highly popular in consumer-focused campaigns, a simple UGC campaign is a winning solution here, too. Drive re-engagement with weekly or monthly themes, perhaps determined by the use of an easily repeatable poll mechanic. Starting with our own “Show Us Your WFH Set-up,” we’ve seen some really inventive themes coming from our clients.
With the UGC contest, this could be a data capture form only, or could also include hashtag based entry — the latter benefiting from visibility outside the business. Why not implore your employees to act as brand ambassadors?
You could even take it one step further with a meme generator, driving the creation of unique shareable branded content.
Give employees a voice with a community voting contest
Certain decisions don’t need to be made in a closed boardroom. Give a say to your employees by asking them to assess a selection and vote on the final outcome. This could be to give kudos to the employee of the month, vote for the top tip of the week, or even how to direct charitable donations.
We have seen all types of businesses across verticals, from small to enterprise, successfully use our contest mechanic in all of the ways mentioned above — with employees entering submissions, the business judging the finalists, and then the community having the final vote.
Understanding your employees
Gather feedback with polls and surveys
You are likely making efforts to better understand your audience and how to meaningfully communicate with them. Are you making the same efforts with your talent? When it’s this easy with a simple poll or survey form, you have no excuse not to be. Perhaps you are collecting feedback on an upcoming initiative, looking to understand local plans for the upcoming year, or even something fun that will power future UGC themes like mentioned above.
Encourage learning and testing knowledge
Reward learning with a watch and learn
Turn the consumer-focused “Watch to Win” template towards your internal audience when you have a policy or updated brand messaging with an accompanying video. As we advise on the consumer side — if you want to ensure that employees are paying attention, how about delivering the video with a followup question that could be either fact- or opinion-based.
Challenge knowledge and drive awareness with quizzes
Quizzes provide a more engaging way to test knowledge on certain procedures or to drive awareness of how overarching business goals match up to company actions. The inclusion of an immediate correct/incorrect answer response allows the opportunity to also link to existing materials to read more.
A classic 2-4-1 deal
And this is where some of our Marigold Grow features really shine. If you’re a current client, you’ll already have your branded theme ready to go, so any activity you set up will already be on-brand.
You may even have the campaign type set up already too, and can simply clone and make a few tweaks. We have an enterprise client who has done just that, cloning and using the same score quiz and just shifting the nomenclature from “How well do you know <brand name>?” to “How well do you know OUR brand?”
If you’ve made a push to communicate and connect with your audience, you already have the framework in place to do the same with your employees. Even though the majority of employees are working from home, that doesn’t mean you should disengage. You can use the same Marigold Grow that you offer to your customers to connect with employees and make them feel just as valued.
