Are you looking for a solution that will help you increase your team’s morale during this time of professional uncertainty? Recruiting Specialist Kaycee Tyler walks you through creative ways to virtually engage with your employees. Keep a look out for more from Fuel Medical Recruiting Services as we’ll be sending out additional tips and tricks about employee engagement and building your employer brand.
Virtual Happy Hour
Let’s Get Virtual! Creative Communication to Accommodate the Distance
In the spirit of employee engagement, we wanted to reach out to you and offer innovative ideas for communicating with your staff that are not on a typical schedule.
Hosting a weekly ‘virtual happy hour’ gives you the opportunity to bring everyone together on a regular basis, communicate with your employees about important things happening in the office, and find out what is going on in their lives, how they are doing, etc.
This kind of consistent communication can increase employee engagement by providing opportunities for employee bonding, decrease the amount of uncertainty in your staff’s lives and contribute to the overall culture in your office.
How to Create a ‘Virtual Happy Hour’
Step 1: Download a Video Chat Platform
Depending on the software and devices you and your staff have access to, this will vary. Here is a good resource that offers some great info on how to choose the best fit for you and your staff.
Step 2: Put Together an Idea List of Topics to Cover
This should include information about general goings-on in the business and anything else employees would want to know about what is happening in the office. Once this is prepared, it can act as a sort of checklist or agenda of topics that need to be addressed at the meeting. Make sure to ask employees for input on things that they are curious about prior to the meeting and pencil in some time at the end for questions.
Step 3: Plan the Creative Challenge of the Week
This is the fun part! When emotions are high, what better way to build one another up than by being silly and fun? This also creates additional engagement by allowing your employees to be involved in the planning process.
- The creative challenge of the week: each member of the team should come up with something creative for the rest of the team to do or bring to the weekly meeting.
- Ideas: wear a funny hat, share a poem about working from home, show-and-tell with a funky item from your home, play a song that has gotten you through the week, teach us how to make your favorite cocktail, dealer’s choice!
- Assign the creative challenge for the week to a different team member at least 24 hours prior to each meeting.
Step 4: Communicate with Your Team About this Weekly Meeting
Include information about what platform you are using and how to download it, when the meeting will be, the duration, what general topics you will cover and who will take on the creative challenge of the week. Then schedule the meeting and invite all attendees.
(Fuel would be happy to provide how-to guides on any technical details for you and your staff.)
Step 5: Execute the Meeting
Have fun and create employee engagement!
Tune in for more tips and tricks around employee engagement from the Fuel Medical Recruiting Service.
