Every year the workplace sector grapples with a major challenge. In 2023, it was ensuring employee well-being. In 2024, it’s low employee engagement. According to a report by Gallup, employee engagement is the lowest this year since 2013.
So, if you too, are struggling with low employee engagement in your organization, it’s time to reassess your communications strategy.
In this blog post, I will tell you how to use Venngage’s HR Teams feature to boost employee engagement and communication.
Click to jump ahead:
- How does regular and interactive communication boost employee morale?
- Examples of content HR teams can create with Venngage
- Balancing fun and serious content with Venngage
- Increase employee engagement with Venngage
How does regular and interactive communication boost employee morale?
Before we get down to business, let’s quickly understand what employee engagement truly means.
Jason Lauritsen, a management innovator and author, describes employee engagement as “the degree to which an employee is willing and able to perform to their potential.”
Engagement is basically the measure of how much your work environment enables employees to perform to their truest potential at work. Lauritsen also provides an employee engagement model, which comprises three things — wellness, satisfaction and drive.
Other employee engagement models, such as Zinger, Gallup, Maslow, and AON-Hewitt also focus on building relationships with employees, setting clear expectations, and providing feedback and growth opportunities.
Irrespective of the model you follow, effective communication is the backbone of employee engagement. It helps organizations foster a positive work culture and build strong employee relationships. Let’s see how effective communication boosts employee engagement.
Impact of effective communication on employee engagement:
One of the major causes of low employee morale is poor communication. In fact, 45% of business leaders believe that effective internal communication leads to better employee engagement. Here is how:
- Employees have a better understanding of their roles, reducing confusion and increasing productivity
- Effective communication culture helps promote an open feedback culture that makes employees feel valued and appreciated
- Sharing inspiring messages and team achievements boosts employee morale
Examples of content HR teams can create with Venngage
Companies often make communication complex. When it comes to employee engagement, organizations roll out different sessions to provide updates or share tips where someone is reading (self-explanatory) content from the presentation.
The truth is employees would rather be left alone than roped into awkward team meetings for updates or catch ups, especially in the middle of their work.
If you truly want to engage your workforce and communicate with them, focus on meaningful and concise interactions rather than bombarding them with unnecessary meetings and presentations. Employees appreciate brief, clear and consistent communication directly.
Here’s how you can ensure clear and consistent internal communications with Venngage.
Mission and vision
According to Gallup’s 2024 Employee Engagement Strategies Checklist, a major reason for declining employee engagement is remote employees have a fleeting sense of the organization’s mission and vision. Therefore, HR leaders need to promote the mission and vision regularly to motivate and inspire employees.
For example, at Venngage, our monthly team meetings start with reiterating our core values and vision.
You can use Venngage’s Company Mission and Vision Human Resource Infographic Template to communicate your company’s mission and vision to employees.
Greetings and celebratory messages
Celebrating work achievements
Gallup’s Q12® Employee Engagement Survey framework provides 12 questions to assess employee satisfaction level. These questions include “In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work” and “There is someone at work who encourages my development.”
It highlights how acknowledging and celebrating employees’ achievements can boost employee engagement.
Publicly acknowledging employees’ efforts makes them feel valued and increases morale. You can use Venngage to create employee achievement certificates and share them on company’s Slack channels or social media pages.
Festive greetings and holiday celebrations
Don’t be strictly focused on work if you want to increase employee engagement. Make employees feel that you value their life beyond work as well by sending greetings or presents on important occasions.
You can create beautiful and interactive festive greetings and holiday celebration infographics with Venngage. Here is an example:
Recognizing important dates
When you share festive greetings with employees and congratulate them for personal milestones and special occasions, they feel valued. It also helps promote a culture of appreciation and gratitude and the workplace, increasing engagement.
Fun and interactive Content
Creating trivia quizzes and polls
“Work hard, relax harder!” You can practice this in the workplace to boost employee engagement. Conduct fun trivia quizzes and polls and keep prizes for winners to motivate employees. This way, you can also gather employee feedback and identify areas of improvement.
Venngage offers multiple quiz and survey templates to keep employees engaged.
Here is another trivia template you can use:
Designing team building activities
Another way to enhance work culture and strengthen team relationships is to do quick and fun team-building activities, such as ice-breaker sessions for new employees. This helps employees connect with each other and promotes a sense of community and belonging.
For example, you can use the Ice Breaker Questionnaire for Team Engagement HR Forms Template by Venngage to collect information and share interesting insights about team members.
Announcements and awareness campaigns
Announcing company events
Have an important company announcement to make? Venngage can help with that too. You can use event announcement templates to promote company webinars, conferences and workshops and encourage employees to attend the events.
However, If you have a fun office party, do it in style by ditching the formal templates. You can go all creative depending upon the event theme, like this Halloween Office Pet Costume Contest Party Flyer Template.
Promoting awareness for important causes
A report by the World Economic Forum says that strong company values are crucial for modern employees. These values include sustainability, work-life balance, and diversity and inclusion. In fact, the majority of professionals don’t want to work with companies that don’t share the same values as them.
So, promoting awareness for important causes, such as mental health and LGBTQ+ rights can increase employee engagement. It helps instill a sense of belonging and pride in employees, increasing their engagement and motivation. You can use Venngage templates to create posters or social media posts to talk about crucial issues.
You can use Venngags’s HR Teams Calendar to easily customize posters for important events and share them on internal and external channels.
Make sure the poster aligns with your organization’s brand identity.
Balancing fun and serious content with Venngage
While communication is the key to engaging your workforce, over-communication can be detrimental. According to the State of Workplace Communication Report 2024 by Forbes, 70% of workers feel burnout due to excessive digital communication. Therefore, as an HR leader, you need to draw a line on internal communication to avoid information fatigue.
The best way to do this is to have a balanced communication strategy — infusing a mix of lively, engaging content with clear, professional messaging.
Importance of a balanced communication strategy
If you have an extremely formal work culture, chances are the communication is always direct, flowing from top to bottom. This can stifle open dialogue and make employees feel detached from work.
On the contrary, consistent informal communication can lead to a casual attitude in employees where they might not understand the essence of communication and take information lightly. It also leads to inconsistent flow of information and reduces accountability.
Whenever you can, add some variety in your internal communications because no one likes boring information. Moreover, with short attention spans, it’s important to convey the information in as few words as possible.
Why is variety important in internal communications?
- Increases engagement: Just circulating formal messages across your communication channels can make the conversation dull after a time because employees often have limited say in formal matters. So, all they can do is react with a thumbs up to show acknowledgment. However, sharing employee achievements frequently, giving shoutouts, or offering productivity tips, give employees the opportunity to engage and share their thoughts.
- Humanizes the workplace: Adding a dash of humor to team notifications or presentations once in a while humanizes the workplace and helps build a positive work environment. For instance, look at this slide shared in one of our team meetings.
Way to make an announcement!
- Helps manage different preferences: Most of your team members have a different personality. While some of them like to keep communication extremely formal in the workplace, some prefer to have lighthearted conversations. Ensuring variety to internal communications helps you manage the preferences and needs of all employees.
How does Venngage facilitate balanced communication?
Let’s say new employees have joined your organization and you want to inform the team. There are two ways, you can go about it:
First, send a formal email to the entire organization, as the one shown below, or post a simple text message on the digital channel.
The second option is to create a visually appealing announcement and circulate it in your team.
Now, that’s some way to introduce your new team members. It shows that you’ve put in effort to introduce the new team member.
Which one seems more personalized and engaging to read according to you?
Let me share one more example. Imagine you have to make the employee of the month announcement.
This letter is short and succinct and conveys information clearly. But what if you could make it better?
Now consider this employee of the month template:
Adding the images and the employee’s bio makes the announcement more personalized and engaging. This template also publicly acknowledges the employee’s achievements, which can make them feel more valued.
Venngage’s templates help you strike the perfect balance between personalized and professional internal communications, helping you boost employee engagement.
Templates for every occasion
Venngage has a vast template library with thousands of HR templates for employee handbooks, HR strategies, policy updates, employee assessments, and more. Here’s what you need to do:
- Browse through our vast library of Human Resources templates and select a template based on your requirements.
- Customize it easily with the drag-and-drop editor. You can change the font, background color, icons, color palette and more.
- Share or download your design.
You can create stunning designs for clear and consistent employee communications, without extensive design experience.
Venngage is an intuitive platform, especially useful for quick turnarounds on infographics and reports that require a professional touch without needing extensive graphic design skills.
Founder, wethrift.com
Whether it’s sharing informal employee announcements or rolling out formal company updates, adding a variety of visuals, such as images, icons, and flowcharts ensures communication in a visually appealing manner. This way, you ensure that all team members understand and align with crucial company updates.
The best part about using Venngage for internal communications is that you can create branded content for consistent and effective communication. Simply go to Branded Templates, select ‘Brand my template effortlessly,’ and use templates with consistent design to reinforce the company’s mission, vision, and values, making employees feel more connected to the organization.
Here is how you can choose the right template on Venngage:
- Decide the type of message: If you want to convey a formal company update, go with a more structured template, such as this Employee Remote WFH Policy Template
For informal messages or updates, go with visually engaging newsletters or posters.
- Assess content complexity: If the content is complex like communicating company performance or explaining processes, choose templates with flow charts or graphs. If you want to communicate simple information, you can choose a simple template with a plain background. For example, here is a minimalistic template to provide an overview of your company to new hires.
- Focus on purpose: For employee engagement, you can select fun and vibrant poster templates. Here is an example:
However, for employee onboarding and training, customize templates with step-by-step processes.
Customized content for different audiences
An excellent way to improve employee engagement is to promote diversity and inclusion. With Venngage, you can create documents in different languages to communicate with employees in various regions.
You can also use Venngage’s Accessible PDF Maker to create accessible content for team members with visual impairments.
Increase employee engagement with Venngage
Employee communication should be clear and direct but interactive to ensure employee engagement. And that’s exactly what Venngage helps you achieve. With a vast library of HR templates, including onboarding guides, newsletters, and employee achievement certificates, you can create customized communication content to make employees feel more valued and increase their morale.
