After completing almost a year of working from home and adjusting to the new normal, things might have started to feel more mundane for everyone. From doing happy hours to starting chat groups, we tried everything and now it's time to freshen up the list a bit and introduce new ideas and new ways to stay in touch and keep each other engaged and entertained. It's almost time now to look for new and creative ways to recognize your team members for a job well done or to simply catch up after a long week.

“Studies show that if employees feel disconnected and isolated from their teams, 27% don’t make it beyond their first year. For those who do decide to stick things out, their productivity can drop by up to 21%.”

Employees all over the world have been struggling to adjust to the new normal. Juggling between and blending in their professional and personal lives. Going through the ups and downs, high and lows of their daily routines. All of this while also dealing with some serious issues like financial stabilities, emotional crisis, loneliness, employee burnout, disengagement, etc. all of this without any professional support and while the world is under a pandemic and everybody is busy looking after their own health and safety.

These conditions can induce major mental health problems which are very real. So what companies can do to help their employees? Well, there are a number of things that can be done to ease out the situation, and to start with we can talk about recognizing your employees for all their hard work and dedication. This is one of the most valuable ways an organization can retain talent. In any organization where employees are well recognized for their efforts and hard work they are more likely to be happy, satisfied, and are well engaged and in sync with companies’ goals and ambitions.

Some of the ways to recognize your employees and keep them engaged, all through virtual channels

Personalization leads to happy employees

This works well with every aspect of professional lives, be it your employees or your clients and customers, everyone expects personalized approaches and efforts. One of the most significant ways of acknowledging your employees is by making them feel heard and seen. Pay attention to their issues and personal lives, try to get involved if they are comfortable with you. You can perk up your virtual meeting by making them a little less about work and a bit more about what is going on with your employees outside work.

Be creative with rewards and recognitions to boost positivity among employees

Introduce weekly recognitions, announce employees of the week and ask them to share their success stories and what they did differently this week. Nominate a member from your team each week to participate in this who went above and beyond for the tasks and for the team.

Share photos with each other

Create a separate group for sharing photos of your kids, your family members, or even your pets. It can be a fun icebreaker and a conversation starter. When words fail, pictures help break the ice. Create weekly themes like, based on a particular color or their favorite anime characters or pictures of their workspace or their gardens, it can be literally about anything, encourage employees to participate by following the theme and share pictures.

Introduce new games

Try playing two truths and a lie game in your next meeting, it's an interesting game and helps everyone get involved. It’s a simple game, go around the virtual meeting room, ask each employee to share two truths and a lie about them, others have to guess which statement the lie is and which are the truths. A fun way to learn about each other.

Share one best thing and one worst thing that happened to them

Ask each employee to share one of their positive experience that turned out to be happy or exciting and one bad experience they might have come across. This activity helps employees open up about their daily struggles and feel grateful for what is going right among all other odds.

All these activities are on the lighter side, to help employees open up and interact more with other team members. These can help them come out of their shells and improve their everyday communication skills. Also, encourage employees to share their feedback, it's very important to know how they feel about these activities, are these even doing any good for them or not, or if they have any other suggestions to make team interactions better.

At Dropthought we believe that to build a sustainable relationship with an employee, we must value their feedback. We believe in building a situation-based and feedback-centric employee engagement plan that will not only help businesses to leverage the data collected abundantly but also if done right this can turn into a long-lasting opportunity to keep your employees intact and keep the revenue bar up and running.

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