Your employees aren’t any less important than your prospects, leads, investors, or other stakeholders. Their work satisfaction will affect directly their efficiency, tendency to take initiative, and dedication during office hours.
The same way you focus on making your clients’ lives better or on delivering the expected results to your investors, you want to make sure you’re dedicating time to improving your employees’ work experience.
Corporate events for your employees are a great way of showing your commitment by providing them with an engaging and meaningful environment for safe communication, idea and knowledge exchange, new collaborations, and a simply gratifying experience they can’t get anywhere else.
Google is an excellent example of a company that inspires employees through events and other experiences. Apart from Employee Appreciation Days, social and philanthropic events, and impromptu team bicycle rides, Google executives also enrich their employees’ minds by hosting different conferences with top authors and leaders in different fields.
These initiatives aim to create a comfortable and friendly environment where people can enjoy each other’s company while engaging in new collaborations and projects. Is it working? You tell us: As you probably know, there’s no shortage of people wanting to work at Google.
Running interesting events for your employees will increase their dedication and commitment to the company, as well as boost their morale (and likely their productivity). By nurturing this relationship, you’ll actually impact the clients’ experience positively. Only happy employees will care about improving their company’s products or focusing on prospects’ and clients’ well-being.
Convinced? Now let’s talk about the things you’ll want to consider before planning an empowering event for your employees:
Schedule the event during the working hours
No matter how much your employees love your company, no one wants to stay up late or spend their weekends attending an event (unless it’s a big party with free food).
To increase the attendance, schedule the events during business hours.
Obviously, there might be some employees who will decide to stick to their to-do list instead of attending the event, but many of them will take the opportunity to get out of the office, learn something new, and socialize with others.
Bring speakers that will inspire your employees
Want to turn off your employees and make them want to quit? Invite boring speakers to your event who will read their speech from a piece of paper in a monotone voice.
To keep your employees highly motivated and increase their engagement, invite speakers who know how to deliver a speech and will inspire your teams.
Include fun and creative activities
Fun teambuilding activities are a great way to combine collaboration and interaction in the workplace and lift everyone’s spirits. Think about encouraging your employees to solve problems by using different business-related or innovation card decks.
If you want to make it even more fun, run some game competitions.
Or take it a step further and set aside an hour on a Friday for people to just play board games and hang out. Employees will always appreciate the chance to have a good time.
Embed the lifelong learning approach
Only an unprofessional company wouldn’t want its employees to grow and expand their knowledge and skills. To make sure your company continues to evolve, and your numbers keep growing, you’ll want to invest significant resources into helping your employees learn.
One way to accomplish this is by running knowledge sessions with top industry thinkers or skillful experts who can share their expertise with your employees and teach them something new.
Make your event co-participative
Give your employees the opportunity to express themselves during the event. Equip them with technology (such as live polls or Q&A apps) or the right environment (co-creative activities) to share their thoughts or ask questions.
This will make them feel empowered and valued, and that their opinions and insights matter to the company.
Wrap-up
Logistically, there’s no difference between planning a corporate event for your employees or an industry conference for different attendees. However, corporate events are a highly effective way to increase employee engagement, make them more committed to the company’s mission, and maybe even transform them into brand advocates. So in between planning your brand and marketing events, make sure to design some powerful corporate events that will inspire your teams to be more collaborative and innovative.
