How to Use Slack to Boost Employee Engagement

In the following text, we’ll talk about why employee engagement matters, how to use Slack to improve it, and which strategies to implement.

Quick Answer

Slack engagement ideas help remote teams stay connected, motivated, and aligned by creating casual conversations, celebrating milestones, and recognising good work. Using apps like Alfy, Billy Birthday, Clappy, and Pulsy, you can build stronger connections, boost morale, and measure engagement directly inside Slack.

Table of Contents

1. Why Employee Engagement Matters
2. The Best Slack Apps to Boost Employee Engagement
3. Measuring Employee Engagement on Slack
4. Examples of Engagement Survey Templates for Slack
5. Try out the Best Slack Apps to Boost Employee Engagement

Why Employee Engagement Matters

Employee engagement is the core of your company culture. Great communication practices in a Slack workspace allow everyone to stay aligned and engaged, no matter where they work.

It makes employees productive and loyal, which essentially reduces turnover. It builds a great workplace environment, improves work-life balance, and therefore is good for attracting talent.

Highly engaged employees also bring energy and motivation to their teams, creating a ripple effect that helps boost morale across the organization. When managers encourage employees and team members, it strengthens connections, helps teams work through challenges, and ensures everyone feels part of the mission.

All in all, employee engagement can be the cornerstone of your company's success.

The Best Slack Apps to Boost Employee Engagement

First off, Slack is the ultimate Employee Engagement tool by itself.  It's great at connecting remote team members and provides features like threads, emoji reactions, and channels/groups that make sure your team-building efforts work well together. 

Not only is the conception of Slack a good ground for boosting engagement, but it's also full of opportunities to improve collaboration. There are tons of creative ways to use a Slack channel, from virtual happy hours and casual games to celebrating achievements and sharing thoughtful strategies for engagement. Still, it's also full of opportunities to improve Slack's collaboration features.

Indeed, one of the big strengths of Slack is the Slack app directory. Thousands of add-ons are listed, and some of them can be very helpful for engaging remote employees.

Here is a list of strategies to put in place for using Slack to boost employee engagement:

Connect employees for coffee chats

When working remotely, the trade-off is that you get to see your colleagues less often. Worst than that, you may never meet some of them in person. Grouping people for a remote coffee chat regularly is a great way to make sure people stay connected on a personal level.

For remote workers, it’s a fun way to stay connected, build relationships, and share meaningful conversations beyond the formal decision-making processes. You'll want to install something like Alfy from BuddiesHR to handle the matching (configurable for cross-team pairing), opt-outs, snoozing, calendar checks, etc.

Celebrate birthdays and workiversaries

Celebrating milestones is very important in the workplace. It's an easy win for HRs who want to improve employee engagement. Whether you celebrate birthdays in a dedicated channel or highlight big wins across the team today, these ideas go a long way in boosting morale, celebrating achievements, and reminding everyone of the company’s core values. 

Employees can opt out, of course, if they don't want to be celebrated, but most of them will be super happy to receive nice messages, and it instills a great feeling of team cohesion. Install Billy Birthday to delegate the hassle of writing messages, remembering dates, and managing opt-outs.

Recognize good work publicly with Kudos

It's a good practice to dedicate a Slack channel for recognitions, praises, or kudos. Making it public is great for recognition. If you want the initiative to last long, it's strongly recommended to install an app like Clappy from BuddiesHR. 

This ensures team members get the spotlight they deserve, while also boosting engagement through fun ways of recognizing effort, sharing thoughtful strategies, and keeping the team’s morale high.

Measuring Employee Engagement on Slack

If you've arrived at this part of the article you're probably convinced that employee engagement is important and needs to be improved as much as possible to make sure the company is successful.

Like I use to say: "You can't improve what you don't measure."
It's not from me but I love this quote.

Good thing I have something for you so that you measure the engagement and satisfaction regularly. It's called Pulsy.

You'll be able to see the impact of your initiative, report numbers to management, and monitor how remote team members are feeling while also having direct, honest feedback from them.

Through anonymous surveys, managers can create meaningful conversations, gather a few tips on improving productivity, and lead the team with better decision-making processes.

Examples of Engagement Survey Templates for Slack

Pulsy has 58 questions in 12 different themes to help you measure Employee Engagement. The themes are the following:

• eNPS
• Core Engagement
• Pride
• Well-being
• DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging)
• Role & Enablement
• Growth and Development
• Alignment
• People Programs & Operations
• Psychological Safety
• Team
• Management
• Senior Leadership
• Other

For example Core Engagement includes questions like:

• I feel fulfilled by the work that I'm doing.
• I feel invested in our mission, vision, and values.
• I feel connected to the people at this company.
• I'm motivated to do my best work.
• I'd like to be working at this company a year from now.
• I rarely think about looking for a job at another company.

These questions are answered with a 1 to 5 scale.

Try out the Best Slack Apps to Boost Employee Engagement

We've seen in this article why employee engagement is important, why slack is a great place to spark conversations, and how to improve employee engagement. Finally how to measure employee engagement and satisfaction. You know everything to manage and improve engagement in you team while improving your company culture as well.

Let us know if you put these advices in place!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How can Slack improve employee engagement?

Slack improves engagement by keeping communication open, building team connections, and making recognition easy. Apps and channels turn it into a central hub for culture and collaboration.

2. What are the best Slack engagement ideas for remote teams?

The best ideas include coffee chats, celebrating birthdays, and public kudos. These simple habits create stronger bonds and keep morale high.

3. Which Slack apps boost employee engagement?

Apps like Alfy, Billy Birthday, Clappy, and Pulsy boost engagement. They automate recognition, celebrations, and surveys to keep teams connected and motivated.

4. Can you measure engagement on Slack?

Yes, you can measure engagement with survey tools like Pulsy. They provide data on satisfaction, morale, and culture so managers know what’s working.