How to use Slack to boost employee engagement

Employee engagement plays an important role in productivity, retention, and company culture, especially for remote and hybrid teams. Slack has become the central hub where engagement can happen naturally through everyday conversations.

In this guide, we’ll share proven Slack engagement ideas, tools, and strategies to help HR teams and managers build stronger connections, recognise good work, and measure engagement directly inside Slack. 

Quick answer

Slack engagement ideas help remote teams stay connected, motivated, and aligned by creating casual conversations, celebrating milestones, and recognising good work stay connected and motivated by encouraging recognition, casual conversations, and feedback. 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

Team engagement plays a big role in how teams communicate, collaborate, and perform at work. When people feel engaged, they’re more likely to stay motivated, contribute ideas, celebrate small wins and work well with others, whether they’re in the office or working remotely.

In a Slack-first or remote environment, engagement helps keep communication clear and consistent. Engaged teams are more responsive, collaborate better on day-to-day tasks, and feel more connected to their teammates, even when they don’t see each other in person.

Strong employee engagement also supports retention and productivity. When employees feel recognised and involved, they’re more likely to stay with the company, adapt to change, and maintain a positive attitude toward their work. Over time, this leads to a healthier work environment, better collaboration, and improved morale across teams.

In short, employee engagement helps teams stay connected, productive, and aligned, making it a key factor in building a strong and sustainable company culture.

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 using simple Slack conversation starters that spark interaction without feeling forced. 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. Worse 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, share stories and have meaningful conversations beyond formal decision-making processes. To make this easy to manage at scale, tools like Alfy from BuddiesHR can automate the matching process, with options for cross-team pairings, opt-outs, snoozing, and calendar availability checks. 

Celebrate birthdays and workiversaries

Celebrating milestones is very important in the workplace. It's an easy win for HR teams looking 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 team bonding is important and needs to be improved as much as possible to make sure the company is successful.

To improve employee engagement effectively, it’s important to measure it regularly. Having clear data helps teams understand what’s working, where improvements are needed, and how engagement changes over time.

Tools like Pulsy by BuddiesHR allow HR teams to measure engagement and satisfaction through structured, anonymous surveys directly in Slack.

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 your team while improving your company culture as well.

Let us know if you put this advice in place!

Frequently Asked Questions

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

Some of the best ideas for remote teams include virtual coffee chats, sharing weekend plans, celebrating milestones, and encouraging light conversations like random fun facts. These activities help teams stay connected and encourage participation without feeling forced.

2. Which Slack apps boost employee engagement?

Slack apps like Alfy, Billy Birthday, Clappy, and Pulsy boost employee engagement by automating coffee chats, celebrations, recognition, and surveys. These tools help encourage participants to engage consistently while keeping engagement scalable for HR teams.

3. Can you measure employee engagement in Slack?

Yes. Employee engagement in Slack can be measured using survey and feedback tools like Pulsy. These tools track morale, participation, and sentiment over time, helping teams understand which engagement initiatives are working.

4. How do HR teams use Slack for employee engagement? 

HR teams use Slack to centralise communication, recognise achievements, run engagement surveys, and create spaces for connection. Engagement activities often include casual check-ins, culture channels, and remote work-friendly competition to keep teams motivated.

5. What is the best way to start improving employee engagement in Slack?

The best way to start is with a few suggestions that are easy to adopt, such as creating a recognition channel, starting informal conversations, or running short surveys. These small steps help engagement build organically and create habits that last.