How to Use Slack to Boost Employee Engagement

Slack is your best ally when it comes to having an impact on all employees. Indeed, it's the first app they open in the morning and it's the last one they close in the evening. Slack is where people have conversations, take decisions and hang out with colleagues.

Slack is where culture happens.

Employee engagement is central to a company's performance, talent retention and overall culture. This is what is basically defining how your company is doing.

We'll explore in this post why employee engagement matters, how to use Slack to improve it and which strategies to implement.

Why Employee Engagement Matters

Employee engagement is more important than you may think. It's the core of your company.

Employee engagement makes employee productive and loyal (reducing turnover). It builds a great company culture and therefore is good for attracting talents.

All in all, employee engagement can be the cornerstone of your company 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 employees and provides features like threads, emoji reactions and channels/groups that make sure your team works well together.

Not only the conception of Slack is a good ground for employee engagement but it's also full of opportunities to improve Slack's collaboration features.

Indeed one of the big strength of Slack is the Slack app directory. Thousands of add-ons are listed and some of them can be of a big help for engaging remote employees.

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

1. 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 get to know each other. It's great for collaboration, team cohesion and simply feeling that you know you team and your company. 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.
2. 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. 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.
3. Recognize good work publicly with Kudos
   It's a good practise to dedicate a channel for recognitions, praises or kudos. Making it public is great for recognitions. If you want the initiative to last long, it's strongly recommended to install an app like Clappy from BuddiesHR. It'll help by automating the appreciation day, showing leaderboards, configuring rewards and more.

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 make sure to monitor how people are feeling while also having direct feedback from them.

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 for improving employee engagement 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!