According to Officevibe, an employee engagement platform, companies with engaged employees outperform organisations with disengaged employees by 202%. They also enjoy an 18% higher average customer retention rate.

Employee engagement is essential, and it falls on the human resources department to ensure that employees remain engaged even in today’s primarily remote work setup. For this reason, companies, through their HR departments, have started holding virtual non-work-related events, a.k.a., socials.

Of course, not all virtual events are engaging or even remotely interesting. If you’re out of ideas, try the following tips on how you can make your human resource virtual events more appealing.

Games

Engagement means involvement. If you want your employees engaged, your virtual event must attract their interest and hold their attention. Additionally, you need to make them feel good about themselves by ensuring your event will make them feel accomplished, competent and rewarded.

Games are an excellent opportunity to achieve all these. Games can attract and hold your employees’ interest and attention, and you can use them to make your employees feel good about themselves.

Idea: Include one or two mini-games in your virtual event, or you can make a game show out of your event.

Guidelines

Games can be great for boosting employee engagement. Just remember to follow these guidelines when you’re deciding on a game to play and when conducting it.

• A game everybody can play

It can be a game everybody already knows or a game that is easy to teach. Instructing your audience on the game mechanics shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes.

• Challenging but not aggravating

Consider your audience, and make sure to choose a game that poses enough of a challenge so it is not dull. However, it shouldn’t be so difficult that people just won’t or can’t win in any way; that would be infuriating.

Remember, the idea is to make your employees feel good about themselves. Making them play a game they can’t win will not accomplish this.

• Verbal praises

When someone does well, express approval and admiration and do so verbally so the person and the rest of the audience will hear. This is another way you can make your audience feel good about themselves.

You cannot simply clap your hands or beam at the screen to show you’re impressed. The subject of your praise might not see you do these things, and that’s wasting an excellent opportunity to engage.

• Generous and many rewards

Aside from expressing praises verbally, give rewards when people do well in your games. Employees can collect points throughout the game, and you can award prizes to the top leaderboard scorers.

Game Ideas

What games can you play during your virtual socials? There are hundreds of game ideas online. Remember to choose your games according to your audience members’ tastes and personalities.

Note: There are apps online that will provide you with a ready suite of games for virtual events.

Here are a few of the games you might consider playing.

• Bring Me

This is a good, simple game that can be exceptionally entertaining. Prepare a list of things you want your audience to bring for the game. Then during the game, preface every command with “Bring me.” For example, you can say, “Bring me a red handkerchief,” and the participants will scramble to bring a red handkerchief virtually.

• Truth or Dare

Prepare a list of questions and dares. Using a randomiser, select employees to play.

• Two Truths and a Lie

This is a guessing game. Employees will take turns making three statements about themselves, while the rest of the participants must guess which of the three statements given is a lie.

• Pitch Me

You can prepare a deck of delightfully random items. When an item flashes on the screen, the player must craft a compelling pitch to sell the item to the rest of the group.

Quizzes and Puzzles

Quizzes and puzzles are great for engagement. They can be challenging, so they help participants muster their concentration and focus. Your audience can also feel accomplished whenever they get the answer right.

Quizzes and puzzles are made more fun by competition. They are an excuse to reward employees, too; answer a question correctly or solve the puzzle and win a prize or something.

Idea: You can sprinkle quizzes throughout your event or host a quiz show. You can use a web-based quiz app to ask your questions and solicit responses.

What topics should you focus on in your quizzes?

You have lots of options. How about a trivia quiz on Star Wars, football, world history, popular Saudi destinations, and make-up? Word puzzles are particularly popular, too. Just remember to consider your audience’s tastes and preferences when choosing quizzes and puzzles.

Dress Up

Give your virtual event a theme and play dress-up. Dressing up forces your audience to think about the event and prepare for it. That is instant engagement or participation right there.

Idea: Provide examples of the look your audience should be aiming for when they dress up for the event. Your event look book can show intricate or impressive transformations using only everyday items. This will encourage your event participants to be creative and resourceful.

By the way, don’t forget to reward ingenuity. Give best costume prizes.

Team Activities

Your employees can do something together, even virtually. Shared experiences strengthen the bond among members of a team.

Idea: Poll your employees about what type of activity they want to do in a virtual get-together.

There are many possible activities your employees can do on a virtual meetup. Popular options include bake and cook fests.

In this case, tell everyone what ingredients, tools and appliances (if using) they need to prepare days before the event. You don’t have to say what you will be making; leave that as a surprise. It would be great if you’re asking them to create something unexpected out of the ingredients you had them prepare.

Other ideas include a simple hackathon (one your participants can accomplish in a few hours), speech writing and delivery, singing, and dancing. One more thing you can consider is focusing on learning and awareness for your team like celebrate black history month at work through virtual events.

Last-Minute Reminders

Technical issues are the enemy of engagement in virtual events. Therefore, make sure that you are using an excellent event platform, preferably one that can accommodate more creative event formats and specialised interactions among participants.

It is also vital that you rehearse your event, including all the games, quizzes, puzzles, and activities you plan to hold. Do a top-to-bottom rehearsal to approximate how long each phase of your event will take and what possible concerns or issues may arise while the event is ongoing.

Also, test screen-sharing capabilities and the apps you’re using. Make sure they don’t have restrictions when used with your event platform and at a large event like the one you are planning.

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