Employee engagement in the US is at a ten-year low. What can turn the tide? Our 2025 State of People Strategy Report found that HR teams look to learning and development (L&D) programming, additional paid time off and benefits, and flexible time off to drive employee engagement.
But sweeping, resource-intensive changes are not the only way to go forward. Creative, small-scale, and well-executed employee engagement activities can also accomplish the same.
In this article, we’ve crowdsourced 13 field-tested engagement activities that have helped real businesses substantially improve job satisfaction, team communication, and employee engagement.
What is employee engagement?
Employee engagement refers to the enthusiasm and psychological ownership that employees willingly invest in their organization and its goals.
While satisfied employees contentedly clock in and out on time with a can’t-complain attitude to their companies, engaged employees go the extra mile, push the envelope, and commit their whole selves to work.
A 2024 Gallup report found that high-engagement business units are likelier than low-engagement teams to enjoy higher employee wellbeing, productivity, profitability, and sales. On the other hand, low employee engagement can drain the world economy of trillions: Gallup estimated that it cost 9% of the global GDP in 2023.
13 Fun and Unique Engagement Activities
Use these employee engagement ideas as a starting point and adapt them to your company culture. Then get your employees’ feedback with Lattice Pulse to get a sense of how they are responding to these activities.
1. Fika Breaks
A Swedish cultural practice, a fika [ˈfiːˌka], or coffee break, is a 10-30 minute respite from work where colleagues enjoy a beverage of their choice together. These breaks give employees a chance to connect over non-work-related topics.
Implementing fika breaks at moveBuddha helped improve cross-departmental collaboration and reduce miscommunication.
“We brought in every employee regardless of their hierarchical position, over a coffee break for 10-15 minutes with a topic, every day,” said Ryan Carrigan, the company’s cofounder and CEO. “Our company saw around a 41% reduction in absenteeism, just because the employees had something to look up to, beyond work.”
2. Energy Mapping
Energy mapping is the practice of identifying the peaks and troughs of an individual’s productivity and energy levels throughout the day and planning around them.
Psychic Source conducted a short survey and visualized the results before optimizing employees’ schedules.
“This method builds empathy among team members, who understand why one person excels in morning meetings while another prefers asynchronous work in the afternoon,” said Maryanne Fiedler, Psychic Source’s director of marketing. As a result, teamwork improved, meeting participation shot up, and project turnaround times shortened by 24%.
3. Retreats
Company retreats are great opportunities for employees to learn, bond, and create in person. However, there is a wrong way to organize them.
“When companies aim to get a 'financial tangible ROI' out of the retreat, it typically goes sideways with low engagement and will to return the next year,” said Lisa Lohmann, founder and chief executive officer of LáFora. LáFora organizes retreats and offsites for corporates. To maximize opportunities for connection, she advises avoiding crammed schedules with back-to-back team-building activities and training sessions, instead allowing enough free time for unplanned activities and natural conversations to flow.
4. Solution-Oriented Discussions
In 2022, Google introduced Simplicity Sprints, where employees were surveyed to identify bottlenecks in their operations and contribute suggestions to increase clarity and efficiency in operations.
Kevin Shahnazari, founder and chief executive officer of FinlyWealth, did something similar. He introduced Solution Fridays where team members spend two hours brainstorming solutions to real customer problems together. “This practice has increased our team's problem-solving capabilities while strengthening bonds across departments,” he said.
5. Team Volunteering Activities
Different generations of talent expect different things from work. Broadly, Gen Z and millennial employees care about social responsibility — and expect their workplaces to do the same.
Find causes that your staff members consensually care about, and devise activities accordingly. For example, animal lovers could volunteer to walk dogs for a shelter.
You could even offer volunteer time off (VTO), a company-sponsored benefit that allows employees to take paid time off to volunteer for charitable or community service activities.
6. Professional Development
Lattice’s 2025 State of People Strategy Report found that learning and development programming is the go-to strategy for HR teams looking to boost engagement. It’s not just that employees crave career development. The Lattice report also found that HR teams and managers report that skills gaps are preventing them from promoting from within as often as they’d like.
If you’re like the majority of HR professionals we surveyed, internal training, paid training for approved programs, and conference attendance are probably key components of your strategy. Also consider a no-strings-attached L&D stipend, mentorship opportunities, and job leveling to provide employees with greater career ownership and growth opportunities.
7. Light-Hearted Internal Communications
Find opportunities to insert fun into the mundane, especially if you work in a remote setting. If you’re on Slack, start a channel for sharing pictures of pets, memes, or gifs and stickers made by your team members.
Singapore-based Telegram Ads Agency created a weekly ‘Unfiltered Hour’ on their team’s internal Telegram channel. “It's simple: Employees anonymously share frustrations, ideas, or even memes about work,” CEO Samuel Huang said. He observed that six months after implementing this practice, engagement scores had jumped by 25%.
8. Fun Onboarding Experiences
Begin your employee engagement efforts as soon as a new hire agrees to join your company. Go beyond ticking off items on a checklist, and make their onboarding program delightful and memorable. Show them that they are valued and give them a taste of the wonderful employee experience that lies ahead.
For instance, at Shopify, new employees are not required to start work for four weeks. Instead, they spend that time building relationships with their peers, experiencing the platform as customers would, and developing their internal networks. Thanks to this, they can hit the ground running after their onboarding period.
9. Consistent Recognition
During FinlyWealth’s early days as a bootstrapped startup, Shahnazari’s virtual team made peer recognition a ritual in daily standup meetings. His company organized weekly ‘Customer Story Spotlights’ where team members shared customer wins. “The sessions dramatically improve our sense of purpose and connection to the mission of democratizing financial services,” he said.
Internal communication platforms can come in handy for recognition. Lattice Praise integrates with platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and even email so you can publicly commend your colleagues and reports without interrupting the flow of work.
Another way to do it is to have your employees recognize and validate their own hard work. Every Friday, staff at Psychic Source share ‘intuitive insights,’ or their hunches for the week that turned out right.
“These micro-interactions resulted in a 12% boost in positive peer-to-peer feedback, as tracked by our internal communication platform,” said Fiedler.
10. Mindfulness Sessions
Mindfulness can be a powerful tool to improve mental health and relieve stress, and when organizations lead the way, it can even translate to improved employee engagement.
A researcher from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) found that daily 10-minute meditation with the Headspace app resulted in a lasting, statistically significant reduction in UCSF health system employees’ perceptions of stress, job strain, and work burnout. Improvements in work engagement were maintained over a four-month period.
11. Awards
Employees thrive on recognition, and awards are a great way to highlight their standout qualities, work anniversaries, and contributions to the company. It’s even better if they come with tangible perks, like concert tickets, gift cards to expensive restaurants, or prize money.
You can also consider spoof awards related to inside jokes. For example, gossips can win a title like the ‘Breaking News Award.’ These can be a great way to reflect and build camaraderie. Plus, everyone gets an award.
12. Incentive-Based Workplace Goals
Set performance-based objectives rewarding employees for achieving specific targets or milestones. Rewards may include monetary bonuses, extra time off, public recognition, or professional development opportunities.
Regularly tracking progress and providing feedback during check-ins help employees stay engaged, while tailoring perks to their preferences ensures greater motivation and participation.
For example, a manager could set an OKR like a quarterly sales target, with a special team retreat as a reward for meeting or exceeding it.
13. Engagement Activities for Managers
Managers are responsible for 70% of the variance in team engagement, according to Gallup. Yet experts predict a 'manager crash' in 2025 — a critical decline in manager wellbeing and performance. To keep them engaged and performing at their best, consider engagement activities specifically targeted at managers.
RushOrderTees CEO Michael Nemeroff saw great results from three initiatives at his company:
- Manager Shadow Days: Company executives each spent a day shadowing managers to observe their daily duties firsthand. This revealed hidden inefficiencies that were burdening them. Streamlining these processes left managers with time for strategic work, and raised engagement scores by 18% within a quarter.
- Culture Fund: Managers were given a monthly ‘culture fund’ to create engagement initiatives tailored to their teams. “One warehouse manager utilized it for 15-minute post-shift coffee chats, which improved team cohesion and cut absenteeism by 12%,” said Nemeroff.
- Reverse Feedback Loops: “Managers frequently felt stuck between leadership demands and team needs, so we introduced quarterly sessions where managers gave feedback directly to executives,” said Nemeroff. “This led to actionable changes, like adjusting meeting cadences, which decreased stress for 70% of managers based on survey results.”
How to Make Engagement More Fun for Everyone
Employee engagement activities should be fun — and not just for those who are pitching them to the C-suite. To use a high school metaphor, they should feel more like field days and less like P.E. Avoid the following:
- Forced fun: Mandatory workplace activities employees see as inauthentic and unenjoyable can backfire, inviting resentment, cynicism, and low participation. That’s a recipe for active disengagement.
Instead: Talk to your employees. Use pulse surveys and provide channels like suggestion boxes through which they can vote for activities they would or wouldn’t enjoy.
- Insularity: Do not organize separate activities for employees with disabilities or those from marginalized communities. If your activities are enjoyed only by homogenous, exclusionary groups, your efforts may stoke resentment and damage morale.
Instead: Organize initiatives that everyone can enjoy. Broaden your idea of a happy hour so employees who don’t drink alcohol can participate in socializing comfortably and meaningfully. Opt for creative activities over sports-related challenges so employees aren’t excluded from participating based on physical ability. Refer to the Job Accommodation Network to learn about how to make your events more accessible.
- Inconvenience: For hectic departments like customer service and sales, having to set aside several hours during the workday can set them behind on work. Further, asking employees to make time for outings during weekends and public holidays can cause friction.
Instead: As far as possible, insert your initiatives into existing workflows, stand-up meetings, and communication platforms. If you must, allow field teams to join in-office meetings virtually, and keep their videos off.
The Evolution of Employee Engagement
Before William A. Kahn first introduced the concept of employee engagement in 1990, organizations tended toward a transactional view of the employer-employee relationship, focusing on more observable metrics like productivity, retention, and absenteeism.
Kahn’s influence shifted the focus toward understanding the emotional and psychological dimensions of engagement, like meaningfulness, availability, and psychological safety.
Donald Knight, group SVP of people and culture at Warner Bros. Discovery, suggests that ‘employee fulfillment’ offers a deeper measure of organizational health than employee engagement.
“Employee fulfillment is achieved when employees feel they are doing the best work of their life,” Knight wrote in an editorial for Lattice.
Knight argued that fulfillment transcends mere engagement by encompassing the sense of purpose and meaning employees derive from their work, aligning individual aspirations with broader organizational goals. “They may be working hard and sprinting, but it is towards a bigger personal or professional purpose,” he wrote.
The Impact of Employee Engagement
Ideating fun employee engagement activities while despairing over how you’ll prove their business impact can feel like you’re cartwheeling uphill, but the gymnastics are worth it.
Gallup synthesized mountains of research and discovered that employee engagement data is directly linked to an array of benefits for the bottom line, of which just three are:
- Improved employee productivity
- Increased customer loyalty and engagement
- Higher levels of organizational citizenship and participation
Are your engagement initiatives succeeding?
Once you’ve begun to execute your employee engagement initiatives, monitor their performance by tracking the following metrics. These are readily available through Lattice:
- Employee Satisfaction Surveys
- Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
- Employee Retention Rates
- Employee Engagement Surveys
To get an accurate picture of employee feedback, you’ll need a statistically significant percentage of employees to participate. Encouraging participation presents an opportunity to inject fun, too.
For example, Semrush held a meme competition on Slack as part of an effort to encourage employee engagement survey participation to great effect.
Optimize your employee engagement strategy with Lattice.
Employee engagement is the foundation of organizational culture and has an exponential effect on everything from performance to profit. Equip yourself with the tech you need to improve and test the success of your employee engagement strategies.
AI-powered Lattice Engagement is an end-to-end solution. With robust tools for surveying employees from the moment they step into your office to the time they move on, Lattice will take heaps of paperwork off your managers’ hands. Forrester research shows that companies using Lattice enjoy a 195% return on their investment over three years.
You can, too. Calculate what your ROI could be and request a demo today!
FAQs
1. How do you measure the success of employee engagement activities?
Talk to your employees! Use a combination of monthly, quarterly, annual, or pulse surveys at a cadence that makes sense for your team using tools like Lattice Engagement. As you appraise their responses, also keep an eye on:
- Adoption Rate: How many employees actively use your engagement tools
- Efficacy: The average response time and completion rate of surveys and pulse checks
- Time and Attendance: Frequency of unexpected time off
- Regrettable Attrition: Departures of your top performers due to preventable reasons
2. Can Lattice’s platform be used for remote employee engagement?
Yes. Lattice is widely used by remote-first and hybrid companies like Shippo and Loom to help global employees feel connected. The platform comes with native Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations, bringing performance, recognition, and feedback tools to where distributed teams already work.
3. What kinds of employee engagement software are there?
Employee engagement software can come as focused solutions to managing aspects like employee recognition, rewards, and surveys — or, like Lattice, incorporate a comprehensive suite of tools to take care of engagement needs end-to-end.
4. How does Lattice help with employee engagement?
Lattice's comprehensive platform drives team performance and engagement by bringing surveys, performance management, feedback, and continuous improvement to one central dashboard. Using Lattice’s advanced AI-powered analytics tools, HR teams can track and swiftly respond to engagement trends in real time across different departments.
5. How can I get started with improving employee engagement using Lattice?
Start by measuring the current state of employee engagement. With Lattice’s AI-powered tools like Pulse, eNPS, and Survey Benchmarks, you can quickly get a snapshot of the strengths and weaknesses of your current engagement programs. Then, use these insights to inform your engagement activities.
