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Staying connected with your favorite coworkers and the teammates you rely on isn’t getting any easier. The new normal, with remote workplaces and flexible scheduling, has opened new opportunities for employees while reshaping the way they interact and collaborate. Many feel a pervasive sense of isolation despite every-present, tech-enabled connectivity. This isolation can impact team cohesion and employee well-being, taking a toll on productivity, retention, and – ultimately – your organization’s bottom line.
Fortunately, there’s plenty that your company can do to keep the connections between employees strong. Here’s a guide to what a connected workforce looks like and how your organization can start realizing the benefits of employee connection.
What is employee connection?
Employee connection is the sense of belonging and attachment employees feel towards their colleagues and their organization itself. It encompasses the quality of workplace relationships, engagement with the company’s mission, and the feeling of community within the organization. Fundamentally, it’s about creating a culture where individuals feel valued and part of something larger, leading to mutual trust, frequent collaboration, and genuine respect.
Employee connection is an often-overlooked driver of organizational success. Connected employees are more engaged and aligned with company goals, displaying a willingness to go above and beyond. And team members who have meaningful relationships with their coworkers are more likely to stay with your business, providing stability, reducing recruitment costs, and preserving institutional knowledge.
6 strategies for building employee connection
Your company’s HR team and its other people leaders can start supporting employee connection by implementing these six actionable strategies.
1. Practice open communication and encourage feedback
Consistently practicing open, honest communication at all levels of your organization further develops employee connection. It starts from the top, with leaders who transparently share information about key aspects of your business, like company performance, new and ongoing strategic initiatives, and the reasoning behind upcoming changes that may impact employees. Your company can also encourage team members to provide honest input on what they like about your organization and what needs attention by establishing anonymous, always-on feedback channels. Consider adopting an employee engagement platform that provides employees with easy ways to share confidential feedback on how your organization can improve their experience and help them feel more connected.
2. Connect your workforce with employee recognition
A few words of thanks or congratulations can quickly establish a special connection between two employees. But relying on team members to provide enough ad hoc recognition to move the needle on engagement and connection isn’t a safe bet. Your company should instead take steps to actively leverage this powerful tool by implementing an employee recognition platform that makes it easy to acknowledge wins and celebrate successes across the organization. These solutions provide a centralized place for sharing messages of appreciation while democratizing employee rewards through a points-based reward system. These systems give every team member reward points on a weekly or monthly basis that they can then send to others to make moments of recognition more impactful.
3. Train managers to empower employees
The strength of the relationships between managers and employees can make or break a company. If team members don’t trust leaders to give them the resources and guidance required to overcome challenges – or if they simply don’t know their manager well enough to rely on their support – they’ll be more risk averse and less engaged with whatever they’re working on. That’s why your company should train leaders to center their management approach around employee empowerment: providing workers with the tangible and psychological support they need to thrive. Encourage managers to focus on making the most of individual strengths, coaching their direct reports, and set achievable, collaborative goals. When employees know their managers have their back, they’ll feel a deeper connection to leadership and the entire organization.
4. Foster collaboration and social interaction
Collaborating and interacting socially is perhaps the most straightforward way for team members to build connections – but only if the opportunities to do so arise naturally. Awkward, compulsory team-building sessions, or unnecessarily roping in additional workers on a tangentially related project, will only lead to frustration and inefficiency. Give employees the tools needed to facilitate communication and effective teamwork, like team chat apps, project management solutions. Then regularly encourage your workforce to reach out to peers and managers whenever they think collaboration would add value, and recognize those who frequently collaborate with other team members.
Your organization can also provide chances for employees to naturally form personal connections through in-person or virtual team-building activities and social events. With all the options available today, like virtual coffee breaks, company-wide volunteering opportunities, and online games, your organization can find something that appeals to every type of employee. When employees have the option to participate in a variety of activities when they actually feel like it, rather than being forced into showing up, these events can enhance teamwork and produce a more connected workforce.
5. Support employee development
Few things make employees feel a connection to an organization more than investing in their ongoing development. Seize the opportunity to demonstrate that your company values its employees and is committed to their success by exploring a range of talent development initiatives, from providing digital training materials through a learning management system (LMS), to holding in-house workshops, to offering tuition reimbursement. And encourage managers to have frequent conversations centered on career development with team members, so they can provide opportunities for growth tailored to employees’ goals and aspirations.
6. Prioritize employee wellness
Healthy employees that have the tools and support to handle stress well, along with the time needed to rest and recharge, have the mental energy needed to actively reach out to their coworkers and build lasting connections. Your organization can support employee well-being by offering flexible scheduling, encouraging employees to take advantage of their PTO, and establishing policies that allow team members to truly “turn off” at the end of the work day. Your company can also implement a range of more structured employee wellness programs, like providing training on mindfulness, educating leaders on the importance of preventing burnout, and even rewarding team members when they meet private goals set in an employee wellness platform. Encourage managers to check in on how their team members are feeling as well, taking the chance to show real empathy and provide whatever support they can.
The role of an employee connection solution
An employee connection solution enhances the employee experience by centralizing HR initiatives focused on engagement, recognition, and communication. Leaders and HR professionals can use pulse surveys and AI-powered chatbots to gather real-time feedback. Reporting and analytics features then help them speedily address any issues contributing to feelings of disconnection. Employee recognition capabilities get every team member involved in building a culture of appreciation, while social components provide natural opportunities for both remote and in-office employees to get to know each other.
The Achievers Employee Experience Platform offers all this and more. It includes fun and engaging recognition features through Achievers Recognize, a built-in rewards marketplace with millions of options with Achievers Reward, and intelligent feedback tools that guide your leaders from insight to action using Achievers Listen. It even lets team members in any location meet up virtually and make connections they otherwise never would thanks to Achievers Connect.
See how Achievers can keep your workplace connected by requesting a free demo today.
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