Keeping your employees fully engaged during the holiday season, from Diwali to Holi, is challenging. Assignments can get harder to complete as co-workers start taking more and more time off. Employees are thinking about their friends and family members who are on leave for the holidays. Children are also on leave, obscuring scheduling. Teams must stay back and work additional hours in order to meet client demands. Bosses add extra pressure on their employees to meet pre-set goals, but often forget to give them satisfactory acknowledgment. With statistics showing that only a meek 13% of employees worldwide being engaged, it’s particularly vital not to lose vision of employee acknowledgment and recognition during the tough holiday season.
So how do you maintain employee engagement under such complicated situations? One of the simplest ways is to drastically increase the use of employee recognition finest practices and strengthen positive relationships between employees and employers. HR must use festivals as brilliant occasions to engage employees in a positive and incremental way. Here are three reasons why celebrating some of the important festivals can be good for employee engagement.
Don’t be extra formal!
The main reason why celebrating festivals at offices can boost engagement is due to the informal atmosphere it creates. It is the perfect way to socialize in an otherwise busy, professional and formal office environment. Employees can relax and freely engage in fun and exciting games. They are excited about the prizes and gifts and find it very satisfying to take part in them.
Torsha B, an editor who works with a market research company in India says, “I relish the general mindless games we play during the holidays. Team-building or educative games are best kept for corporate gatherings or programs. Also, HR puts a lot of thought behind gifts now, which are not just some sweets or dry fruit stuff. So, it’s thrilling to get some distinct vouchers. The casual aspect of the festivity is a break in an otherwise professional environment.”
Fellow feeling
Because HR takes care of all the departmental procedures, they are usually not very well connected to. The festive experience helps in creating a better relationship amongst the departments. Usually, each department has absolutely no direct work-based contacts, except for mutual events. And inter-departmental events are now and then problematic to pull through for hosts of issues, like mismatch among colleagues, dissimilar work approaches etc. Keeping these issues into consideration, the HR department hosts public festival games where employees with dissimilar departmental members enlist. “We arrange good, thrilling viable games to increase the creativity of the employees. We also give out correspondingly exciting gifts which are a way to say that our employees are important for us. These festivities additionally stimulate employees to partake in the company events with much fervor,” said Shraddha, a member of the cultural team in an MNC based in Mumbai.
Easy induction for newbies
New employees, together with novices have a strong craving to blend in. These festivities are a seamless way to do that. Employees are provided with the opportunity to meet and engage with the office staff, and because it’s informal the introduction process becomes easier to understand. Some tips by veteran employees about the organizational procedures instantly give the new ones a strong sense of belonging. “I find official induction very uninteresting. I joined a firm just at that time of their Diwali celebrations. And I knew no one there but one HR person and my supervisor. But the HR team made sure my name was contained within team games, and even a minor introduction was done by them. I instantly felt at home,” said Vidisha Sharma, a digital marketing expert.