Employee engagement isn’t just an HR buzzword. It’s the foundation of how teams work, stay motivated, and perform over time. Leaders often overcomplicate engagement by tying it to annual surveys or big company initiatives, but the truth is simpler: engagement is built in the small, everyday experiences your people have at work.
Work looks different today. Hybrid teams, distributed employees, and the rise of Slack/Teams have reshaped how culture shows up.
HR Professionals — and CEOs and Leaders of all stripes!! — need practical strategies that make engagement feel natural — not forced, faked, or fumbled.
This guide covers 9 quick employee engagement strategies you can put into practice right away. They’re designed to be simple, scalable, and effective across teams of any size. Think of them as culture levers: small actions with outsized impact.
Table of Contents
1. Celebrate Moments That Matter
All teams and cultures are simply groups. Just like a friend group, a school alumni network, a congregation, or a political party, groups are defined by what they share together. For organizations, groups share milestones, and so in many ways, engaging cultures start at celebrating shared milestones and elevating those moments.
Milestones and what the team celebrates together really matters a lot. It’s important and impactful to elevate these celebrations into moments.
We wrote about celebrations and the Power of Moments in Work Anniversary Celebrations: Make It Special, and about work anniversaries specifically, I dug into the memory bank pulling together the Ways I Created Work Anniversary Moments as CEO.
Group Milestones and Why The Moment Matters
| The Milestone | Why The Moment Matters |
|---|---|
| Birthday | Birthdays aren’t “shared” moments for the group, but they are important milestones for individual group members. By recognizing an individual’s milestone, the group bonds together. |
| Work Anniversary | Work anniversaries are a big, big deal, and unlike birthdays (which are celebrated by the individual more personally), the work anniversary is something exclusively important and symbolic for the group. Don’t let these go unnoticed. The individual feels more included and connected to the group, and the group feels more validated by the individual’s achievement. |
| Goals / Milestones | Does your organization celebrate goals or milestones? It should. This gives everyone a feeling of shared accomplishment. Our 10th customer! Our first billion dollars! No matter how big or small the milestone, a milestone is an amazing moment to celebrate and elevate. |
| Group History | Celebrating group history helps the team feel better connected and helps everyone see and feel how far they’ve come. When people feel like they’ve come far together, they are more motivated to keep going! And when people understand their family’s or organization’s history, they are happier. Celebrate the company’s anniversary. Celebrate the anniversary of the first financing round. Celebrate the day you landed that first big customer. |
| Awareness Days | Groups are full of diverse individuals with different backgrounds, themselves part of a variety of different groups. Celebrating holidays, diversity and awareness days, and the like, helps people bring more of themselves to their working group(s), and this has the effect of bonding the team together. |
How To Celebrate Key Moments
Start by creating automations in your digital workplace platform (like Slack or Microsoft Teams). This is easy to do and it assures that routine “celebrations” don’t slip through the cracks.
Start with simple basics like birthdays and work anniversaries. Then add layers: celebrate customer wins, team achievements, company history, and cultural moments like heritage months or awareness days.
Bring some humanity and personality back to celebrations as well by sprinkling in some “fun” – for those using Slack/Teams and CultureBot, we recommend adding your teammate’s faces to the celebrations. Small teams may have just one face and one name connected to a celebration. Big teams will need to create photo collages or celebrate weekly or monthly. See more about big team celebrations here: Milestone Celebrations Made Easy for Huge Teams.
For holidays and awareness/diversity days, you could easily go overboard with these – celebrating multiple per week. We recommend setting up just one or two each month. These are days like:
- international religion day
- international women’s day
- world mental health day
- earth day
- the begining of pride month
… and so many more! If you’re using CultureBot, you can select from a wonderful list of preset days, that come fully prepped with animate graphics. But even better, you can use CultureBot to truly customize and personalize these celebrations, graphics, and messages to fit your organization.
2. Recognize People Publicly
Next up we have a big one… how do you deliver on building up a culture of recognition?
Public recognition amplifies impact. A private “thank you” is good. A public shoutout is 10x better because it not only rewards the individual but also signals to the team what behaviors are valued.
Build Recognition Rituals
Build rituals around shoutouts — end-of-week kudos roundups, Slack/Teams channels dedicated to recognition, or all-hands highlights.
When I was CEO of a 400+ person team, we had all kinds of shoutout rituals. I wrote about our biggest ritual — the annual award — in a LinkedIn article Running The Annual Meeting To Get Your Team FEELING Right.
Now that Levelset is sold, people commonly ask me for regrets., and the #1 regret I carry is that I didn’t say “thank you” enough. Showing appreciation was always part of our annual meeting, and it always stole the show.
We would give out “Thumbs Up” across the organization each month, and then a “Thumbs Up Winner” every year. Our super talented people leaders, Jami Smith and Madeline Chizmar, came up with the idea of turning this into a “MVP” award at the annual meeting. We would name MVPs connected to each of the previous year’s Objectives.
The executive closest to the Objective would present the MVP award, which typically came with a lot of tears and a heartfelt description of the person’s contribution. And this MVP process communicated so many things at once: Appreciation to the MVP, how involved and committed our executives were, how genuine relationships were at the company, etc.; and it also re-iterated and created a reputation around the objectives themselves.
Organizations should mix the formal awards structure with informal stuff that can pop-off within the team at all times.
This is why using Slack/Teams to actively promote sharing praise is a must-have for companies of all sizes.
You can call it praise, kudos, or bespoke things like “thumbs up.” In CultureBot lingo, this is called “shoutouts.”
And you can create systems to remind the team to share praise on a regular basis by sending a reminder weekly or bi-weekly to a dedicated channel to drum up the praise.
Incentivize the team
Recognition itself is a massive incentive, but put a cherry on top. Create a peer rewards system – essentially you give employees a monthly allowance of points to add onto shoutouts when they send them. As points are accrued by employees, they can go into a gifts marketplace at anytime to exchange these points for gifts.
If you’re actively using the points/peer rewards system, you can level-up again by automating the sending of points on employee’s birthdays and anniversaries. You can do that as well from inside CultureBot/Slack.
Tie It To Your Core Values (Or Goals)
Want to level-up more?
Align your shoutouts with your company’s core values or the company’s annual priorities – that way, when an employee goes to share praise with another teammate, they have to actually think about what value the other person exhibited before they send. And it reinforces and re-communicates your values or goals, both things you want to be constantly repeating and teaching in the organization.
If you’re using CultureBot, this is easy to customize (you can even swap out our default shoutout styles for your company colors, graphics, etc.).
3. Give Employees A Voice with Feedback
Being heard is never out of vogue in the workplace. Employees who feel heard are 4.6x more likely to feel empowered to do their best work.
There’s no time like the present to work on getting a system in place to systematically and regularly solicit honest feedback from your employees (better you get word of any issues or harbored resentment before it ends up on Glassdoor or somewhere else online).
Manually you can do this by sending out an anonymous survey on a monthly basis, but there is a better way – Slack or Teams!
Use pulse surveys, Slack/Teams polls, or open feedback forms.
The critical step is follow-through: acknowledge feedback, share what you learned, and explain what you’ll change (or why you won’t).
In Slack or MS Teams, you can setup regular reminders to seek feedback from the team. Teammates can submit feedback anonymously that can be privately sent to leaders, the people ops org, or anyone else. In apps like CultureBot, you can even message back and forth with the teammate who left the feedback to get the bottom of any issues or concerns they may have without either identity being revealed!
Don’t overcomplicate your surveys. A single, recurring question like “What’s one thing we could improve this week?” can unlock powerful insights.
4. Grease the Socialization Skates
A huge part of driving engagement working in today’s remote-first world is thinking about ways to replicate the more informal in-office socialization of the pre-covid era.
We like to think about this like a coin with two different sides – asynchronous socializing and synchronous socializing – both have their own distinct purposes. Let’s start with the first.
Starting Async Conversations
This is best thought of as the proverbial “water cooler” from the in-office days. How best to replicate this? For starters, we recommend creating/re-naming a few channels in Slack / Teams to align with common hobbies/interests your team may have. For example, you could setup a channel for travel, another for running, and a third one for Taylor Swift. You might name these #social-travel, #social-running, and #social-taylor – these give employees a clue as to what these channels are about, and whether they might want to watch them.
Next, you can automate conversation starters to “feed” into these channels once a week or even more often than that. If you are using CultureBot, that’s as easy as creating a water cooler instance (a ‘classic’ instance for the more basic topics, and then an ‘ai’ instance for the Taylor Swift conversation starters). And, that’s it! Invite the teammates you know who are interested in those topics (which you could validate by running a short questionnaire in Slack/Teams – also via CultureBot).
Enabling 1-on-1 and Group Meet-and-Greets
For teams that are onboarding new folks on a regular basis, it can be hard (especially in a fully remote environment) to facilitate the kind of regular social interactions that are best developed in a one-on-one setting.
It probably comes as little surprise to you, but you can also utilize Slack or MS Teams to automate this!
Open up CultureBot and select the ’employee intros’ feature. From here, create a new ‘instance’ of intros – this will then let you pick a channel, time of day, time of the week, etc. to configure your automated intro making. It’s important to highlight a few of different kinds of intro-making:
- Random 1-on-1’s: setup an intros instance with a group size of ‘2’ for this type – 2 employees at a time (who are in the same designated channel) will be introduced to each other at an interval of your choosing (e.g. weekly). This is great for new hires to meet new team members.
- Random group meetings: setup an intros instance with a group size of 3-8 for this type – 3 or more employees (who are in the same designated channel) will be introduced to each other at an interval of your choosing (e.g. weekly). This is great for more introverted departmental syncs (e.g. engineering <> another set of teammates).
- Lotteries: choose the lottery type on your instance when creating it to enable this type. This is great for CEO lotteries, where you essentially have the CEO meeting with a new person or group of teammates every week or two – great for morale and active transparency building from the top down!
5. Team Bonding & Events
Games and events are a tried-and-true way to build team connections, morale, and overall camaraderie. Although in-person events are definitely recommended whenever possible, when it’s too expensive or time is tight (as the remote world we live in continues to expand) – there are things you can do to have as close to that in-person vibe/good time as possible.
- Trivia Slack Games – start these by typing “/trivia” into any Slack channel. You can then choose from a list of Jeopardy categories, and even add your own company-specific questions as well. You can also schedule trivia out, if you’d like to use it as a scheduled pick-me-up or coffe break mid-afternoon for your team. We do suggest using it as an icebreaker to begin larger calls as well – you can simply have everyone enter a specific Slack channel, and off you go.
- Immersive Slack Games – these are started by using the “/games” command in any Slack channel. From here, you’re shown a list of games to play – these games are more engaging than your traditional geoguesser or skribble type games because they’re led by a virtual comedian and keep the full crowd equally engaged the whole time.
- 60-min Virtual Game Show – these are hour long games shows hosted by an actual live comedian. You will play a series of 10+ games over the hour long window, with the comedian engaging with random teammates as you go. Example games includes virtual escape rooms, a virtual theme park, wordplay games, seasonal games, and more.
6. Balance Work with Well-Being
Burnout kills engagement. It’s hard to care about culture when you’re exhausted. Leaders who prioritize well-being send a powerful cultural signal. So, this matters a lot because engagement and well-being are inseparable.
Promote breaks, encourage time off, and respect boundaries (no “always on” Slack culture). Recognize life events — not just work milestones.
If you’re not doing any sort of wellness programming today, this is a great opportunity to start (and to show you care/are thinking about things that matter to your employees, like work:life balance, burnout, physical/mental wellness, etc.). Build wellness nudges into the workday: hydration reminders, mindfulness breaks, or encouraging messages with bots.
This is a really easy, and quick win if you have Slack or MS Teams.
Visit the ‘health tips’ section inside of CultureBot (in Slack) and setup the tips to send to your new #wellness channel at a certain time of the week. Don’t like the tips? Skip some of the presets and add your own!
7. Welcoming New Hires
With new hires, it’s easy to get caught up on the formal stuff – employment forms, HRIS setup, benefits, onboarding checklists… the list goes on. We recommend also spending some time thinking about the softer/more social side of an employee’s first day.
Get them to share a little bit about themselves in a fun way!
From the surveys & questionnaires feature you can setup a new form using the template ’employee intro (2 truths and a lie)’ – once you do this, go ahead and create a new campaign that is set to run at the frequency of ‘new users daily (as they join Slack)’ – what will this do? Any new hire who joins Slack for the first time will get your new 2 truths a lie survey via DM – when they respond to this survey (never leaving their DMs)
CultureBot can be set to then automatically share those answers to a public channel of your choosing. This makes it super easy to get the conversation flowing in a fun way to introduce your new hires – and, once you set it up the first time, you can set it and forget it!
Checking-In With New Hires
It’s not always bunnies and rainbows post-honeymoon period for new hires – it’s very possible (esp. in larger organizations) that a new hire might have some suggestions or feedback on how to make the onboarding process easier. Of course, it can be burdensome to collect feedback and suggestions from new hires – but it doesn’t have to be (and it really shouldn’t be – as this data is golden, and it super vital for bettering a team’s culture).
In Slack via CultureBot, setup an automated survey to send to new hires a week, a month, or more after they join. The beauty is you only need to set this up once, and then it’s sending to new hires at your desired interval automatically from there on out. You can ask new hires whatever you want in this questionnaire – but we recommend using our template ‘onboarding survey’ as a good place to start.
If you’ve setup the results to send automatically (we suggest doing so), they’ll then send to you via DM in Slack (and anyone else you designate) automatically – now you’ve got a fully automated feedback mechanism for collecting onboarding thoughts from your new employees!
8. Communicate Internally Like A Marketer
Internal communication is often the weakest link in engagement. Too many words, unclear messages, no reinforcement. Employees tune out.
Clarity and repetition drive alignment
Treat internal comms like external marketing: short, clear, frequent, and repeated in different channels. Use Slack/Teams for quick updates, but also layer in visuals, storytelling, and campaigns.
If no one reads your all-hands memo, you don’t have an engagement problem — you have a communication problem.
9. Measure Engagement As You Go
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Engagement should be tracked with the same rigor as financials or customer metrics.
Assessing your team’s health shouldn’t be an afterthought (and it also shouldn’t be laborious, either).
There are solutions to make this very straightforward, especially if you’re using Slack.
The end result? You can have a fully automated “pulse check” going out to your team on a monthly (or quarterly) basis to gauge how they’re doing. Employees will receive a simple questionnaire in their Slack or Teams DMs (CultureBot can even follow up automatically with those who don’t reply the first time) and when they respond you’ll start to see results fill up in the reporting section of the campaign inside the CultureBot web portal.
This allows you to quickly report back to leadership on a verifiable, and quantifiable measure of how the team morale is doing – proof that your employee engagement strategies and tactics over the course of the year are paying dividends in terms or retaining key personnel!
Don’t chase vanity metrics. Focus on outcomes: Are employees staying longer? Do they feel more connected? Is productivity rising?
Pulling It All Together
Here’s the truth: engagement isn’t built in one grand gesture. It’s built in small, repeated actions that make employees feel valued, connected, and heard.
If you do nothing else, start with three habits:
- Celebrate milestones consistently.
- Recognize people publicly.
- Listen and act on feedback.
From there, layer in rituals, manager training, and stronger communication. Over time, these strategies compound into a culture where people don’t just work — they belong.
Why CultureBot Exists
At CultureBot, we’ve lived these challenges. We know how hard it is to scale culture across hybrid teams while juggling competing priorities. That’s why we built a tool to automate the small moments — birthdays, anniversaries, shoutouts, surveys — so leaders can focus on what really matters: building connection.
CultureBot lives inside Slack and Teams, making recognition, communication, and engagement effortless. Because culture doesn’t happen in slides. It happens in moments.
