Employee interactions happen everywhere. They might happen at the break room, meetings, one-on-one sessions, and focus groups. This is true regardless of whether your team is online, in-person, or hybrid, and they are often an overlooked part of a workplace’s success. Managers need to know how to cultivate and navigate positive employee interactions in order to maintain their team’s culture and communication. Those skills come differently to everyone. If you dread talking to your team, this guide is for you.

Understanding Employee Interactions

Employee interactions are where your team members communicate and collaborate with one another. These might look like water cooler chats, team meetings, instant messages, or project sessions. These interactions have a huge positive impact on your organization for a number of reasons:

• Employee interactions facilitate positive relationships.
• These interactions encourage a communicative, respectful, and understanding of work culture.
• Communication encourages the mental and physical health of your team.

Negative peer to peer interactions can result in costs to physical and mental wellbeing, unhealthy behavioral changes (skipping work, substance abuse), and loss of productivity. According to Forbes Advisor’s State of Workplace Communication in 2024, nearly half of workers reported loss of productivity due to communication problems.

Employee interactions also include how you as a manager or HR professional communicate with your team. It’s important to recognize how your interactions impact the rest of your team and how you can improve and improve your work culture.

Increasing Positive Employee Interactions

As managers and HR professionals, our goal is to increase our team’s willingness to collaborate and form lasting relationships. Let’s explore some strategies that can help you succeed in your employee interactions.

Curb Your Judgment

One of the best places to start is to ensure that your interactions establish a judgment-free space. If you create an atmosphere where everyone can communicate openly without fear of retribution, you’ll make them feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas.

Lead by Example

It's also important to lead by example in your interactions. If you demonstrate your willingness to collaborate, ask for feedback, share knowledge, and work closely with your team, they will do the same in their interactions with others.

Cross-Department Collaboration

Another thing you can do if your team has different departments is seek collaboration between departments. This can help combat groupthink and encourage broader perspectives when approaching problems. It will also encourage teams to collaborate across departments more often to solve problems. In fact, companies that focus on collaboration perform five times better than those who don’t.

Team Rewards

If you like what you see, reward it. Implement new reward systems or leverage existing ones to incentivize teams in individual and collective efforts. CultureBot is a great tool to accomplish this. This Slack integration’s shout outs feature allows managers to give selected rewards to employees. This enables you to easily reward team members in hybrid and remote teams for positive employee interactions.

Create the Right Environment

You and your employees aren’t going to interact if you don’t create spaces that facilitate those positive encounters. Encouraging water cooler discussions, setting up your office layout for greater chances of contact, and thinking carefully about your Slack workspace are all important things to consider. It's important to imagine your Slack channel setup as being like an actual office. Make space for water cooler channels and provide opportunities for people from different teams to interact. In your water cooler channels, you can use CultureBot’s conversation starting features to generate a question of the day to lighten things up and get people talking.

Manager to Employee Interactions

Although it might seem trivial, navigating and encouraging positive employee interactions must be learned. Your managers need to be taught how to do it right. This is an ongoing process — you and your team will have to learn about this over time and adapt as needed. However, you can prepare your team with educational workshops that help you learn the fundamentals of topics like emotional intelligence, empathy vs sympathy, and the impacts of positive and negative employee communication.

Another important thing to consider beyond education and learning is feedback. Take note of your managers’ progress and give them feedback to help them improve. HR teams should also provide their workers with anonymous feedback options to give their thoughts about how their managers are doing. CultureBot enables anonymous feedback through its surveys and suggestions box features that work directly through Slack.

Don’t keep knowledge to yourself. Use mentorship programs to provide a way for your more experienced communicators to help their peers. This builds talent in your organization in more than just communication and can increase your team’s productivity. Don’t forget to reward your team members who demonstrate positive communication skills.

How to Document an Employee Interaction Gone Wrong

Every HR team needs to know how to handle a situation where communications break down. With Zippia reporting last year that 85% of employees experience conflict in the workplace, it’s important for HR teams to be prepared to respond and mitigate the impact of the situation. Every organization will be different, but here are the main objectives you should have when responding to an employee interaction gone wrong:

1. Documentation: start taking notes immediately. You need to know who, when, what, how, and why. Document what action was taken afterward.
2. Investigate: with the evidence you have, write down the facts as best you can with as little subjective language as you can. Collect signed and dated witness statements and any other physical or digital evidence.
3. Coordinate: take the evidence to the right stakeholders to decide on a resolution like disciplinary action if necessary. Be discreet and pay attention to confidentiality.
4. Review: regularly review what you’ve documented to make sure everything is up to date. Make sure everything is compliant with relevant regulations and company policies. Use these materials to learn about how your internal practices can be improved.

Keeping these objectives in mind will help you respond to negative interactions appropriately, document the situation, find a resolution, and learn from the incident to improve things for everyone.

You Can Cultivate Positive Employee Interactions in Your Organization

Negative employee interactions can be harmful to your organization's productivity, morale, and reputation. Even if you’re an introvert, you can make a difference in your organization’s communications. By doing so, you will foster a culture of mutual understanding, collaboration, and trust among your employees. You will also enhance your own leadership skills and confidence. Modern tools like CultureBot make cultivating positive interactions with employees easier than ever before with its helpful Slack features like shout outs, conversation starters, and more. Check out a free demo today to see how it can benefit your organization.

FAQ

Why is Employee Interaction Important?

Employee interaction is the exchange of information, ideas, feedback, and support among colleagues in the workplace. It helps employees learn, engage, collaborate, innovate, and communicate more effectively. Avoiding negative employee interactions can help your team develop a healthier culture that reduces turnover and increases productivity.

How Do You Increase Employee Interaction?

You can increase employee interaction by encouraging open and honest communication, promoting collaboration and teamwork, and supporting social and informal interaction. You can also use CultureBot to recognize effective communication and cultivate better communication habits.

What Are the Benefits of Using CultureBot to Encourage Employee Interaction?

CultureBot is a Slack app that helps you cultivate positive employee interactions. With CultureBot, you can appreciate your employees with shout outs, start fun conversations with conversation starters, and learn more about your employees with polls and anonymous surveys.