Top Conversation Starters That Increase Employee Engagement

In order to develop meaningful professional relationships across your organization, you need conversation starters that increase employee engagement. You might work with a small group of individuals on your sales, marketing, accounting, product, management, etc, team, but there are so many individuals in your organizations that will contribute to your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly success. Over time you may stumble upon the right people, but to accelerate your growth you must seek out those relationships.

Organizations are complex structures with multiple office locations, dispersed teams, and remote teams. Leadership and the HR department have enough on their plate. Setting up networking events might benefit some individuals on the team that have a flexible after-work schedule in certain locations, but by enlarge is not accessible due to time restraints and other responsibilities.

Interpersonal communication is still key to build stronger relationships and better company culture. The key is having a combination of networking options across the organization, across your department, and across your team. It is nearly impossible to organize events that work at every level of the organization without automation.

Organization Wide Conversation Starters

There are a countless number of individuals across your organization whom you may never have a conversation with. Your next professional opportunity may just be due to serendipity. Leadership knows the value of networking and relationship building, building more relationships within your organization is a great start.

Company Milestones

Highlighting the success of departments, teams and individuals is a great way to reinforce your company story and values. These types of highlights are core to conversation starters because they create the right base and environment to build relationships. Making your company values clear through story telling helps individuals in your organization remember and repeat your values and goals. Leadership should request these type of stories from managers to share across the organization.

Create The Right Public And Private Channels

Not everything needs to be shared with everybody. Use your team communication tool to create channels that are focused on departments, teams and cross functional teams. Giving team members the right channels to connect with relevant individuals across their organization will provide opportunities to start conversations but not be overwhelming.

Department Wide Conversation Starters

You may not immediately see the value in building stronger relationships on the technical side of the organization if you are on the business side of the organization or vice versa. Focusing on relevant departments that you engage with, or networking within your department provides shared interests.

Virtual Coffees

Use randomly selected virtual coffees across departments and cross functional teams in order to make completely new introductions that are relevant to your responsibilities but are unlikely to connect with otherwise. Having access to historic Icebreaker answers and any additional information will help these conversations go smoothly.

Birthdays

Birthdays and other anniversaries are low hanging fruit. Finding out it is someone’s birthday and reaching out either publicly or privately helps solidify relationships.

Team Wide Conversation Starters

Your team might be a small or medium sized group of people. It could be a focused team or a cross functional team. No matter what your team make up is it is essential that you build strong relationships. This in turn improves communication among team members and increases productivity.

Icebreakers

Fun Icebreakers are great conversation starters. They can be used across the organization but are more enjoyable when you get to learn more about individuals that you already interact with on a regular basis. Covering topics that may not come up organically gives teammates insights into individuals on both a professional and personal level.

Employee Recognition & ShoutOuts

Team member recognition is important because it brings the team closer together to celebrate wins. These wins are the core of company culture. Leadership should have access to these wins in order to tell the entire organization success stories. Using team values, skills and goals when recognizing team member cements the company culture on a daily basis.

Employee Feedback

Private or public feedback is of course important when helping team members meet their deliverables. Without feedback they are lost. Outside of employee evaluation it is important to use feedback for relationship building. Having a culture of feedback improves communication across teams and between individual team members.

Conclusions

There are different ways that you can implement conversation starters across the organization to increase employee engagement. Whether it is across the organization, within departments, or within teams getting the conversation started is the first step in building more meaningful professional relationships. This increases productivity by improving communication. It also makes team members happy by giving them the opportunity to grow their network and learn from individuals across their organization that they may not have otherwise had the opportunity to engage with.

About ChatFox

Employees that work across an organization don’t have the same opportunity to get to know each other in the hallways, the water cooler, or around meetings. These opportunities to build meaningful professional relationships directly impact the way employees work together and communicate. ChatFox increases employee engagement by building more meaningful relationships across your organization, department, and team. We get the conversation started with Virtual Coffees, Icebreakers, ShoutOuts, and Birthdays. Unlike other employee engagement apps, ChatFox provides customizable chat cadences, custom Icebreaker questions, and custom ShoutOut skills within Slack to reinforce your organization’s values.