How Employee Events Improve Retention

Maximizing employee retention and minimizing turnover should be important to a business owner of any size.

Harry Drake, Max Wasserstrom, Chris Cargill
and Lou Serrone at the Safe Memorial Golf Tournament

At Block Real Estate Services, LLC (BRES), we have found that employee events can be used as an effective strategy in employee retention. Creating an environment and sense of culture where employees can bond and grow together leads to happier employees that stay longer. Here are 3 reasons how employee events improve retention:


1. Employee events are platforms to shape company culture

Employee events are the perfect times for company culture to be conveyed and communicated to team members. Having a "company team motto" or mission statement that you highlight in internal marketing materials and events is a nice way to get employees to unite under a common mission. At BRES, our team motto is “TEAM”- Together Everyone Achieves More.


2. Events get people talking to one another
In this Mashable article discussing how to make your employees happy and thus, stay longer, the author makes a nice point about how getting employees talking to one another breaks down barriers: "It's easy to fall into a silo and only talk to and work with people within your own department. If your company is growing quickly or has several offices or remote workers, some employees might not even recognize each other — but it's essential that they know and engage with one another." We have found team-building activities to be a great way for team members to interact and have fun. Some ideas we have had some fun

with:

• Volleyball games
• Trivia 
• Golf tournaments
• Life-sized Jenga

3. Working together for a cause especially bonds team members
In our experience, the employee events that get the best engagement are those where employees can unite and work together for the greater good.. In this past blog post, I shared some ideas for how to get your employees involved in fundraising activities and why it's an important part of corporate responsibility.  In our most recent philanthropic event, we partnered with Harvester's to promote a "Take Your Can to Work Day."

We continue to love planning employee events. Our next event was having fun in sun and enjoyed great games and food at the BRES Company Picnic- click here to watch our company picnic video!


Contributor: 

Paige Salveter
Director of Marketing and Communications
Block Real Estate Services
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