Looking to Boost Employee Engagement? Sociabble Trees Can Help.

Keeping employees engaged with company news and office life is critical—but it’s not always easy. Sociabble Trees presents a fun way to get employees involved, and help the planet. Both at the same time.

Maintaining and building employee engagement certainly hasn’t become any easier, with the deluge of constant information, coming in across platforms and devices. Let’s face it: it’s harder than ever to get employees’ attention, and keep them engaged. Hard, yes, but definitely not impossible, if you have the right strategy and tools at your disposal.

And as it just so happens, Sociabble Trees, a feature of the Sociabble employee communication platform, makes it easy to boost engagement, as employees are rewarded for interacting and participating, with real trees planted in their name, in reforestation initiatives around the world.

Discover Sociabble Trees for employee engagement

So what is Sociabble Trees? Essentially, it’s a CSR feature built into the Sociabble platform that empowers companies to increase employee engagement while planting trees in fragile ecosystems all over the globe.

Here at Sociabble, we partnered with Tree Nation, an organization that specializes in reforestation initiatives worldwide, to create the program. It functions by attaching trees as rewards for specific actions, like posting original content, commenting on a post, attending an event, or excelling at a task.

For each tree an employee earns on the platform, an actual tree is planted in their name, with a leaderboard so you can keep track of which employees are contributing the most to your company forest.

Engaging employees while reforesting the planet

Increasing employee engagement is key today, especially because it has reached new lows. According to Forbes, disengaged employees cost U.S. companies up to $550 billion a year, so it’s important to keep employees as engaged as possible.

There are many techniques and levers that can be activated to achieve this. And one of the easiest is Sociabble Trees. Why is it such an effective technique?

It is easy and affordable

The feature is embedded right in the platform, making it easy to use, and budgets can be determined by administrators. You can buy a specific number of trees and own a company forest, choosing from vulnerable forested regions around the world.

Then, the company can offer those trees to employees who can then plant them virtually in the company forest.

Of course, the forests really exist, and each is certified by our partner, Tree Nation.

But the important thing is that trees are a fantastic lever of recognition and motivation, at a very reasonable and affordable cost.

It is fun and engaging… and also gratifying

Individuals can monitor their own success tree by tree, and see how they are contributing overall to their own company’s corporate forest.

For employees, it’s fun to receive a tree, and plant it, even virtually. You can follow how many trees you have, how much you contributed to reforestation—it’s all there to keep track of and measure.

Employees are more motivated and engaged because the reward has a real social meaning, as opposed to gift cards or goodies, for example.

It helps the planet

Of course, this also helps the planet, as planting trees offsets CO2 emissions. For example, here at Sociabble, we systematically offer 24 trees each year to every employee, in order to compensate for the CO2 emissions the workforce creates.

But the main point is that trees are also distributed on many other occasions, mostly to recognize successes and achievements—like, for example, our client Sutherland.

Not only can employees follow their contribution in reforesting the planet, but companies can also communicate on their commitment, enabling them to receive an Annual Reforestation Certificate regarding the trees planted in their Tree Nation forest.

Some employee engagement ideas

Sociabble Trees is a versatile employee engagement solution, and there is a myriad of ways you can use it to boost involvement and awareness among your workforce.

Here are just a few ideas for how the feature can be used as part of an engagement initiative:

1. Have a standard campaign where employees are rewarded for engagement.

This could mean giving 1 tree for every piece of content they create, or for every 5 pieces of content that they share on social media.

As an example, one of our clients, an international investment fund based in France, is one of the first companies in its sector to adopt environmental criteria to manage its operations.

By choosing to reward the most committed employees on its Sociabble platform with trees to plant around the world, rather than with traditional rewards—such as an iPad—the company has gained 30% more users on the platform, and user engagement increased threefold.

This resulted in a 3-fold increase in reach on social networks. With more engaged employees, a more visible company, and more trees on the planet, everyone wins.

2. Challenges.

With the Sociabble platform there are many engagement features that centre around contests, recognition, and healthy competition. What better way to get employees excited and involved?

For example, one of our financial services clients relies on the friendly competitive spirit of employees. According to their Comms Director:

They are encouraged to win and plant as many trees as possible with the Sociabble Trees feature. Our teams are always motivated by challenges.

And when that challenge is about reforesting the planet, it’s more meaningful. Our employees are proud to contribute to saving the planet.

3. Celebrate successes.

This could mean starting a campaign where you distribute trees for clients based on a business anniversary. Or business successes, like a milestone achievement, i.e. “To celebrate 10 years of partnership with this client, we’re giving 10 trees for every employee!”

It is a way to celebrate team success and strengthen team spirit, too.

4. Events.

You can thank employees for participating in an event by giving them a tree, or encourage them to participate, with trees rewarded according to overall participation.

This is what our client BBGR did, and they chose to plant trees in a local forest situated next to their offices:

No more goodies, we preferred to turn to a reforestation project. Thus, we follow and watch grow our own BBGR forest, in Burgundy.

5. HR actions.

Sociabble Trees can be a lever for HR, too. You can distribute trees to welcome newcomers and make onboarding more fun, but also to celebrate a work anniversary, etc.

And as Sociabble is also available to frontline workers that are not equipped with professional devices, this kind of program can be easily implemented to include them as well, in order to strengthen team spirit and a sense of belonging to the company.

Sociabble is able to distribute trees to employees on an as-needed basis, but it also has automated distribution features in order to make it easy for platform administrators to award them without having to use detailed instructions or processes. In short: it’s easy!

Sociabble, the internal comms and employee advocacy platform for engaged employees

 Sociabble Trees is a meaningful, fun, affordable, and easy way to engage employees. You can choose among many types of trees and forests around the world.

You can determine the rules of attribution, whether on demand or automated, and the occasions/employees with whom you want to distribute them. The feature is totally adaptable to your needs.

In fact, Sociabble Trees is just one of the many features developed to engage your employees on the Sociabble communication platform.

Sociabble also offers the possibility to make surveys, quizzes, challenges, communication campaigns, send internal newsletters, and push relevant content to all employees—even frontline workers who are not equipped with professional devices.

Sociabble is the employee communication and engagement solution that’s already been used by industry leaders like L’Occitane, the Renault Group, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, and many others.

If you’d like to learn more, just schedule a free demo. We’d love to chat!