Employee engagement programs offer a clear path to better business outcomes, shown to boost everything from employee retention to profitability, but they can be challenging to implement at scale. In our latest webinar, two Donut experts — Carrie Parker, Head of Customer Experience and Glynn Dickens, Customer Success Manager — share their best strategies for automating employee programs while keeping engagement high and measuring impact.

Key Donut Products for Employee Engagement: Journeys and Channels

At the core of our platform are Journeys and Channels, two powerful tools designed to streamline your employee engagement programs. With Journeys, you can create customizable, automated sequences of messages and actions, ideal for onboarding, offboarding, mentorship and other moments core to employee experience. Donut Channels integrate directly within Slack to facilitate interactions, support team-building, and spark casual connections.

“Donut Journeys are all about creating repeatable, scalable programs that build meaningful experiences for new hires without manual upkeep,” Glynn explained.

Onboarding Made Easy

With Journeys, onboarding becomes a breeze. Set up reusable message templates to introduce team members, automate network-building activities, and enroll new hires into channels. Your onboarding process can be reused over and over, saving your HR team time while ensuring consistency across new hire experiences.

Hot Tip: Make sure to incorporate team feedback — especially from company leadership — when planning your programming!

As Glynn put it, “. . . making sure you bring in those hiring managers to really curate that experience for folks. Every organization is unique, so it’s really important to ensure that there are multiple teams represented at the table when creating these programs.”

Versatile Applications for Every Stage of the Employee Journey

Donut goes beyond onboarding to support multiple employee lifecycle touchpoints, including:

1. Offboarding: Create a smooth transition for departing employees.
2. Return from Leave: Ease employees back into work after an extended absence.
3. Training Programs: Deliver information consistently and on time.
4. Mentorship Programs: Facilitate connections between mentors and mentees.

Boosting Employee Engagement and Connection in Slack Channels

In today’s hybrid workplaces, building connection is critical. Our Channel programs offer innovative ways to keep your team engaged:

• Standard Intros for casual connections
• Cross-group options to connect employees across departments, locations, and more
• Within-group matching for team-specific connections, interest groups, or location
• Lottery-style pairings for executive skip levels or lunch lotteries

Hot Tip: Providing certain questions or topics for teammates to discuss in Intro meetings is a great way to drive engagement and participation.

Robust Reporting on Employee Engagement Efforts:

With Donut, you can track team progress through their Journeys, send surveys right in Slack for quick pulse checks or multiple-question feedback, and monitor success metrics for Intros like meeting completion.

One attendee was especially thrilled by the survey capabilities in Donut, exclaiming, “Y’all just made my entire quarter!”

Tracking Your Success: The New Donut Homepage

Our newly designed Donut Homepage puts reporting insights front and center, helping you see what’s working and where you can improve. Track active usage, intro completion, Journey participation, new hire additions, and more — all in one place.

The customizable “Action Required” section helps you stay on top of tasks that are critical for the success of your program.

We’d love your feedback on this new feature. Please feel free to pass your requests to our team via [email protected] so we can share them with our product team!

Key Tips for Donut Success

To make the most of Donut, try these tips:

1. Announce and promote Donut to your team.
2. Set aside time for employees to participate.
3. Iterate on your programs based on feedback.
4. Tailor programs to match specific employee needs.
5. Celebrate and incentivize participation.
6. Focus on creating purposeful connections.

With Donut, your employee experience can be more engaging, efficient, and connected than ever. Whether it’s streamlining onboarding or fostering cross-team relationships, Donut has the potential to transform your workplace culture.

This webinar was packed with valuable insights, great questions, discussion, and feature demos. You can watch the full recording below: