Have you ever worked for a company that felt more like a group of strangers coming together rather than a tight and coherent team? These are not fun places to work, and the company culture can feel disconnected and distant. After all, why would you want to participate and build relationships with people who don’t want to interact with you?
Global engagement rates are falling. According to the Gallup 2025 State of the Global Workplace report, the global percentage of engaged employees fell from 23% to 21% between 2023 and 2024. The only other time we have seen a drop in the past 12 years was in 2020, the same year as the global pandemic and unprecedented times of uncertainty.
The report puts this year’s drop as being caused by managers. According to Gallup’s data, individual contributor engagement has remained flat at 18% but the engagement for managers has dropped from 30% to 27%. Though this might not seem like a significant change, it is causing a real impact across the workplace at multiple levels.
Employees are getting more unengaged, and the whole workplace is suffering as a result. Rather than focus on fixing the individual performance and engagement of each and every employee, a better approach will be to look at the workplace community overall. Building a positive employee community encourages everyone to come together to collaborate and contribute. Rather than letting your employees drift apart and alone, create a central hub for them to come together. Give them a community.
What Is an Employee Community?
An employee community has no one strict definition as it is ultimately shaped by those who will use it the most. Some might prefer an online hub where they can message one another and share information, a bit like Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint rolled into one. Others might just want the social aspects and the ability to connect with their team members in a way that goes beyond meetings and talking about their tasks and project updates.
Just picture an employee community like a town square. It is a place for everyone to come together for announcements and celebrations. There might be different zones or areas for everyone to work or collaborate, and it will also look very different depending on how the community members choose to shape it.
Even a virtually-based team can find ways to hang out together. You might set up a Slack channel for random chats or discussions around hobbies (perhaps a book club?). Get together on the first Thursday of every month for a coffee morning on Zoom. You could even set up employee resource groups to bring together like-minded employees with similar backgrounds and interests.
Some businesses will benefit from a more developed employee community with active connections and a calendar of events, while others might just want the sense of community and the knowledge that they can reach out to their co-workers for anything. It really all depends on exactly what your employees need from their workplace.
What Happens if There’s No Internal Employee Community?
If you bring people together for the same purpose, surely they will form their own community? Why does the company need to provide some sort of structure? Can’t people just get on and make those connections themselves? Unfortunately not.
Sure, some employees will be able to come together to create their own groups and community spirit. However, the onus should not be on them to do so. If they have no motivation to build or interact with a community, we can often see the following issues arise:
Disconnection
When employees have no reason to build personal connections with one another, it results in disconnection. The rise of remote working also means that there are fewer chances for employees to build connections in person. When you sit all day in your own home, talking to nobody but your own household members, you lack the passing water cooler talk and casual conversations that can help break down barriers and build rapport.
With a disconnect, employees will feel lost and isolated. They won’t feel comfortable reaching out to one another when they have an issue or query, and they certainly won’t ever think about socializing. This makes for an unpleasant working experience and they won’t feel like part of the team at all, especially if they also see other coworkers forming bonds.
High turnover
When people don’t feel comfortable in their teams, they look for opportunities elsewhere. High turnover and poor retention rates can be indicative of many problems within a company, and unless they are addressed and reduced, no positive change will be made.
As human beings, we inherently want to belong; we want to find community. When our workplace doesn’t offer that, it is only natural that we might want to move on and find somewhere that might be closer to what we envision. If it feels like your company is a revolving door of faces, look to the company culture. If there is nothing to attract and ground people, it is about time that they won’t want to stick around.
Poor morale and stress management
A lack of employee community leads to discomfort and disconnection. When a team does not communicate with one another, they run an even greater risk of developing poor morale. Stress levels go up, and no one wants to take the initiative to fix the issues present.
When employees feel connected and part of the same community, it is easier to share burdens and work through periods of stress and change together—as a team. Without it, employees are more at risk of mental health issues and burnout, causing further disruption within the team.
What Are the Advantages of Building Employee Community?
Building an employee community is not a fix-all solution for issues within a company, but doing so can bring a wide level of employee satisfaction that might have otherwise been difficult to achieve. Here are some of the biggest advantages you might see in building a discernible employee community:
Builds a positive workplace culture
A positive workplace culture benefits everyone. Employees participate and share. Managers and executives not only get to share as employees themselves, but they also get to promote these internal communities as unique company selling points during recruitment. Creating employee value propositions and other important standards are not just box-ticking exercises; they are valuable steps in creating positive workplace communities that employees actually want to engage with.
Improves engagement
Speaking of employee engagement, when people have a good time and feel like they are part of a community, they will also want to engage with the business and each other. Employee engagement often improves as one of the biggest obstacles to an organization. If you wish to see an improvement across many areas of the company, increasing employee engagement is a good place to start.
Enhances collaboration
Employees need to be able to work together. When they are disconnected, they don’t know the best way to reach out to one another and find a harmonious line to work from. In creating a community that allows them to find shared interests and things in common, positive working relationships form. Effective communication is used to facilitate easy and free collaboration at every level.
How Do We Build Employee Communities?
Employee communities need buy-in and support from every level, but ultimately, they have to speak to the people they serve. Building an employee community from the ground up can be an extensive task but it can deliver amazing results.
Ask employees what they want
Employee communities need to serve those who built them. When building one from scratch, the emphasis needs to be on creating something that actually serves that community. Though it might evolve and change over the years, at the beginning it has to serve those who are with you in that moment.
Employees want an inclusive environment where they can be themselves. Goals like business outcomes and targets are for management; the average worker just wants somewhere where they feel valued. Whether you set up virtual spaces or organize in-person meet-ups within your office, you won’t see any engagement with these events or groups unless they are interesting to the people they are for.
Set up hubs and bases
Company support from the beginning shows that these interest-based groups are welcome. Choosing to create specific employee resource groups gives them structure. It is one thing to just casually discuss personal interests with your coworkers and another to have a dedicated space for them. Hubs like employee resource groups provide a much-needed structure that helps to take these employee spaces from casual corners to foundations with the potential for change and success.
Implement the right technology
Don’t just leave the groups to thrive for themselves and spread news through word of mouth. Give them software and technology to build the foundation and break down communication barriers. Purpose-built apps and software help to ease many of the issues that can arise in the creation of employee communities.
Just as you are making a hub for your employees to come together, so must you provide a platform for them to stand on. From dedicated software, you will be able to pull important data and manage all the details that come with maintaining a community for employees.
Make it easy to access
When you have the community in place, you don’t want it to get lost in the noise of the rest of the company. You need to drive employee engagement and make sure it is visible and accessible to everyone, especially those who the community is built for.
The community members need to feel comfortable in promoting the group’s activities. With internal communications, posts on message boards, or even just chats in the hallway or before the start of meetings, conversations about the communities should be a welcome part of the organization. Newcomers should be made aware of the communities as part of their onboarding, and they should be invited to join and take part.
Encourage voices at every level
Employee communities are for everyone. If the only people who get to set direction or voice an opinion are the people at the top, those further down the corporate ladder won’t want to engage with the community as they see it as not representing their views.
Work needs to be put in to ensure that employees at every level are given space to voice their thoughts and bring about real and lasting change. Even very junior staff like interns deserve to work for a company that values them,and they should see themselves reflected in the organization.
Build Your Employee Community With MentorcliQ
A strong community needs to be at the heart of your organization if you want to see dedicated employees who are engaged with their work and capable of weathering any storm thrown their way. With so many benefits to building a coherent company culture and community, this is not something that you can leave unattended.
Though creating a company community should be placed in the hands of employees, management can give them the structure and platform to launch their initiative successfully. CommunityCliQ Employee Community Software is exactly the platform you need to give your groups and communities the supported space they need to thrive. Centralize your employee community efforts and bring communication, knowledge sharing, and fun all under one easy-to-access umbrella.
Create a community that your employees want to engage with, and watch as they turn it into something you can all be proud of. Book a demo today and find out how CommunityCliQ can transform your approach to employee community.
