Employee engagement has become the primary indicator of measuring work satisfaction and level of productivity. It is a combination of employee recognition, communication, and feedback. Organizations the world over are using software platforms to optimize employee engagement and boost ROI.
Employee engagement is generally defined as an approach taken by a business to improve the environment in the workplace, in order to make it as conducive to productivity and organizational success as possible. It is more than simply improving employee satisfaction. After all, the happiness of an employee does not mean that they will be just as motivated to work and achieve the organization’s goals.
It is understanding what motivates employees with the end goal of improving overall employee sentiment in the workplace. Employee recognition also plays an important part in engaging, motivating, and keeping employees focused. Employee engagement software platforms help you do this. More than ever, this is becoming one of the most important aspects of building and maintaining a brand/business in the modern enterprise.
Let’s examine a few employee engagement definitions that fit the term in an apt way.
According to Gallup employee engagement is defined as “Engaged employees as those who are involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and workplace.”
According to Aon Hewitt employee engagement is “The level of an employee’s psychological investment in their organization.”
Here are some employee engagement stats for 2020 that you really need to know:
- Nearly 66% of all employees are disengaged.
- Due to disengagement, staff turnover can cost businesses $3.8 billion monthly
- 47% of employees actively looking for a job say that they would prefer working for a company with an established and thriving culture.
- The behaviours of businesses with highly engaged employees result in 21% greater profitability.
- 69% say that employee recognition and rewards is the top factor that keeps them with their current employers
Why Is Employee Engagement Important?
By now you already know that employee engagement can increase profitability and decrease turnover but there are so many more ways in which employee engagement can benefit businesses.
Here are some of those key benefits:
- Happier Employees – The first and most obvious benefit is of course that your employees will be much happier as individuals, which leads them to work better with their colleagues and peers. An employee recognition strategy helps to boost employee happiness, and satisfaction thereby keeping them engaged for longer periods of time. They also refrain from switching to unneeded high-stress behaviors.
- Higher Loyalty and Retention – Engaged employees are satisfied with their environment, growth, and work. Because of this, they tend to stick with their employer for as long as possible, thus increasing retention and helping businesses save billions in turnover costs.
- Increased Productivity and Higher Quality of Work – Engaged employees put more effort and focus as well as use their entire skill set to complete their tasks. In other words, they are more invested in getting the job done. They work better, smarter, and at a higher optimal rate.
- Increased Sales and Better Customer Service – Engaged employees are more likely to provide better service to their customers, reflecting their engaging nature and engaging their customers just as much. Club higher productivity with great customer service and your sales will skyrocket.
According to Google, 75% of people say that smartphones make them more productive. It’s not surprising to know that most people will look to their smartphones for ways to improve, efficiency, speed, productivity, and skillset. 97% of mobile users in particular claim that productivity apps are the most dominant type of app on their smartphones.
Most importantly, 64% of organizational leaders say that investments in technology have led to gains in organizational productivity. It is safe to say that investing in an employee engagement software platform is incredibly beneficial for organizations.
So why don’t more companies use them?
It’s because many companies are unsure about the specific features needed to make an employee engagement software platform successful.
So let’s start at the beginning…
What Is An Employee Engagement Software Platform?
An employee engagement software platform is designed with the sole objective of helping a company’s employees boost productivity, engage employees, efficiency, and align with organizational objectives by making internal communications and employee tracking convenient.
How Do You Engage Employees Using A Software Platform?
Employee engagement is a combination of a number of activities. With Internal communications forming the base of all activities organizations can engage their employees with:
- Regular and daily communications
- Recognizing their work and talent
- Conducting an employee engagement survey to get to know your employees better
- Organizing internal events aimed at team or skill-building
- Giving your employees a platform to help them connect, communicate and build relationships with management and colleagues
- Develop skill-sets
- Track work, timelines, and progress on achieving objectives
- Track engagement, productivity, and performance with in-depth insights and analytics.
What Are The Key Features Of An Employee Engagement Software Platform
Keeping employee engagement & experience in mind; here are the key features every employee engagement software platform must have:
Communications
For work to occur at a constant, highly efficient, and regular pace, communication is a necessity. Employees should be given a platform where they are able to not only communicate with each other but also with management.
Two-way communication helps with maintaining transparency and building relationships. Employees should also be able to connect with their peers not only within their team or department but company-wide.
A platform with social capabilities will provide a healthy base to collaborate and brainstorm. Just like any social platform, the tagging capability, use of hashtags, and smileys are an added bonus.
Over and above exchanging messages, the platforms should be able to transfer information via all kinds of media i.e. documents, pdfs, excel sheets, videos, gifs, images, etc.
Rewards & Recognition
It’s no surprise that people will perform better when recognized for their work and effort, it’s just basic human psyche. Recognition and appreciation of employees also helps develop positive and motivational work culture. This is one feature that is absolutely necessary.
Your software platform should support your ability to create a custom rewards and recognition plan for your employees. The recognitions should suit your employees, their designation, department, location, working conditions, and industry.
Apart from management recognizing employees, employees should be able to recognize each other too. This will help in dividing the responsibility of motivating employees. So the pressure doesn’t solely lie on management to do so. Employees should work in an environment where they boost each other up. This acts as an aid in developing lasting work relationships as well as a brilliant work environment.
Similarly, rewards also plays a vital role. Provide a wide range of rewards for you employees to choose from. By introducing gamification elements within the app, you are able to incentivize employees to engage further with the app.
The rewards you provide should reflect the generalized character profile of your employee population. Automation of the rewards features will help you scale the rewards and recognition plan for a larger population.
Surveys
It is imperative to understand what and how your employees are feeling, in general about the organization, their work, certain work-related situations, their career, etc.
Surveys is an employee engagement software platform feature that is designed to help you get into the minds of your employees and make organizational changes based on their honest opinions.
Your software platform should give you the ability to conduct all kinds of automated employee engagement surveys to help you improve employee satisfaction. Be able to get the right insights by being able to ask questions in any format. Attach all kinds of media to ensure your employees have all the information they need before responding to questions.
Notify employees instantly when insights or responses to surveys, pulse or anonymous surveys are required. Add gamification elements to further incentivize employees to fill out surveys so you get insights quickly in order to make well-informed changes.
Deep Insights & Analytics
It is this one employee engagement software platform feature that will help you analyze and track employee performance and engagement levels.
Employee engagement tools/systems use artificial intelligence to process and analyze your company data and provide you with the best employee engagement solutions.
Your engagement platform should be able to deliver in-depth employee analytics in real-time giving you a clear picture of their performance over time. Be able to download time-based reports for all your employee engagement campaigns. Understand trends so you can realign strategies to improve efficiency and engagement.
AI-based analytics will help organizations understand how their employees are feeling in real-time, thereby helping them take the necessary steps sooner rather than later before any major damage is done.
Employee Engagement Software Platform Functionality Basics
At its core, the employee engagement software platform’s features should encompass the following basic requirements:
- Easy to use
- Quick & responsive (fast-loading apps screens are imperative)
- High-quality design and UI
- Easy to access (access from IOS, Android, iPad, browser, digital displays, etc)
- Safe & secure (no data leaks and hacks)
- Instant notifications and updates (be able to send out push notifications)
While it is necessary to engage your employees. It is also just as necessary to keep an eye out for disengaged employees. A disengaged employee can have a significant negative impact on your organization’s employee engagement, employee recognition and employee communications strategy. So take the time to weed them out and make the necessary changes to engage them.
For an employee communication and engagement strategy to be executed efficiently, an all-in-one employee engagement software platform that contains all the features is required to supercharge employee performance. Use the above checklist when shortlisting employee apps to make sure you are choosing the right one for your organization.
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