Can an employee engagement platform truly make a long-lasting positive impact on your workplace? Yes, it can. Let’s break it down. One of the weakest points in every organization’s defense is its attrition rate. An article in Harvard Business Review writes that according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4 million Americans quit their jobs in July 2021. Resignations peaked in April and have remained abnormally high for the last several months, with a record-breaking 10.9 million open jobs at the end of July.
According to Forbes, Employee turnover can cost employers 33% of an employee’s annual salary. That’s a huge amount of money, a huge expense that can be done away with. Employee engagement is the answer. Organizations need to explore ways to improve employee engagement in order to reduce turnover. According to Gallup, businesses with lower engagement levels (as low as the bottom-most quartile) had 31%-51% more employee turnover. When you combine these stats, the damages to a company’s output, productivity, quality, and ROI are exorbitant.
Apart from turnover, disengaged employees lead to many other highly detrimental side effects:
- Disengaged employees care less about their jobs than engaged employees.
- While engaged employees have a vested interest in seeing their projects and careers advance, a disengaged employee is looking for the exit at best and planning on minimal effort indefinitely at worse.
- Disengaged employees have more absenteeism, experience more safety incidents, and create more turnover within the company.
- The cost of overtime to cover illness, training new employees, and worker’s compensation adds up over time.
- Disengaged Employees lower morale
- Disengaged employees reduce the quality of customer service
- Disengaged employees find more excuses to not do the job instead of solutions and ways of doing the job.
The only solution is to engage employees on a daily basis. But how do you do this? How do you monitor employees & engagement activities? How do you execute strategies? How do you know if it is effective? The technology exists so why aren’t more companies using it? Only 16% of companies use technology to monitor employee engagement! An employee engagement platform is the ultimate secret weapon that will help you gather the masses, reduce costs, supercharge productivity and build a better brand.
So let’s have a look at the four key tactics that will help you engage your employees:
Rewards and Recognitions
When simply put, human beings will always respond to two things: getting affirmations and free things. Let’s face it, who doesn’t get excited with free samples at a supermarket, or samplers, or winning a contest even if the prize is something you’d barely use. It just makes you happy. What if you get those two things at work? You could potentially make your entire workforce happy enough to naturally not be affected by working harder. What are the benefits of employee rewards and recognition?
- Higher productivity
- Higher retention
- Increased job satisfaction
- Increased loyalty
- Improved team culture
- Boosted motivation
- Happier employees
Effective Communications
Communication is an integral part of any relationship, whether it be personal or professional. An organization’s relationship with its employees is one of the most important relationships they have to maintain. Transparent and effective two-way communications have to be at its core. It’s the only way you can ensure clarity in all functions. Employees know what their duties are, objectives are clear and every single person is getting the same messaging. Communications today, go beyond verbal or email, use videos, mobile apps, and other nonverbal means to get the message across. Maintain constant communication touchpoints throughout the day, throughout the week throughout the month, and throughout the year, and most importantly make sure your employees are able to communicate with you the same way. How does employee communications benefit the organization?
- Increased engagement
- Increased productivity
- Increased collaboration
- Boosted job satisfaction
- Improved work environment
- Reduced conflict
- Improved work relationships
Surveys
Surveys are one of the best ways to get your employees’ opinions. To be honest, everyone has an opinion, about everything. It’s only a matter of who voices their opinion and who doesn’t. Oftentimes an employee will confide with their peers when something upsets them instead of going to the source. Employees complaining amongst each other just leads to negativity and them being disgruntled and all this time management doesn’t even know what’s going on. Most of them will not voice their opinion to management unless they are asked for it directly. So use customizable surveys to ask them what’s wrong. You’d be surprised at the honesty when you just ask them the right questions. It’s even easier for them to voice their opinion if they get to take the surveys in a mobile app (straight from the palm of their hands). What happens when you conduct regular employee surveys through your employee engagement platform?
- Increased job satisfaction
- Increased two-way communications
- Increased engagement
- Clarity on key improvement areas
- Positive changes in work culture
- Transparency on leadership effectiveness of managers and supervisors
Frequent Engagement Events
Just like in school, extracurricular activities are not only good for development but also helps to take a break from an otherwise stressful, day, week, or month. Be it a simple mid-day team building activity or a quarterly sales conference; you’ve got to get your employees out of their little workbox for them to engage more at work. There’s no need to plan large events, use your employee engagement platform to do small things with gamification elements on a regular basis to keep their minds active. Fun things like quizzes, contests, sports events, music, or even a webinar. The gamification does help to urge them to participate; everybody wants a freebie or prize. Plus it takes their mind off their mundane job for a while. How do engagement events help employees?
- Increased engagement
- Increased productivity
- Improved retention
- Happier employees
- Lower absenteeism
- Improved quality of work
When you look at the benefits of all the engagement activities mentioned above, do you see any similarities? All of them lead to the same thing. And all of them are possible by using the right employee engagement platform. The HubEngage employee engagement platform gives you the functionality to help improve your workforce and get a massive ROI. Use the platform to create a positive, transparent and supportive workplace environment. Show your employees you care and they in turn will return the favor tenfold. Get in touch with us for a live demo and we’ll show you what your custom employee engagement platform can do for your organization.
