Use an Employee Engagement Platform to Connect your Frontline Workers
An employee engagement platform assists businesses in facilitating opportunities to connect with their employees. Such solutions are critical in developing workplace environments that promote employee, team and corporate success.
The Dangers of Disengagement
An employee engagement platform can counter many of the negative factors associated with disengagement that manifest in the following ways:
- Poor customer service
- Mentally absent team members
- Absenteeism
- High staff turnover
- Low productivity
- Avoidable mistakes
- Shrinkage
Sometimes the problems can become extreme and ‘active disengagement’ starts occurring where employees start organising themselves around real or perceived ‘issues. Therefore, ensuring effective employee engagement is a critical management component in today’s fast moving business world.
A Threat to Business Sustainability
The impact of disengaged employees can be far-reaching for companies and it can impact on finances:
Profitability is lowered by 15% in companies with disengaged workforces.
The cost of disengagement is on average 34% of each employee’s annual income.
Left unaddressed, disengaged employees can severely impact key company financial performance metrics.
The Alternative
Studies conducted across the globe have shown that companies who want to ramp up employee engagement tend to focus on five specific areas:
- Providing recognition for high performers.
- Ensuring roles and responsibilities of employees are aligned with the overall business strategy.
- Making senior leadership ‘visible’ across all parts and all levels of the company.
- Ongoing confirmation and communication of business goals.
- Monitoring potential drift away from overall business objectives by ensuring internal communication supports overall strategic objectives.
While it can be challenging to ensure the above elements are moving in the right direction and constantly monitored, companies that are willing to implement some form of employee engagement platform are putting themselves on the front foot when it comes to unlocking the full human potential of their workforce.
An Employee Engagement Platform – What Is It?
Employee engagement solutions assist companies in motivating, assessing, tracking and comprehending team member involvement with their work responsibilities and overall organisational objectives.
A good employee engagement platform has a wide array of digital tools available for deployment by company leadership. This allows companies to boost internal communications, gather employee feedback and understand employee mood, mould the employee experience, appropriately acknowledge employee successes and encourage employees to take steps to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Because a successful employee engagement strategy includes a personalised approach, top employee engagement platforms also provide adaptability across a variety of employee experiences. This is a critical element in a world where younger generations of employees are accustomed to a high degree of personalisation in their online interactions.
What Should an Employee Engagement Platform Include?
An effective employee engagement solution should include a number of features and functionalities to ensure that it offers a top-notch experience to those workers using it, while providing employers with the ability to refine and re-direct their engagement approaches.
At Wyzetalk, we’ve learnt through our many engagements with clients that the following are important components when it comes to employee engagement solutions:
Feedback surveys – employee engagement levels may be strongly influenced by how different employees see the workplace. The capacity to extract data on the employee experience is important to long-term corporate success, and surveys are critical in this regard.
Targeted communication – one of the most difficult tasks in internal communications is getting the correct message to the right person at the right time. Top-tier solutions facilitate this type of directed communication.
Peer-to-peer communication – moderated peer-to-peer communications mechanisms are crucial to promoting collaboration and effective communications.
Learning – overcoming the confines of physical infrastructure by providing learning on the go, whether it be micro-learning to facilitate ongoing employee development or onboarding employees quickly and effectively.
Human resources functions – digital distribution of payslips or scheduling of leave is a key element in this regard. Additionally, a solution should offer schedule management enabling employees to easily access their shift schedules and standby rosters digitally so they always know when they are required to work and they can also be speedily informed of changes.
Safety management – a safe work environment is a non-negotiable in all industries. An effective solution helps employees understand organisational safety policies and procedures, allows employees to log a safety hazard or a safety incident including attaching pictorial representation and helps them track the safety performance of themselves and their team.
Production support – in this regard setting up customised team groups, issuing instructions to group members regarding the execution of specific tasks, providing up-to-date information on the key metrics and being able to reward and recognise outstanding work performance are important facets.
Advanced analytics – ultimately business leaders need to be able to access and compare data in order to understand how changes to their engagement approach is impacting operational performance.
An employee engagement platform is a potentially powerful solution for companies to offer employees improved and streamlined work processes while providing their leaders with important insights across a wide range of operational matters.
Benefits of an Employee Engagement Platform for Employees
The benefits for employees of this type of platform are generally in the following areas:
- Providing employees with a voice.
- Offering flexible self-management of work tasks.
- Lowering administrative burdens related to human resources functions.
- Creating access to learning opportunities.
- Recognition opportunities for outstanding workplace performance.
Benefits of an Employee Engagement Platform for the Business
A well-developed and fully customisable solution provides companies with the following benefits:
- Higher levels of innovation.
- Lower rates of sickness or absenteeism.
- Improved customer service or product quality focus
- Better productivity
- A more involved and committed employee base.
Key Takeaways
In an increasingly competitive business environment companies are able to differentiate themselves from their competitors through the use of an employee engagement platform. Not only do such platforms offer fast and flexible ways of improving engagement with employees but they also have the potential to improve the employee experience. It’s a win-win scenario for both the company and its employees.
To learn more about the benefits of an employee engagement platform talk to an expert.