It’s not enough to have happy employees.
Don’t get us wrong – happy people at TechGenies is really important to us. But it’s equally important for employees to be engaged. Employee engagement means employees are invested in the business, passionate about their jobs, and committed to putting in the effort it takes to achieve departmental and organizational goals.
Why does employee engagement matter?
Employee engagement is distinct from an employee only being satisfied, or happy at work, because a satisfied employee could be perfectly happy doing the bare minimum needed to collect a paycheck. While happy employees can fuel organizational culture and support retention, engaged employees can drive business results.
When employees are engaged, they’re fired up about innovative, new ideas they can offer customers, passionate about streamlining processes and invested in eliminating waste. Employee engagement isn’t just important for organizations on principle, it’s essential to their success, a Harvard Business Review study found.
Despite this clear connection between employee engagement and business results, upping employee engagement isn’t always easy. Just over one-third of the U.S. workforce is engaged in their roles, according to Gallup, and that’s true for both individual contributors and managers.
Now, some good news: leaps in technology can enable organizations of any size to better understand and manage their employee engagement.
Get technical: How big data analytics implementation, cloud computing, and technology innovations impact engagement
With the right software and technology tools, your business can apply these 6 technology-driven practices to boost employee engagement at your organization.
1. Measure engagement.
Even a quick pulse of engagement level with a few survey questions can help you track engagement over time. Ask employees about their engagement with the organization as a whole to understand how they view senior leadership, how fair they believe the organization to be, how respectful the company is of its people and what kind of values the organization holds. Then, ask about how employees are engaged with their manager, understanding if they feel valued, treated fairly, receive coaching and direction and gauging how the overall working relationship is with their manager.
When this is done digitally, your organization will have access to a wealth of current and historic data on engagement that can be mind for insights, forming the foundation for the next practice.
2. Invest in people analytics.
Collecting real time data is helpful. But leveraging this employee engagement data over time in an AI-powered software can allow you to identify relationships and better manage employee engagement by understand specific variables that influence it.
Also, keep it in mind it will be important to really understand different segments of your employees and their engagement. This requires a software adept at supporting robust business analytics to understand how different segments of your employee population, like entry-level employees vs. tenured ones, organization level or departments, feel engaged, and which variables influence engagement rates.
3. Communicate well.
Keep employees informed about organizational goals and the organization’s progress toward them. For example, when the organization is undergoing a transformation project, ensure project communication is transparent and timely for everyone in the organization.
Also, consider outsourcing some support services, to enable employee support even in the off hours. Chances are, employees are already flustered if they are working after hours, but if they can’t communicate with anyone who can support technology challenges, they’ll be even more frustrated.
Set and establish clear goals for your employees. For example, good performance goals for software developers might speak to specific initiatives at the company.
4. Support flexibility.
Millennials are trending to comprise 75 percent of the workforce by 2030, and are already stepping into leadership roles. A generation that values flexibility, achievement, open communication and cause advocacy will expect its organization to have the tools to support this kind of work life. This means in the race for technology transformation, business need to get serious about maintaining work -life balance as they adopt these changes. Leveraging a firm to outsource niche IT, technology staff around the globe, and developing custom software to meet the specific needs of your organizations are all means that can help you stay on the cutting edge of technology without burning out your staff.
5. Grow talent by cultivation, not competition.
With performance management software, organizations can better employee feedback, opportunities, and coaching. Intentionally cultivate talent, instead of pitting talent against talent, ensures everything is working together toward the same goal.
6. Capitalize on cloud infrastructure management tools.
Thanks to cloud storage, many employees can do their jobs from any location. By building out a cloud tools list that can support most of the actions and storage an employee needs, your business can free them up to enjoy more flexibility. Employees can easily collaborate across offices, with different countries and in traditional or non-traditional offices.
Whether you need a cloud solutions consultant to set up your cloud infrastructure to meet your business needs or someone with savvy knowledge of artificial intelligence law, TechGenies is here for you. Contact us at info@techgenies.com to learn how our technical expertise can help your business maximize your employee engagement.
Lee
