Many human resources departments renewed their focus on employee engagement as U.S. engagement hit an 11-year low earlier this year. Although recent reports show a slight uptick, from 30% to 32%, now is not the time to get complacent about engagement. Your engagement strategy is critical for employee retention, and 51% of them are watching or actively searching for a new job. But where can your HR team find the time to measure, increase, and analyze engagement on top of everything else on your to-do list?
You can engage your people more effectively and help your team work more efficiently with employee engagement software. The software simplifies many repetitive, tedious tasks required for a strong engagement strategy. For example, engagement software offers tools like pulse survey templates to make it easier to create a survey, send it to your employees, and examine the results.
The importance of employee engagement can’t be overstated in the contentious labor market we’re experiencing. Even in the best labor market, you want to hold onto your employees and keep them interested in their work. It’s an essential part of a successful people management strategy. Employee engagement software helps you approach engagement strategically and get access to valuable people data you can use to inform those strategies.
Keep reading for a detailed look at six of the benefits of employee engagement software.
What Is Employee Engagement?
First, we should answer this question — what is employee engagement? Employee engagement measures the level of connection and commitment workers feel toward their jobs. It’s also defined as the emotional or psychological connection employees feel to their work. Engagement goes beyond job satisfaction, indicating a deeper level of investment in work and organizational success.
When engagement is higher, employee performance and retention — even company profits — are higher, too. Gallup’s extensive research on the topic proves it. Compared to firms with low engagement levels, highly engaged firms boast:
- 51% less turnover at low-turnover companies
- 63% fewer safety incidents
- 32% fewer quality defects
- 10% higher customer loyalty
- 23% higher profitability
Given those correlations, it follows that if you’re measuring engagement, you can make some predictions about company success. Combined with the recent dip in engagement, it should come as no surprise that 70% of CHROs say they’re focusing on improving employee engagement across their companies.
Your engagement rate depends on how your employees answer questions about several factors that contribute to engagement, including:
- Are your employees excited about and motivated by the company’s vision and goals?
- What do your employees think about company culture?
- Are employees receiving enough feedback about their work?
- Do employees feel comfortable giving feedback, including to managers and peers?
- Does your company show appreciation for employees’ hard work and celebrate their achievements?
- Do your employees find their work challenging and interesting?
- Do your employees feel their voices are heard at work?
- Are your employees given opportunities for professional development and career growth?
- Do your employees feel they are fairly compensated?
- Would your employees recommend your workplace to others as a great place to work?
Engagement is clearly a highly impactful way to gauge the prevailing attitude of your workforce toward workplace culture. You want to understand how employees feel about your company, its goals, and their own work. You want everyone to feel supported and empowered to do their best.
In order to do that, you need to take steps to foster a culture of engagement and track your engagement rate regularly. And, in order to efficiently and effectively foster and track engagement, you need software for employee engagement.
Want more insight into employee engagement now?
Download three employee survey templates from ClearCompany to dig deeper:
- Standard Employee Engagement Survey
- Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging (DEIB) Survey
- Stay Motivators Survey
Promote and Measure Engagement With Employee Engagement Software
There are many ways to encourage employee engagement:
- Setting and tracking the progress of SMART goals
- Sharing company goals and objectives with employees
- Giving employees continuous feedback
- Asking employees for their feedback, whether in person or via a survey (on company culture, work processes, their own and their peers’ performance, etc.)
- Aligning individual and company goals
- Executing a performance management strategy that includes regular performance reviews
- Conducting regular employee engagement surveys and adjusting strategies as needed
- Implementing an employee recognition program to ensure employees hear they're appreciated regularly
- Increasing opportunities for collaboration and communication
No matter how well you do any of these things, you won’t know if your strategy is effective unless you monitor engagement consistently. Fortunately, with employee engagement software, you can execute an engagement strategy that works and measure its impact.
With an employee engagement solution, you can get a feel for what employees feel but might be reluctant to say. You can also address issues or areas of concern since those are opportunities to boost engagement. For example, if employees in many departments feel they don’t get enough feedback from their managers, you can meet with managers to suggest implementing weekly check-ins.
Employee engagement software makes it easy to better understand both engagement trends at your company and how to engage your employees. It also provides the tools you need to carry out engagement strategies and measure their effectiveness.
Let’s dive deeper into some of the top benefits of an employee engagement program that utilizes software.
1. Gives Employees a Voice
Ensuring your employees’ opinions are not just heard but are taken into account is a pillar of employee engagement. You want your employees to feel empowered to share their opinions, voice their concerns, and know they’re being taken seriously. You also want them to be able to use their voice to celebrate their colleagues and share their own accomplishments with the company.
Employee engagement software offers your workforce a platform for their voices to be heard. With engagement surveys, workers can give their opinions anonymously (or semi-anonymously) and honestly. Celebration and recognition tools allow them to applaud their coworkers for a job well done.
Goal-setting tools enable each employee to publicly share updates about their goal progress and achievements. They can also stay updated on what their colleagues are working on.
2. Recognize and Celebrate Employees
While we mentioned employee recognition, it’s worth mentioning again, given that recognition is a top factor affecting engagement levels. 37% of employees say acknowledging their good work is the number one thing their employer could do to help them be successful. Peer recognition is also an effective tool, making a bigger impact than recognition from managers only.
With employee engagement software, your organization can celebrate colleagues’ accomplishments and milestones like work anniversaries with ease. Employees give their coworkers Shout Outs that are shared across the company, inviting other employees to add their kudos. Shout Outs can also bolster performance reviews, becoming part of the employee’s digital record. Milestone date announcements show employees you care about the important days in their lives and give your company the opportunity to celebrate each individual.
3. Save Time and Resources in HR and Across Departments
More often than not, the goal of using software is to save time and conserve resources. HR software is, of course, meant to save time for HR professionals. Employee engagement software’s reach extends beyond the HR department.
It simplifies tedious work for HR and managers on a day-to-day basis, automatically collecting engagement data and digitizing complex tasks like goal management. Its long-term benefits include reduced turnover costs and a more productive workforce.
Engagement software also provides a way for HR and management to demonstrate the value of both engaged employees and software. The software can show changes in engagement levels and how they correspond to changes in strategy. It can also help HR demonstrate how much time is saved on tasks like sending employee surveys or creating engagement reports. Without software, it would be far more labor-intensive and difficult to illustrate these points with data.
4. Analyze Engagement Trends and Progress
One of the biggest benefits of employee engagement software — and of many kinds of software — is its ability to collect, analyze, and organize large amounts of data. Humans are no match for software when it comes to dealing with data, and employee engagement data is no different. By conducting surveys, tracking goals, and celebrating successes, you build a complete picture of engagement at your company. That allows you to track trends, pinpoint issues, and adjust your strategy to meet employees’ needs.
With employee engagement software, you can find the answers to many of your engagement questions:
- What portion of employees are engaged? Are any actively disengaged?
- Do certain employees, or employees in certain departments, receive more recognition than in others? If so, why?
- Are employees meeting the goals that they set for themselves (with the help of their managers)?
- Do employees feel the company’s culture reflects its mission, vision, and values?
- Are there trends in employee engagement across individuals or departments? For example, does engagement tend to follow a cyclical pattern, increasing at certain times of the year and decreasing at others?
- Do you notice any great disparities in engagement from department to department or individual to individual?
- What are some shared traits of the most engaged employees?
- What do disengaged employees need more of (e.g. feedback, learning opportunities, recognition, etc.)?
5. Creates a Culture of Transparency
Employee engagement software tools help increase the sense of connection your people feel to each other and their work and create more transparency around goals and opinions. A culture of transparency helps build trust between employees and their employers. Trust makes employees more likely to stay at their jobs and boosts engagement. Employees in high-trust workplaces are 76% more engaged.
A transparent work environment has other benefits, too. Being honest with candidates results in better-fit hires, and an open work culture makes employees feel more comfortable sharing their ideas and speaking up. More perspectives lead to better problem-solving and increased innovation.
Employee engagement software enables transparency with a news feed displaying goal updates, Shout Outs, new hires, work anniversaries, and more. Public goal updates, direct feedback on goals, and regular employee surveys all contribute to forming a culture of honesty and openness at your organization.
6. Healthier Employees, Healthier Business
There is an established relationship between employee well-being and engagement. Gallup found that “engaged, high-wellbeing employees” whose company culture “honors individual strengths” have near-zero burnout levels. Employees and businesses benefit when employees are well cared for:
- Lower costs related to health care overall
- Reduced number of work injuries and workers’ compensation costs
- Higher productivity
- Less absenteeism
- Higher morale and loyalty (which also means higher engagement)
Now is the time to emulate these companies — 65% of employees reported feeling burnt out last year, and more than eight in ten are at risk of developing burnout this year.
Send out a survey to find out how employees feel about your health and wellness benefits. Ask your employees, does your approach need improvement? Are they feeling burnt out or at risk for it? Which wellness perks would benefit them the most?
If you do make changes to benefits, continue gathering employee feedback via surveys to see if the changes are well-received and useful. Watch metrics related to employee health and wellness, like the number of workers’ comp claims and absentee rates, to measure the effectiveness of your benefits and compare them to previous plans.
Your One-Stop Shop for Employee Engagement Tools
Show every team member that you care about their well-being, happiness, and what they think of your company. Start measuring engagement levels or revamp your approach to motivating employees with ClearCompany. Our Employee Engagement software platform has the custom tools you need to build a strategy that works. You’ll get access to features that make it easy to send surveys, give frequent feedback, thank employees for their hard work, and spot signs of disengagement.
Put ClearCompany Employee Engagement to the test at your organization. Talk to a ClearCompany expert when you sign up for a demo of our Employee Engagement software.
