6 Ways to Bring Tech Into Your Employee Engagement Efforts
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Today’s Question: Have you used technology to help engage your employees? If so, what tech did you use? How did you use it? Did it work?
1. Anonymous Climate Surveys
In addition to your standard in-house wiki/knowledge base, we have used technology to engage our employees through climate surveys, polls to gauge interest in certain events and opportunities, and trivia/games.
We use SurveyMonkey to create and deliver our surveys and polls. We get a lot of participation in the activities because we offer rewards to those who participate, making it fun for employees.
The climate surveys are required, but they are anonymous. The responses to these surveys have helped us identify ways we can improve our processes and incentives, and they have also helped us determine what we are are doing right and should keep up.
One of the best software solutions we have used to engage our remote employees is 15Five. It’s a great way to catch up with people and see what’s causing any bottlenecks. Since 15Five surveys are sent out to employees automatically, I don’t have to remember to do anything. I just have to take action when responses come in.
Real-time messaging via Slack has been key in helping us keep projects moving forward without major interruptions. Asking questions, sharing advice, clarifying tasks, and sending office memes has never been easier.
For project management, we use Trello, a user-friendly team collaboration tool that allows us to keep every step of a project on track. Team members have the ability to set due dates, of which Trello automatically notifies them via email or the mobile app. Boards keep track of different types of projects, and then cards are made within each board to prioritize tasks.
In addition, Trello and Slack can sync together, so when a new project card is made on Trello, it is sent to the appropriate Slack channel. Anyone can create a new board or card and assign other users to that board. That way, everyone can see all of the different projects that everyone else is working on.
Transparency within an organization cultivates trust at virtually every level – and where there’s trust, there’s typically loyalty. With loyalty comes employee engagement, which yields great customer service, which then generates more sales.
Take restaurant employees as an example. Restaurants are always looking to improve their performances. As a result, workforce management has evolved to include smart scheduling. Those companies that make this shift in focus are the ones that are will grow revenues through improved operations. They get that turnover continues to be higher than is desirable, that employee engagement never seems to rise measurably despite sincere efforts, and that they are in tough positions.
Improved scheduling – or as we call it, “smart scheduling” – entails an open and honest effort to balance the needs of employees with those of the business. If you involve the employee in building the schedule by making it super simple to determine their availability and preferred shifts – and you give them the ability to swap shifts and pick up extra hours – and you do it all through a platform they can access anywhere, then the employee will feel more valued and that the company is more honest.
Younger employees especially want to work at companies that offer transparency and tech-savvy workplaces. Digital signage software is a great way to share important information with employees in a visual way that doesn’t overload their email inboxes.
We use T.V.s throughout our offices to communicate with our team. We show our most important marketing, support, engineering, and sales metrics using Geckoboard dashboards on our screens. To recognize our employees, we post employees’ birthdays and work anniversaries along with their photos on our screens. For some fresh content that’s also informative, we show industry news feeds and our company’s blog and social media feeds.
The biggest challenge with using digital signage for employee engagement is that the screens can fade into the background unless the content is updated frequently. Luckily, modern digital signage tools like can Enplug pull in fresh content through social media, news sites, and metrics dashboards.
