What is An Employee Engagement Platform? 

The best workplaces put a high priority on maximizing employee engagement. A high level of employee engagement is indicative of higher worker performance, increasing revenue and better company profitability. With team sizes growing and workers being spread out between headquarters, regional offices and home offices around the world, how can companies manage their activities to maximize employee engagement? While individual effort and good management practices are important to maximizing employee engagement, without a platform to help centralize, organize, analyze and report on employee engagement, efforts can be disjointed, sporadic and not based on actual data. To have an effective program to maximize engagement, companies have turned to Employee Engagement Platforms to help organize these efforts. These platforms normally combine the ability to survey employees, analyze results and insights, create action plans for improvement and develop good management skills for leaders.

Does Focusing on Employee Engagement Really Work? 

Research studies have shown the positive impact of focusing on improving employee engagement. Teams with higher employee engagement saw reduced turnover and absenteeism, higher productivity and improved company culture. Examining decades of employee engagement and performance data from more than 100,000 teams and covering over 54 industries, Gallup’s 10th employee engagement meta-analysis report highlighted that those businesses with highly engaged employees experienced 23% higher profitability and 18% increased sales productivity demonstrating the significant bottom line impact of high employee engagement. While significant time is spent by HR leaders deciding on which platform to implement, equally important to the program is for these teams to establish and commit to an overall employee engagement strategy to ensure the success of the program. Here are the five most important strategies for a company to adopt regardless of the employee engagement platform they select.

Five Key Employee Engagement Strategies?

Regardless of which specific Employee Engagement Platform a company selects, it is important for the company to commit itself to some important strategic pillars for the program. There are five major strategies of a successful employee engagement program which leaders need to implement as a part of their employee experience program.

• Data Collection Strategy: The most common way for companies to understand their employees is to use surveys. Engagement surveys, pulse surveys and 360 surveys all have an important role to play in understanding the employee experience and providing a feedback mechanism for workers. More recently, companies have added passive listening technologies like TruPulse software to develop real-time insights from employees to provide unfiltered feedback on morale, trending topics and workplace cultural health. By combining active surveying and passive listening technologies, companies can get a consistent and detailed understanding of the employee experience.
• Communication Strategy: The most frustrating and demotivating aspect of work life can be when people feel they are communicating but the company is not hearing what they are saying or respecting their needs. Collecting and analyzing data is important but equally important is having a strategy for communicating back to people what insights were found and how the company is working to address employee needs. A combination of broader group-wide communications and individual communications with team members is vital to complete the feedback loop. 
• Time to Market Strategy: The days of the yearly engagement survey are over as companies realize they cannot wait so long to hear about problems and look for solutions to address them. Everything in business from sales, to manufacturing, to inventory and even engineering is tracked on a daily basis and decisions are made constantly to course correct. HR leaders are quickly moving from a Yearly Planning strategy to a Time to Market strategy for quicker implementation of improvements. Modern HR teams must be adaptive by having realtime access to information like morale, trending topics and cultural health. Proactively addressing issues before they become serious and being able to spot both company-wide trends and trends in specific demographics or groups is critical to keep engagement high and the employee experience positive.
• Mental Health Strategy: If we have learned anything from the last few years of pandemic disruption, it is the critical nature of mental health in employee engagement. IO Psychologists have identified stress, anxiety, depression, worry and burnout as specific areas for concern. The taboo of employers and employees not discussing these issues at the group or individual level has been broken as companies have seen the benefits of addressing these issues strategically and the consequences of ignoring them. 
• Leadership Strategy: Keeping employee engagement high is not all about asking for a list of what employees want and giving it to them. It is a competitive market for good employees and companies need to ensure they have a great employee experience to keep retention high, but there are times when difficult decisions need to be made. Controversial post-pandemic issues like Return to the Office are best handled through strong leadership communications on why decisions are being made and how those decisions are important to the success of the company. These decisions should not be communicated from one person or group but should be strategically reinforced through all levels of leadership. Honest and upfront communication by company leaders of difficult issues goes a long way to keeping engagement high even when people cannot have everything they want.

Conclusion

Every business is different and every period in time presents different challenges. While there is no one size fits all solution for keeping employee engagement high at all companies, and over all time periods, what is clear is that with employee engagement having such a high impact on corporate success, companies need a systematic process for addressing employee engagement built on an Employee Engagement platform. Having a good platform is only part of the solution. The other critical piece is for companies to establish and commit to a set of 5 key employee engagement strategies including having an established data collection strategy, a communication strategy, a time to market strategy, a mental health strategy and a leadership strategy. Having these strategies in place will put the organization in the best possible position to be successful with its employee engagement program leading to higher employee retention rates, improved morale, better productivity and superior corporate financial results.