What is Employee Engagement Software?
Employee engagement is essential for companies to maintain employee morale and productivity. Engaged employees experience higher employee satisfaction than their non-engaged counterparts. This engagement increases employees’ enthusiasm for their roles, colleagues, and company, improving retention, productivity, and the bottom line.
When employees are disengaged, presenteeism and absenteeism increase, and productivity declines. Employee engagement software helps companies increase and maintain employee engagement across the organization. These talent management solutions provide companies, HR departments, personnel, and managers with pulse survey tools to monitor employees’ feelings about their company, department, career, and role. Pulse surveys allow employees to provide feedback, which empowers employees and increases engagement. In addition to pulse surveys, these solutions might provide additional means of feedback, progress tracking, and employee recognition and rewards features. Some solutions offer gamification features that track employee progress toward goals to increase engagement.
Key Benefits of Employee Engagement Software
Increased employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention
Reduced absenteeism
Increased revenue, sales, and stock prices
Why Use Employee Engagement Software?
As research has repeatedly shown, companies suffer when employee engagement is low. Businesses use employee engagement software to build, grow, and manage employee engagement initiatives. These tools help companies, HR personnel, and managers solicit and track actionable feedback from their employees through pulse surveys. Understanding the employee experience can help companies improve company-wide engagement and promote positive activities that benefit the organization’s and its employees’ health and wellness.
HR departments and personnel typically implement employee engagement solutions as a supplemental tool for traditional performance review processes. Employee engagement software is great for businesses and HR departments looking to implement, manage, or expand employee engagement initiatives. These tools engage the entire workforce, especially when companies employ remote workforces or have them spread out across different floors or segments of a company.
Who Uses Employee Engagement Software?
Employee engagement software is great for businesses and HR departments looking to implement, manage, or expand employee engagement initiatives. Bigger companies may find it harder to unify their workforce. Employees are typically more engaged when they feel they are part of a team working toward a common goal, but this can be a difficult spirit to foster in larger, more divided organizations. A tool that unites people who work on different floors or in different segments of a company can be incredibly beneficial.
Kinds of Employee Engagement Software
Every employee engagement tool will look and feel different. Since all tools will have survey capabilities, companies will want to consider how customizable they need the surveys.
Survey Types and Reporting Capabilities—The level of customization and the breadth of employee engagement survey options will determine a tool’s reporting capabilities. Some tools offer engagement scores based on survey feedback, and other products focus more on goals and performance management related to engagement.
Performance Management Capabilities—Employee engagement and effective performance management software are tightly linked. Many employee engagement tools have some sort of performance management capability. Because the software is employee-centric, most employee engagement tools with performance management will enable managers to evaluate employees and be evaluated by employees.
Feedback Types—Employee engagement tools differ in their feedback types. Depending on an organization’s makeup and style, employees want to ensure the tool they invest in offers the desired feedback types.
Many employee engagement tools offer anonymous feedback. This is an effective way to encourage honest responses and constructive criticism. Generally, anonymous feedback is reserved for bottom-up feedback so employees can provide feedback to their manager. It can also be used effectively in peer-to-peer feedback, though it’s not a bad idea to moderate this type of feedback.
Continuous feedback is another form of real-time feedback that is becoming increasingly popular. Employees are more likely to be engaged if they receive constant feedback rather than once or twice a quarter. It allows them to constantly recalibrate their goals, and when goals are more present in mind, engagement is higher. If this type of feedback is a priority for your organization, you’ll want to ensure the engagement tool you purchase has the functionality for continuous feedback.
Mobile – Many employees now work from different locations, and the line between work and life is graying. The more mobile a workforce is, the more important a mobile app is. A powerful mobile app promotes use across an organization and, in turn, increases return on investment.
Employee Engagement Software Features
Pulse surveys are the main feature of employee engagement software. HR personnel and managers can access ready-made questions or customize pulse surveys for company-wide or department-based distribution. These engagement solutions enable users to organize and manage data collection for reporting purposes. Additionally, some solutions provide employee recognition capabilities.
Survey creation—Customizable or ready-made templates for pulse survey design help managers and HR personnel better understand employees’ feelings about management, colleagues, work policies, etc.
Survey deployment: Businesses, HR personnel, and managers can rapidly deploy pulse surveys at regular intervals and share the results.
Survey analytics — Provides businesses, HR personnel, and managers with actionable insight to improve engagement, spot issues, and set priorities.
Gamification features — Add entertaining competitions, such as quizzes and tasks, to regular tasks.
Employee Pulse Surveys—Distribute short, customizable culture-focused surveys or polls to employees to measure various factors of employee engagement, including satisfaction with their job, environment, and pay.
Survey Customization—You can Customize various components of surveys, including individual questions, distribution frequency, audience size, and anonymity.
Content Library – Access and use pre-written survey questions to target specific areas for measurement, e.g., Net Promoter Scores (NPS). Questions are frequently written by HR and/or psychology professionals to ensure subject matter expertise.
Employee Segmentation – Segment employees according to location, demographics, and position. Distribute surveys and filter survey results according to employee segments.
Wellness Assessments—Assess employee health and wellness through prebuilt wellness assessments and use the results to create custom wellness initiatives and personalized goals.
Goal and Challenge Creation—Within the system, Set professional and personal goals with customizable due dates and milestones. Use built-in tools to share these goals with other users and track and measure performance.
Peer Recognition—Send and receive recognition to colleagues, employees, and managers through digital badges, awards, or messages. Recognition is displayed in real-time on a live activity feed in the platform.
Social Feedback Portal—Communicate with team members and managers through a built-in customizable employee self-service web portal. Users can communicate one-on-one with each other and ask questions, share frustrations, and make suggestions with varying degrees of anonymity. Management can access the manager self-service portal to provide pertinent feedback.
Performance Benchmarking—Compare survey results to industry benchmarks to identify key areas for improvement. Evaluate survey results at the high-level or individual employee level.
Reporting and Dashboards—Survey results can be visualized and reported in real time with manager dashboards and automated reporting tools. Reports can be customized and distributed to aid organizational improvement and employee performance reviews.
Trends Related to Employee Engagement Software
Remote work—Workplace flexibility is a growing priority among workers today. Most large corporations have policies for hiring remote workers or allowing employees to work from home. Small businesses are following suit and will continue to expand their remote work policies.
Natural language processing (NLP)—This AI-based technology enables large corporations with employees who speak myriad languages to process, interpret, and analyze any human language. This allows organizations to accurately collect employee feedback regardless of the languages used, including slang, abbreviations, and colloquialisms.
Predictive analytics—Companies, managers, and HR personnel will be able to use company-wide employee engagement data to predict and prevent the causes of employee dissatisfaction and understand how changes in operations might impact engagement.
Corporate wellness — Corporate wellness initiatives will expand beyond physical wellness, including offering stress management workshops, providing meditation rooms, and focusing on mindfulness and work-life integration. Wellness apps will help HR personnel better promote and deliver these solutions to their employees.
