Learn More About Employee Engagement Software
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 role, colleagues, and company, thereby improving retention, productivity, and the bottom line.
When employees are not engaged, 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 keep tabs on how employees feel about their company, department, career, and role. Pulse surveys offer employees the opportunity 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 shows time and time again, 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 in the form of pulse surveys. Understanding the employee experience can help companies improve company-wide engagement and promote positive activities that benefit the health and wellness of the organization and its employees.
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 of all sizes looking to implement, manage, or expand employee engagement initiatives. These tools engage the entire workforce, especially when companies employ remote workforces, or are spread out across different floors or in different segments of a company.
Who Uses Employee Engagement Software?
Employee engagement software is great for businesses and HR departments of all sizes 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 is going to look and feel different. Since all tools will have survey capabilities, companies will want to consider how customizable they need the surveys to be.
Survey Types and Reporting Capabilities – The level of customization and the breadth of employee engagement survey options will play a part in determining a tool’s reporting capabilities. Some tools offer engagement scores based on feedback in surveys, and other products focus more on goals and performance management relating to engagement.
Performance Management Capabilities – Employee engagement and effective performance management software are tightly linked. With this being the case, many employee engagement tools have some sort of performance management capabilities. Because the software is employee-centric, most employee engagement tools with performance management will enable managers to both evaluate employees and be evaluated by employees.
Feedback Types – Employee engagement tools differ in the types of feedback they provide. Depending on the makeup and style of an organization, they will want to ensure the tool they invest in offers the feedback types they want.
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 an employees can provide feedback on 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 which is becoming more and more popular. Employees are more likely to be engaged if they are receiving 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 in 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 so managers and HR personnel can better understand employees’ feelings on management, colleagues, work policies, and so on.
Survey deployment — Businesses, HR personnel, and managers can rapidly deploy pulse surveys at regular intervals and share results.
Survey analytics — Provides businesses, HR personnel, and managers with actionable insight to improve engagement, spot issues, and set priorities.
Gamification features — Provide features that add entertaining competitions, such as quizzes and tasks, to regular work tasks.
Employee Pulse Surveys – Distribute short, customizable culture-focused surveys or polls to employees to measure the various factors of employee engagement, including satisfaction with their job, environment, and pay.
Survey Customization – 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 factors such as 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 results to create custom wellness initiatives and personalized goals.
Goal and Challenge Creation – Set professional and personal goals with customizable due dates and milestones within the system. Use built-in tools to share these goals with other users and track and measure performance.
Peer Recognition – Send and receive recognition in the form of digital badges, awards, or messages to colleagues, employees, and managers. 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 can 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 locate key areas for improvement. Evaluate survey results at either a high level or individual employee level.
Reporting and Dashboards – Survey results can be visualized and reported on in real time with manager dashboards and automated reporting tools. Reports can be customized and distributed to aid in organizational improvement and employee performance reviews.
