Employee engagement has been a persistent issue organizations have faced for years. Unfortunately, the downward trend of employee satisfaction continues. In fact, among U.S. workers, disengagement has reportedly dropped to its lowest levels in over a decade.
What many companies may not realize is disengaged employees can cause staggering amounts of financial losses. For instance, in 2019, organizations lost between a whopping $450 billion and $500 billion due to employees’ disengagement.
These are alarming trends. The good news is by recognizing a lack of employee engagement, steps can immediately be taken to reverse the problem.
One solution lies within integrating employee engagement tools. You can leverage these tools to boost motivation, help employees become fulfilled, and, in the end, increase their levels of happiness within their jobs.
Even better is the ability to eliminate the negatives causing disengagement. A natural side effect of improving engagement is better morale and higher productivity. Here we’ll take a look at what employee engagement tools are and how you can utilize them.
Introduction to Employee Engagement Tools
When employee engagement levels take a plunge, this can quickly have an adverse effect on your company’s culture. Fortunately, there are digital tools available to empower employers to:
- Diffuse the situation
- Revitalize their workplaces
- Identify helpful employee engagement ideas
- Implement new initiatives
To help keep your employees invested in your organization, one of the best strategies is to try to find ways to re-engage them. Engagement tools are a great mechanism to help you to achieve this goal.
What are Employee Engagement Tools?
Employee engagement tools are technology solutions, including software, apps, and platforms organizations use to bolster workplace interactions. Designed to increase employee motivation and happiness in the workplace, employee engagement tools can:
- Improve employee morale
- Boost retention rates
- Increase productivity
- Boost profitability
- Increase cohesiveness in teams
- Generate an overall revitalized work environment
Through employee engagement tools, you can develop better relations and help create a cohesive, happy work environment.
Why are These Tools Important for Businesses?
Since employee engagement tools are specifically designed to help establish a positive and productive workplace atmosphere, when you begin using tools, you give your employees a voice. Once you receive responses, you can aggregate the responses to help identify issues and then your data to develop solutions to improve employee engagement.
Best Practices to Improve Employee Engagement
Integrating best practices can go a long way toward boosting employee engagement and re-establishing loyalty from employees. Perhaps even create a rejuvenated sense of excitement about their jobs. Ways you can do this include:
Fostering Open Communication
Decades ago, managers tended to be more hands-off and aloof when it came to their employees. Often preferring to segregate “management” from “workers”, this philosophy often led to an “us vs. them” mentality. This isn’t healthy for any workplace. Especially since these beliefs tend to create distrustful and non-communicative workplaces.
Modern work environments are more likely to operate on more of a flat hierarchy. But this doesn’t mean communication issues don’t persist. Consider investing in developing a welcoming, open-door environment. This philosophy:
- Provides higher comfort levels for people to openly talk about issues
- Affords an ability to hold social conversations
- Ultimately improves morale
Other ways to foster good relationships and open communication are to have team lunches or plan fun workplace events to encourage team bonding. At a loss of what to do? Why not send an employee survey to cull ideas on how to build a more communicative environment? Whatever way you decide to approach fostering open communication, focus on establishing a good rapport. You might be amazed at what happens!
Prioritizing Employee Recognition
Employees typically want to feel appreciated. By prioritizing employee recognition, you show employees they matter and help nurture a culture of appreciation and respect for contributions made. You don’t even have to have a large budget, even small gestures can mean a lot to employees.
- Give digital shout-outs via email, social media, or other mechanism
- Provide celebratory luncheons
- Offer casual Fridays
- Allow flex-work days
- Add remote work options
- Buy gift cards to distribute are rewards for good work
- Hold monthly (or other time frames) employee appreciation days
Really, the sky’s the limit, all you need is some creativity and maybe a portion of your budget to find ways to prioritize employee recognition. Even a simple meaningful “thank you” for a job well done can go a long way towards improving morale and engagement.
Encouraging Ongoing Learning
Most people don’t want to stagnate in their jobs. While burnout has historically been an issue, today’s employers also may need to consider “boreout”. To help your employees remain stimulated, you can encourage ongoing learning and provide them with the tools and opportunities to do this.
By motivating employees to re-invest in their jobs, their careers, and your company, the result will be more engagement and an overall increased level of happiness. Accompanying these are natural side effects, such as stronger productivity, better customer service, and other positive impacts.
Types of Employee Engagement Tools
When it comes to digital tools to utilize to improve your employee engagement levels, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. You’ll want to look at a variety of tools you can use, the objectives you want to meet, and then identify which tools best suit each goal. Here are common employee engagement tools today’s organizations use.
Survey and Feedback Tools
To learn more about what your employees want and identify what makes them tick, why not simply ask them? Consider using:
- Google Forms
- SurveyMonkey
- Peoplelytics
- Qualtrics
- ThriveSparrow
Send a survey out to your teams to solicit feedback and gather their overall thoughts and feelings on specific issues.
Get tips, industry benchmarks, strategies to boost scores, and more!
Employee Recognition Tools
Employee recognition tools allow for public praise, rewards programs, and other perks. They employer employers to establish an environment to recognize employees for their dedication, efforts, and accomplishments in real-time. Tools to consider include:
- Bonusly
- Kudos
- Motivosity
- Nectar
- Vantage Rewards
Giving timely praise for a well-done job offers many benefits and improvements across a work culture, including but not limited to better motivation and improved morale.
Collaboration and Communication Tools
Integrating collaboration and communication tools offers organizations ways to monitor processes and find ways to improve upon them. They also provide simplicity in facilitating employees to connect with each other, share data and/or information, or give updates. Tools to consider:
- Slack
- Trello
- Microsoft Teams
- Zoom
- Discord
These tools are also conducive to transparency, which often helps increase worker comfort levels since everything is in full view.
Learning and Development Tools
Offering your employees the opportunity to grow their knowledge through continuing education or other opportunities can meet your goals to encourage ongoing learning. Options include but aren’t limited to:
- Coursera
- LinkedIn Learning
- Udemy Business
Many learning and development tools are free or low-cost which are great for small and medium-sized businesses.
Work-Life Balance Tools
For decades, employee wellness took a back seat to organizational needs. Nowadays, managerial decision-makers better recognize the value of their employees having a healthy work-life balance. The following tools can help promote better balance, reduce stress, and overall increase your employees’ well-being.
- Toggl
- Cozi
- Wheel of Life
- SMART Goals Tool
- Not-to-do List Exercise
Improving employees’ work-life balance positively impacts your entire organization since it increases engagement, reduces burnout, and decreases absenteeism.
Leveraging Engagement Tools Benefits Everyone
Unhappy employees can ultimately have a substantial impact on your corporate culture and your bottom line. Since low morale tends to be contagious, it’s best to halt further damage by quickly working to reverse employee engagement problems.
Left unchecked, you may experience high employee turnover, low productivity, lower quality of customer service, and eventually, damage to your company’s bottom line.
On the other hand, recognizing the problem and taking proactive steps to mitigate engagement issues can result in a happier, healthier, and better workplace, along with positioning the company to be stronger.
