Employee engagement is as necessary to a business as a paycheck is to a worker—but the mere necessity of these two doesn’t make them effortless by default. As explained by the Institute of Employment Studies, employee engagement is a two-way street, where both the organization and the employee have the right to decide on the degree of their commitment.
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Employers can choose the type of engagement they want to offer and the extent to which their relationship with an employee can go beyond the mere transactional exchange. And on the flip side, the employee has a similar choice—whether to fully commit to given objectives and values.
For the employers that fail to nurture their employees, they could be left with unmotivated and fickle staff that are likely to view their workplace as only a source of income. Retaining an engaged and loyal workforce is, therefore, important for a business to thrive—it drives productivity and reliability that is further strengthened by a lower turnover rate.
When employees are engaged, going the extra mile to meet company goals is not a problem—neither is promoting the company and bringing passion to whatever they are responsible for.
Depending on the industry, businesses will have different ways of measuring engagement in a workplace. But just as a business can differ greatly from another, individual responses to what drives productivity can differ, too.
However, it’s become commonplace for HR departments to implement certain standardized methods when struggling to create a “one-size-fits-all” strategy that will keep employee morale high. The arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) has been a catalyst for changing the rules of the game, where responding to highly polarized feedback has become a no-sweat experience.
Employee Engagement Software Is a Game-Changer
AI and robotics are gaining popularity, as more and more businesses have started adopting smart solutions when trying to cut down transactional costs and streamline existing processes. According to Deloitte Human Capital Trends research, 38% of respondents expect AI to be fully incorporated in their companies in the next 5 years. This, of course, will modernize the workforce as we know it, with employees seeing their job descriptions and responsibilities significantly altered.
But what does that mean for HR, and how can it affect your employees’ engagement?
AI exists to make our lives easier, so the future tools incorporated by HR departments will no doubt have similar agendas. For example, the responsive feedback platform allows organizations to collect feedback from employees throughout the year, rendering annual evaluations obsolete. With employee engagement changing by the hour, or even by the minute, capturing people’s experience in real time means that companies can produce individualized responses to issues arising within their workplace.
Reviewing and nurturing employee engagement has always been a complex task, but new, easy-to-follow tools are emerging to make the process less troublesome in the future, even for people with limited technical expertise. By giving everyone in the company a voice, employees can mutually validate colleagues’ performance, express new ideas, or flag up any challenges.
Smart employee engagement tools are also excellent for collecting invaluable data that can be used for keeping track of employee experiences. Rather than simply delivering a bunch of unrelated answers, the intelligent survey captures only that portion of data that is essential for creating informed feedback programs.
With the arrival of smart technologies, it seems like we are finally getting to a stage where meaningless qualitative data will eventually be replaced with quantitative data. Analytics and statistics will always be around but only for the benefit of HR, and those kinds of data will be elevated to a position of a truly strategic business partner. With this in mind, acquiring the right and up-to-date information about employees seems to be a necessary commitment, especially if employers want their teams to succeed in a highly competitive and digitalized world.