5 Ways Tech Can Help You Engage Your Employees • AxiomQ

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August 20, 2019 Business

Your brand may be your brainchild, and your business may exist thanks to many generous investors, but your future and your reputation will persevere only because of your workforce. As a business owner, you already know how vital it is for your employees to feel valued, empowered, and encouraged every step of the way. Treating them fairly and ensuring a transparent workplace are both must-haves for any modern company, but despite all of your efforts, you might be failing at keeping your teams engaged.

To put things in perspective, you can even put a price tag on disengaged employees. For the US, that price tag is as high as $550 billion per year. Essentially, it pays to invest in employee engagement in a multitude of different ways, and tech seems to be of great help in this sense. Even if you’re already attuned to your employees’ needs and you keep them engaged, perhaps implementing some of the following tech tips can further boost those engagement levels and help your business thrive.

1. Track and measure preferences

To give your customers what they want, to post on the right platforms, and to improve your products and services, you use digital tools to monitor their online behavior and to build comprehensive reports to boost your business performance. If your customers’ satisfaction is so vital for your business, why not apply the same dedication to your employees’ happiness, too? You can use digital tools to track and measure employee engagement and to discover perfect opportunities to improve your relationships with your workforce.

Sometimes, a single open-ended question such as “What would you do differently at the office?” can open a world of opportunities for improvement. Then again, you can use an entire platform to track how your employees feel and point out to specific segments of their work and their life that could use a boost. Perhaps your workers need more flexibility to be able to exercise regularly, or they could benefit from psychological counseling to deal with burnout and stress. Hopefully, you’ll be able to prevent such negative outcomes in the future as you start to use tech to your advantage.

2. Go digital with your hiring methods

Many competitive markets, the likes of Australia, thrive thanks to businesses that think (and hire) out of the proverbial box. They know that employee engagement in such competitive environments needs to be high in order to prevent employee turnover and boost long-term loyalty inside the company. To achieve that, they have refined how they hire their workforce, and they turn to digital platforms that help them find the best match for their culture and job requirements.

When locals are looking for Sydney jobs in their industry, your business is more likely to find the right match for your brand and your business when you utilize reliable websites and digital platforms. This is a very efficient way to refine employee engagement by going back to the root of the issue and making sure that you employ the people that will actually flourish under your wing. From there, it will be easier to pinpoint strategies to ensure high engagement rates.

3. Enhance collaboration with tech

Much like we enjoy using social networks to interact with our loved ones, your employees should have a unified digital solution for your entire business that will allow them to connect, interact, and engage with their colleagues on a regular basis. Using project management tools has more perks than just engagement, though. They are perfect for improving company-wide collaboration, enabling ongoing communication, and effective work allocation.

With the help of a single tool, you can make sure that not a single person on your team is overworked while the other one is bored out of their mind, or to keep track of their progress and have someone jump in to help if they’re stuck on a particularly difficult milestone.

Add to that, file sharing, storing, email notifications, and a wide range of other communication steps make PM tools your finest tech investment to enhance productivity and engagement across the board.

4. Intranet for useful feedback

When you work with local staff, and all of your employees visit the office every day, it may seem like engagement among them is not an issue. However, what about your remote teams? Your single parents with flexi work schedules? Your freelancers who pitch in from time to time? As far as engagement goes, you need to make sure that everyone participating in building your business feels that they are appreciated and welcome.

Enter: the intranet. Serving as your safe haven for employee communication, social chatter, exchanging experiences and feedback, all the way to helping you add a digital element to your meetings, this single innovation can make all the difference in elevating engagement among your teams.

5. Gamify those workshops and training

There’s enough time in a day to adult around the office. It’s often frustrating and boring to tame our playful side and keep things completely predictable in our daily operations. So, why not introduce that element of fun and gamify your training sessions to engage with your employees? Setting up online learning can be a challenge, but if you add specific goals and gamify the entire strategy, your employees will be more inclined to actively participate, and they’ll absorb more information with ease.

Research shows that gamification has the potential to increase engagement by 48% among your employees, so it might be high time to add a fun twist to your digital courses and make your teams happy.

Employee engagement will always remain a burning issue among businesses of all shapes and sizes. Use these simple principles to maximize the use of tech in engagement, and your teams will become more productive and loyal as a result.

About the author:

Jacob Wilson is a business consultant, and an organizational psychologist, based in Brisbane. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for Bizzmark blog.