63.3% of companies in the US report that they find it more difficult to retain employees than to hire them.
While retention issues aren't new, they have gotten much worse in recent years. This is partially due to the increase in employees working from home where they don't have the usual engagement initiatives in place.
Employee engagement is crucial, but with so much else to get done it's easy to let engagement fall to the wayside, especially if you don't have a plan.
A great place to start is with employee engagement software. But it's important to choose the right software that will be the most helpful to your company.
In this post, we'll go over some of the key features you should look for when choosing employee engagement software.
Keep reading to learn more.
What is employee engagement software?
This software is designed to help businesses measure and improve the engagement and satisfaction of their employees. It allows companies to gather and analyze feedback directly from their employees. It allows companies to gather and analyze feedback directly from their employees. They can then use this information to help improve the culture of their company.
This is great for either seeing if your company is already doing well or for showing you exactly where you may have issues and how to improve them. If you have a problem with employee retention, adding this software can be a game-changer. It can help identify employees that are disengaged and allows you to intervene before they decide to leave.
Software like this helps employees to feel heard and valued, which helps with retention, but also with an employee's desire to do well in their role.
This workforce engagement software can either be its own standalone software or it can be integrated into your current comprehensive HR software.
Easy to use
One of the best features of good employee engagement software is that it is easy to use. There is nothing that will drive down engagement quite like having to learn another new convoluted app or software system on top of your employee's regular responsibilities.
If the software isn't easy to understand or intuitive then most likely, employees will just not use it. If they do try to use it, the extra time spent trying to learn it can not only make them less engaged but can even have a negative impact on productivity levels.
A lot of tools prioritize looks or fancy functions over simplicity, try to find one that doesn't do this. Your employees will thank you.
Customized access depending on role
Each role in your company will value different information more. Those in the C-suite will likely be interested in information that is not a priority for those in HR for example, or vice versa.
The software that you choose should be customizable to fit each role and the information they're most interested in.
Though some pieces should be standard throughout your organization. Every employee should have access to any surveys you create or any place where they can provide clear feedback. As well as any communication channels that connect your organization.
Surveys for employees
One of the core features of this software is the ability to create surveys for your employees to respond to. You should be able to create custom surveys to gauge the reaction to specific HR initiatives or to get a feel for the culture of the company in general.
You should also have access to other built-in surveys that have been developed specifically to help with employee engagement such as the employee net promotor score.
Many employees may not be willing to approach their managers with concerns or feedback in person. But by offering an anonymous survey, they may be willing to open up more.
Some of this software will even have functions that can search through the surveys you've created to find and remove redundant questions that won't provide more value. This helps to keep the surveys as concise and simple as possible, which makes them less annoying or time-consuming for employees taking them.
Analytics
There is a lot of data that can be collected using this kind of software, but going through and analyzing it on your own would take an incredible amount of time. Be sure that the software you choose has advanced analytic capabilities to save you time.
Analytics can look at survey responses and help you focus on what changes could have the biggest impact on engagement and building a good work culture.
This can also show you how many employees are actually logging in and using the software, and what pages they go to most often. This can help you to improve your setup and make it more relevant and valuable to your employees.
Peer recognition
This software is an excellent place to acknowledge the employees who go above and beyond and deserve to be recognized. This is especially important when you have a lot of remote employees who don't have a way to stay up to date with company happenings. It's important to make sure your team knows their hard work is appreciated, no matter where they work from.
Recognizing the hard work of your employees is not only helpful for morale and company culture but can also help to boost productivity. Knowing that there is a chance of having your work recognized by the company can help to motivate employees to work harder. It can also encourage a slight air of competition which can help drive productivity. Although, you can't let the competition grow toxic.
Improve your employee engagement today
Increasing employee engagement is good for more than just improving company culture. It can also help to boost productivity and even profits. Be sure to find the best employee engagement software for your company to truly promote increased engagement.
If you're interested in learning more and improving your business through employee engagement, we can help! Contact us today.
