Babak SalimiHR leaders and management teams are starting to realize that they need more real-time insights on employee engagement. The Wall Street Journal article last month (“How Do Employees Really Feel About Their Companies?”) highlighted sentiment-analysis as a way to help identify and resolve employee engagement issues before talent starts to leave.
But first let’s define employee engagement:
Employee engagement is the extent to which an employee is enthusiastic about his or her work and committed to furthering the organization’s goals.
Today for most organizations the common way to measure engagement is once or twice per year via survey. However, while such measures of engagement have been used for years, they aren’t effectively driving engagement or improving retention in today’s agile economy.
So, let’s look at four simple steps you can take today to boost employee engagement:
- Find the real-time pulse of your employees
- Create a culture of continuous learning, recognition and feedback
- Provide personalized career opportunities
- Foster transparency and open communication
1. Finding the Real-time Employee Engagement Pulse
One way to find out how your employees are feeling, more than once a year is to gather employee sentiments continuously. This way, you can identify areas where employees are dissatisfied and design strategies for enhancing engagement before you start having issues with productivity, employee retention and customer service. Measuring and capturing employee feedback and sentiment on a “real-time” basis can help you identify issues early and continuously adjust management practices and the work environment.
Saba Cloud sentiment analysis is an example of an employee-driven and anonymous approach to collecting and tracking employee sentiments 24×7. Find out what your employees are thinking before they post on Glassdoor!
Saba Cloud gathers employee sentiments on three fronts (self, manager and company).
2. Creating a culture of continuous learning, social recognition and real-time feedback
Research has shown social recognition helps drive motivation & engagement. You can drive engagement by combining on-the-spot recognition with private personal feedback from peers and managers anytime anywhere from mobile devices. Managers can use public praise and private “even-better-if” feedback to provide real-time continuous coaching which is very much demanded by millennials and today’s workforce.
Saba Cloud has a feature called Impressions, which is a simple way of empowering all employees to recognize one another at any time while giving each other private feedback. You can also encourage and measure desired behaviors by creating custom badges around key behavioral characteristics that drive your organization.
Saba Cloud Impressions and Custom Badges
EBI (“even-better-if”) feedback
Corporate cultures promoting continuous learning and development drive higher levels of employee engagement. “The clear pattern of highly engaged employees is that they learn constantly. They never graduate, and they don’t want to,” according to Timothy Clark’s, The Employee Engagement Mindset. “They want to keep the enthusiasm and passion. They want to retain the childlike qualities of curiosity and passion.”
Leveraging today’s technology like predictive analytics and machine learning can help foster a learning culture by providing your employees with personal recommendations on classes, mentors and relevant content.
Saba Cloud’s machine learning provides proactive personalized recommendations
3. Provide personalized career opportunities
Helping employees take control of their careers to achieve personal success that is aligned with the organization’s goals has a direct impact on employee engagement. The latest machine learning technology has the capacity to change how managers can help employees grow, how employees plan their careers and how employers engage their high potentials.
For example, Saba Cloud’s machine learning enables employees to map their career paths based on their aspirations. All employees can do what-if scenario analysis (comparing multi-path options) and reach their full potential with personalized development plans and recommendations of relevant courses to take, experts to connect with and open assignments to apply for.
Saba Cloud’s intelligent career planning
4. Foster transparency and open communication
These days, millennials (and most other employees) expect transparency and open frequent communication about company strategy, business unit direction, and performance as well as their contribution to the overall goal. Fostering more open communication, organizations can build a culture of transparency where employees care deeply about their work and feel aligned to the organization resulting in higher levels of engagement.
Real-time collaboration tools can aid team management and communication in distributed organizations with remote employees. For example in Saba Cloud anyone can host a virtual town-hall or an All-hands team meeting with a simple click of a button! And no worry for anyone missing the meeting, since the recordings automatically get posted so people can review on their own time and comment via a social activity stream at any time via mobile devices.
Saba Meeting with HD video facilitating real-time collaboration and communication
Have you tried any of these techniques in 2015?
What are the top 4 ways you plan to boost employee engagement in your organization in 2016?
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