Employee engagement has usually been an HR thing. But things seem to be changing. By 2020 Gartner predicts, 20% of Organizations will include employee engagement improvement as a shared performance objective for HR and IT. So how is it that IT can help with employee engagement?
In my experience of working with several enterprise customers, both large and small, here are some that I have seen yield results.
1. Help People Share Ideas
Sharing Ideas opens avenues for people to have a conversation about something they hold dear. However, if people don’t see their ideas moving beyond conversations, the interest would soon wane off. Having a simple system that encourages people to share ideas and allow management to select and implement them works great for engaging employees.
2. Embrace Social Not Just As A Platform
Social has not been adopted well other that by Marketing. There are some companies that leverage social for customer engagement but these are few. Comments and likes are features on most collaboration platforms. Have ways of feeding these back to the right people. Build workflows to integrate systems and make sure feedback reaches the right people and they act on it. SharePoint and Nintex work brilliantly together in this space.
3. Make Experiences Simple And Fun
People don’t like reading through pages of user instructions or attending hours of training simply to use a system. Intuitive experience, anywhere access and gamification go a long way in providing engaging experiences. IT can help increase engagement by bringing these flavors to systems. I believe all of Acuvate’s key solutions like Customer Portal, MESH & WAVE owe their success to this thought.
4. Analyze And Use Data
We all know well built interactive dashboards are a great way to help take decisions. Would a interactive dashboard also keep users engaged? Knowing what is happening is the first step towards engagement. It is important that reports and updates are available to people on key metrics on demand. IT can invest in a good Analytics platform to enable users to take the right decisions or in some cases simply keep themselves informed. Setting up an enterprise grade analytics platform no longer takes months of time or large upfront costs. With cloud based analytics platforms like Birst, not just fantastic reports across different sources but also self-service analytics can be provided to end users very quickly.
5. Bring It All Together
Disjointed systems, multiple logins, multiple places to go. In this age and time, providing seamless access to the systems is straight forward and can help keep people coming back to the systems and using them. Companies spend significant time and effort in building unified experiences for customers. The same principles would work internally too. Through our many implementations of MESH across sectors, I have seen little integrations like getting an people’s leave balance on the intranet and allowing them to apply for one do wonders in keeping people engaged.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.
