Forget the yearly engagement survey, a raft of new
technologies means engagement can be a daily, not yearly, occurrence. Here's
our pick of the best new tools.
Measuring engagement levels used to mean annual
staff surveys and the ability of individual managers to assess how their teams
were feeling about the organisation and their roles. But now employers can add
a range of technology-based tools to their armoury. Using apps and devices to
capture emotions, or social recognition and reward platforms, engagement levels
can be continuously assessed in real time.
Availability of real-time data is already proving
valuable for customer insight so it’s no surprise that some of this technology
is also being used to monitor employee engagement. “Customer and employee data
can and should be sourced with similar tools,” says Dave Ulrich, professor of
business at the Ross School, University of Michigan, and a partner at
consulting firm RBL Group.
But Jon Ingham, executive consultant at Strategic
Dynamics, reckons traditional engagement surveys will continue to play an
important role. He stresses that data should be used to change the way people
behave. “Getting data more quickly and more regularly doesn’t really increase
this insight and may result in moving from a strategic perspective to engaging
in more short-term activities,” he explains. “However, I also believe that the
technology-based, data-rich environments we work in do offer new and
significant opportunities for engagement.”
Ulrich cautions it is easy to become more enamoured
with the technology “than the impact the information will have”. “The [tool]
should help provide better information and access to delivering better business
results,” he adds. HR magazine presents some of the hottest tools around.
Emotion
monitoring devices
What do they do?
These simple devices provide an alternative and even
quicker way of tapping into the mood of the workforce than online surveys. They
can take the form of an app or a dedicated device. Here, employees will
typically touch icons such as a smiley, sad or angry face, coloured buttons or
a slider to indicate how they are feeling. This technology also provides
analytical and reporting tools.
Social recognition
and engagement platforms
What do they do?
Provide a vehicle to ‘spread the good news’ of
employee success to peers as well as managers. Crowd-sourcing, gamification,
messaging and familiar social networking tools are all used to nominate and
recognise the achievements of others. They can be accessed as a discrete portal
or built into the company intranet and extended to the mobile environment. Some
can directly connect to a reward system that enables individuals to redeem
points to shop via their smartphones, for example.
Examples: Globoforce; TemboSocial; Jostle; WooBoard
New generation
employee surveys
What do they do?
Gather real-time and continuous feedback from the
workforce in addition to or in place of annual employee engagement surveys.
Questions can be tailored and targeted depending on an organisation’s needs and
individuals can provide additional comments to back-up their answers. Typically
web- or cloud-based, they are easy and quick to deploy, and provide dashboards
and tools to help employers analyse and report on data.
Examples: Blackbook HR; Culture Amp; TINYPulse;
QuestBack; SurveyMonkey
Sources: hrmagazine.co.uk