How to choose the best employee engagement software?
Are your remote employees missing deadlines? Have you seen a lack of participation among your employees in virtual meetings and calls? Do they lack commitment and are refusing to improve? Are your customers dissatisfied with your remote employees?
If yes, then you must include engagement software in your organization’s engagement program as soon as possible. Because these are among the most common warning signs of disengaged employees.
According to a Gallup article by Dvorak & Sasaki, more than half of the USA’s disengaged employees work remotely.
Even if your employees are already engaged, employee engagement software will help you to strengthen and maintain remote employee engagement in your organization. Moreover, businesses of all sizes can benefit from using employee engagement software.
The COVID -19 outbreak has made employee engagement a primary issue with different social and health effects. Thus it is more important than ever now to incorporate employee engagement software in your engagement program.
“According to Towers Perrin’s research, companies with engaged workers have 6% higher net profit margins, and according to Kenexa research engaged companies have five times higher shareholder returns over five years.”
Can a software help increase employee engagement?
Yes.
It does not just help you provide more communication and participation for your remote employees, but also creates a culture where they feel valued.
It creates a collaborative environment where employees can connect and cooperate in a virtual workplace scenario.
Why do you need a Employee engagement software for your remote employees
- Measurement is the first step towards improvement.
- Develop and sustain
- Make work enjoyable
- Peer-to-Peer recognition
- Keeping goals transparent and resources accessible
Can employee engagement be measured?
Employee engagement is the emotional commitment that your employees hold towards the organization. And it is not easy to express emotion in terms of quantity.
Measuring employee engagement becomes more difficult when you are dealing with teams working from different geographical locations.
Since it is important to measure if you want to improve, thus to quantify engagement you need to ask your remote employees specific questions and deduce your answers from that.
You also have to keep an eye on each remote employee and their performance to measure the engagement level.
Employee engagement software does exactly this for you through pulse surveys, performance tracking, and feedback. It helps you gather and analyze data that you can easily zoom in or out to understand and measure how engaged your employees are.
How to choose the best employee engagement software for your remote team?
Since employee engagement is such an important aspect of your organization’s success, choosing the right software is really important.
To make the process easier for you, let’s divide the process of choosing the best employee engagement software for your remote teams into three parts- self-contemplation, scrutinization and the final decision.
Step 1: Self-contemplation
Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself before choosing an employee engagement software for your remote teams-
1. Does the software aligns with your organizations needs?
To choose the best-suited engagement software, first and foremost you should know what your organization’s needs are and then find the software that best aligns with it. So, before choosing an employee engagement software ask yourself a few questions like -
- What is already working for your organization and what’s not?
- The main issues you are facing to manage your remote teams
- Your primary goals and objectives
2. What features are you looking for?
Before adopting new software consider what things are going in the right direction and what not. It will help you understand what are the most needed features you want in the software.
When there are countless features a software can offer, it may be sometimes confusing to decide. Thus keeping a list handy will help you focus only on the features you require.
Step 2: Scrutinize
Now that you know what your needs and goals are, it’s time to examine the softwares present in market. Here is a list of things you need to look for in your ideal employee engagement software-
1. Does it provide the basic facilities?
Here are the basic functions of employee engagement software should offer-
- Measure employee perceptions
- Discover employee priorities
- Dashboards
- Company strengths reporting
- Employee engagement survey templates
- feedback reminder
- Real-time feedback analysis
- Email notifications
2. Is it mobile friendly?
Ideally, employee engagement software should be accessible through any browser including smartphones and tablets.
3. Does it use AI to improve engagement in your remote teams?
AI-driven software offers your remote employees 24/7 assistance. It will enable employees to easily access all required resources and internal portals from a single interface.
AI-driven software also helps in sentiment analysis and captures employees’ daily experiences in Real-Time . AI uses Chatbot to improve the onboarding experience and team Team Collaboration.
4. Does it incorporate other important tools?
Make sure that the software you choose for your remote employee engagement of your organization incorporates other tools like Google Calendar, Office365 and Slack. It is a necessary feature for the smooth functioning of your remote teams.
5. Does the software provide consistent and reliable data analytics?
Employee engagement is an ongoing process. Thus choose a reliable software that will provide accurate data consistently to help you track long-term progress easily and effectively.
6. Does it offer engagement reports?
An ideal employee engagement software should provide engagement reports to track trends, minute and significant changes in employee engagement, and productivity. It will give you insights into where to focus your employee engagement efforts.
7. Does It incorporate features to support your engagement efforts?
Once the problems in remote employee engagement are identified, Line Managers and HR are expected to work on it. It may be difficult for you to do it without any guidance or training.
Thus choose a software that provides training materials for you to take action effortlessly.
The best employee engagement software will offer automated leadership action plans to support and sustain employee engagement efforts
Step 3: Reach the final decision
Here are a few things you should consider to reach the final decision-
1. First try then decide.
Make sure the vendor is providing a preview of the software. It is best if you can try a demo to understand if the software will work for your organization or not.
2. Choose the software that best suits your budget
Ideally, employee engagement software providers keep their pricing structure transparent. However, if your budget is not directly matching with the pricing list you can ask for discounts for long-term commitment as most vendors are willing to incorporate special pricing models.
3. Is the vendors’ team engaged?
If the vendor does not have a highly engaged team himself it is most likely that their software will also not act desirably.
Thus try to go through the reviews and other sites to determine if the vendor has a highly engaged organization of their own.
4. Are security and privacy in place?
Employee engagement software captures sensitive information about your employee details, demographic information, and employee sentiment toward various company efforts, etc. Therefore, you must choose software that practices strong security and data privacy.
Make sure to review the security policy the vendor offers. Make sure the vendor doesn’t share your organization’s data with any third party or use your data for other purposes.
5. Does the vendor offer support and maintenance of the software?
It is important to consider if the vendors are providing software support and maintenance for issues like bug fixes, software updates, and security.
Peoplebox — One in all solution for HR to feel empowered to build high performing teams through employee engagement
Peoplebox is the best solution for all employee engagement related issues for your remote teams- a software that is trusted by companies like LinkedIn, Zendrive, Optimizely. It uses AI for continuous performance growth.
Here are the salient features that Peoplebox offers:
- It allows you to send automated pulse surveys to understand your employees’ needs better.
- It encourages anonymous feedback to understand what is stopping your employees to go above and beyond for your organization.
- You can use it to monitor and analyze feedback in real-time with its AI assistance.
- It offers powerful insights for HR with a dashboard to drive improvement in the work culture.
Originally published at https://www.peoplebox.ai on August 21, 2020.
