Employee Experience Platform

There’s no question that employee engagement is a trending topic in human resources. But let’s take a step back and define what it means – and why it matters.

Employee engagement is both a quantitative and qualitative look at how connected employees are to the companies they work for. At its core, engagement refers to three elements: job satisfaction, loyalty, and the effort spent toward organizational goals. In the past, HR departments would send out annual employee engagement surveys and employees would self-report their sentiment. However, more sophisticated employee engagement assessment tools have now made analyzing and tracking data easier to benchmark.

So why is this important? Work is no longer just a 9-5, punch in and out commitment. Research shows that employees who are more aligned to their company’s mission, feel passionate about what they do, and have positive emotions about the company culture are more productive – meaning higher profitability for your organization. For this reason, many HR teams are employing modern workplace technology, such as human capital management platforms with integrated employee engagement tools, to monitor and improve their employee engagement.

See how Paylocity’s Modern Workforce Index can measure and maximize your company’s engagement.

There are three types of employee engagement:

Actively Engaged Employees: These are employees that feel attached to their work and motivated to start their day. When meeting with them, they provide new ideas and insight to projects. If your company is using employee engagement tools, actively engaged employees would rank high on utilization scores within your platform.

Not Engaged Employees: Though not necessarily unhappy, an employee who isn’t engaged is simply going through the motions of their everyday tasks. They are merely doing what is asked of them – neither overachieving nor underachieving. Employees who fall under this category would be a great area for your team to focus on.

Actively Disengaged Employees: This group of employees is not only unhappy, but they are also the most likely to spread their energy upon others in your company. Using your employee engagement online tools to identify these employees early on and intervene with their management may be beneficial, before allowing too much detraction to spread.

Use the new Modern Workforce Index to identify and track the three types of employee engagement.

The first step of building employee engagement is knowing where to look. And with the right employee engagement tools comes the right data your team needs to make decisions on what types of employee engagement programs to employ.

Armed with the right insights, your HR team can start working on creating a modern employee experience that attracts and retains top talent. Here are a couple ideas to improve your employee engagement program:

• Feedback that matters: Nothing should be a surprise on a performance review. Managers and employees should regularly meet to discuss meaningful feedback, skill growth, and career pathing utilizing ongoing goals to measure and track performance.
• Focused recognition: A little appreciation goes a long way. Integrating an employee recognition program in your company is an important way to demonstrate to employees that they are valued.
• Regular reach outs: An annual engagement survey is just that – only once a year. Consider conducting quick pulse surveys on a regular basis to gauge employee sentiment – especially after key decisions are made on a company-wide scale. Not only can you use this data to drive decisions, but it’s also a way to show employees that their opinions are being heard.

While everyone inevitably works for a paycheck, it’s ultimately not what gets people to stay. Here are some key drivers for employee engagement:

• Leadership: Whether your company has 10 or 10,000 people, the decisions senior leadership makes – and how they trickle down – impact employees in all positions.
• Teamwork/Co-workers: Is work distributed evenly? Do teammates generally get along? Employees can spend as much time at work as they do at home and enjoying the company of their colleagues can be pivotal in engagement.
• Company Values: Employees who feel aligned with the company mission generally share more positive emotions and are more productive.
• Meaningful Work: Mutually beneficial work – work that positively benefits the company while enhancing an employee’s skill set – improves employee sentiment and increases an employee’s longevity with an organization.
• Communication: Clear communication regarding expectations on a company, department, and peer-to-peer level might be one of the most important drivers in employee engagement. Employees need to have access to the tools and resources to do their jobs and cannot be left feeling like they are in the dark.