Keep your employees engaged by utilising the technology that’s available to you and your employees.
The HR profession is currently experiencing an explosion of new in-depth functionality through technology which is being made available through on-premises and Cloud-based HR solutions. Many HR professionals are wondering where this is all going to lead to, as they are being spoilt for choice, and sometimes having too many choices can be a lot more stressful and challenging than having very little or no choice at all. As an HR technologist, all I can do is echo the call, “Carpe Diem!”
In the past six months, one of the most written about topics I have come across is employee engagement. It seems that the world has woken up to the advantages of having a truly engaged workforce. With employee engagement and retention of key skills now becoming key action points in organisations’ strategies, it has become vital for HR to understand how they can use technology to maximise their impact on both employee engagement and subsequent productivity.
To quote the 2015 Gallup study poll, employee engagement is serious business, in their study they found that, incredibly, only 30% of employees say that they’re engaged in their job. More than 50% of employees said they weren’t engaged, and almost 20% of employees stated that they were “actively disengaged.”
These statistics can pose severe problems within an organisation’s workplace, and many other surveys have been undertaken that substantiate the results found in this Gallup study.
However, HR and in fact the entire leadership of the organisation should not hang their heads as if all is lost, as there is a way out of this quagmire. In fact, many forward thinking organisations are finding smart ways to boost employee engagement through the effective use of technology.
But I guess the first step in resolving this issue of non-engaged employees is to ensure that management clearly understands what is meant by employee engagement. According to Forbes, employee engagement “is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organisation and its goals.” So, it is important for organisations to realise that engaged employees are not bothered with just the conventional rewards and benefits the organisation might offer. They are more interested in the success of their team and the organisation as a whole.
It is therefore critical to understand that engaged employees want to:
• start having a say in business decisions;
• be part of a team that is working towards the organisations’ success; and
• feel that they are valued members of their team and the company as a whole, and they are not just employed as a means of revenue generation. So, the question you might well be asking is: how can technology assist in creating a workforce that is fully engaged?
The first point to understand is that technology is only the enabler. In the end, the organisation and the employees need to use the technology in whatever means it is provided.
In today’s technological environment, the Internet, mobile devices and Cloud technologies allow organisations and their employees to be connected like never before. No longer does any employee in the organisation have to be excluded from any team meeting, think-tank or brainstorming session just because they are not able to be physically present in the office.
Fortunately, most employees are now in possession of smart mobile devices which enable them to connect to other employees in the organisation, as well as to their own external networks, meaning that an organisation is able to better facilitate online communities which can provide far more innovative results at a fraction of the cost of traditional means.
As such, employees can now simply connect into meetings via video or audio link, and play an active role, no longer do they have to feel excluded because they are not physically present, a challenge often found in many large corporates and global corporations, leading to much higher levels of collaboration.
Most CEOs look to achieve high levels of collaboration in their organisations, as it is through collaboration in the workplace where groups of employees can work together by sharing their thinking and ideas to accomplish a common goal. Employee engagement and collaboration go hand-in-hand, as found in recent research where at least 60 per cent of respondents cited that improved collaboration, operational efficiency, better business performance and improved customer service were direct benefits of strong employee engagement. In the end, which organisation would not want the combined brain power and efforts of all their employees working together, sharing their ideas, solving problems and transferring skills to ultimately provide customers with superior products and services.
The greatest challenge facing organisations today is being able to demonstrate the ROI of engagement initiatives to executives, which will then start driving employee engagement higher up on the organisation’s strategic agenda.
In summary, by using technologies at their disposal, from data analytics to dynamic employee feedback mechanisms, and linking this information with sales, productivity and customer feedback, HR departments are ideally positioned to provide feedback on employee engagement statistics, with the end goal of helping the organisation retain its most valuable assets – its people.
Rob Bothma is an HCM Business Solution Architect at Oracle Corporation SA, www.oracle.com, a Fellow of the Institute of People Management and past non-executive director and Vice President of the IPM, co-author of the 4th Edition of Contemporary Issues in HRM.
This article appeared in the April 2018 issue of HR Future magazine.