The engagement tools you can leverage:

In your tech stack is there an engagement tool or tools??

There probably should be!

Because engagement dropped for the first time in decades in 2020 and continues to decline, with only 32% of employees engaged in 2022. 

Not surprised! The pandemic was tough for a lot of employees and employers as we learned a lot of things don’t work well when the world goes fully remote. 

Now, almost 4 years later we’re still adjusting and engagement hasn’t bounced back. 

All the more reason to invest in tools that could help improve engagement. 

When employees are engaged:

• They are more productive 
• Customer satisfaction is higher 
• Employee retention is higher 
• The company is more profitable

When I think about engagement tools, there are two categories that come to mind:

1. Tools for insights
2. Tools for deployment 

Let’s dive into what each of those means! 

Insights:

How can you fix a problem if you don’t know where to start?

Spoiler alert: you can’t 

Insights are incredibly important when it comes to employee engagement!

1 way to gather insights: Surveys 

Surveys:

There are a few tools I’d recommend when it comes to surveys but first: do not launch a survey if you don’t plan to release the results and actually make changes. 

Why? Because your employees will realize that the survey is just a checkbox and not something to actually facilitate change and they will disengage. 

Some of my favorite insight tools:

1. Gallup Q12: 13 questions to understand employee engagement. The insights go down to the team level provided 3 or more employees answered. There’s benchmarking data and tons of helpful resources like action plans and conversation guides. This costs $$ and might not integrate with any of your other tools. 

2. CultureAmp: there are templates, it’s customizable and when it comes to putting things into action there are plans, focus areas and benchmarking data. Bonus if CA is already your HRIS that you don’t have to add one more standalone tool. 

3. Free surveys: Even if there’s no budget available, you can still leverage free survey tools and engagement questions to get what you need. One of the cons is your engagement data will live outside your other systems but a major pro is that it’s FREE!  

A word of caution: if you do not want to work across multiple systems, look for an HRIS that might already have survey functionality built into it. That way you can have your data in one spot. 

Deployment:

You can measure employee engagement all that you want but what about actually deploying engagement initiatives? 

Well, there are tools that help you deploy and facilitate your engagement initiatives! 

These tools cover a wide range of things like:

1. Recognition & rewards
2. Team building 

Some can easily be integrated into your tech stack, others not so much. 

1. Recognition & Rewards:

You’ll get sick of hearing me say this, recognition is free. 

You can easily start a recognition program in your internal comms channels like Slack or Teams. 

Bonus: most HRIS systems now feature recognition, check out Hibob and CultureAmp for what this looks like. 

Still stuck? Here are 20 ideas for recognition! 

2. Team building: 

Team building has a major impact on employee engagement. Done right, your team building activities can actually boost your employee engagement! 

But no one wants another boring happy hour or virtual zoo visit. Employees are looking for something unique and special when it comes to team building. 

When it comes to team building tools to leverage check out:

1. New Stand: unique in-person or virtual events for your team 
2. Wavy: a marketplace for events that makes it easy to deploy your own activities. 
3. Gatheround: interactive way to connect via video and team build. 

Deploying engagement initiatives is never easy and the reason I picked recognition & team building as focus areas is because those are where I see the biggest impacts on engagement and they are relatively easy to deploy. 

There are bigger things that impact engagement like leadership, communication (next week’s topic!) and compensation. Those are for another newsletter, another day. 

What’s next:

I already spilled the beans but next week I’m focused on communication. 

What role do comms tools play in your tech stack? 

Is there a role?? 

Do you even need a comms tool???

All that and more next week!