With mounting pressure on HR teams to acquire and retain top talent, businesses are increasingly exploring the benefits of digital tools in supporting their efforts to improve the employee experience. We look at some of the key challenges facing employers and the problems that employee engagement software can help you solve.
Key employee engagement challenges facing HR teams in 2022
Where do we start, right? Keeping employees engaged is intrinsically linked to retaining them, as engaged employees are more motivated and inspired and feel part of the company’s future goals, objectives and vision. Here are just some of the challenges HR teams must address and overcome:
- Managing internal relationships
- Offering adequate training and development opportunities
- Ensuring diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) are embraced
- Change management
- Employee health and wellbeing
- Reward and recognition structures
- Clear leadership communication
- Fostering a feedback culture
- Digitizing HR processes
- Delivering the right employee support
So, not much to solve then! Also, good employee engagement enables you to attract talent to your organization, through word-of-mouth, referrals, testimonials, social media and third-party review sites, such as Glassdoor, where the quality of your company’s employee experience can be reflected and showcased.
What role can employee engagement software play?
Digital solutions can be leveraged to ease the burden on HR resources and empower employers to be more strategic and efficient. There are various employee engagement software and experience tools you can leverage to implement transformative change across the organization. From encouraging employees to provide feedback and building a culture of inclusion and collaboration to analyzing employee insights and taking meaningful actions, these tools can directly influence the employee experience, leading to increased staff retention and talent acquisition.
5 problems employee engagement software can solve for your business
So, let’s break down some of the main problems that employee engagement software can help you solve and how you can use the technology to overcome key challenges.
1. Low motivation and its impact on performance
When staff are not engaged and don’t feel included or supported it impacts motivation. Good performance and productivity come from people motivated in their roles and invested in the success of their team and the company.
So, how can employee engagement software help with this aspect? Predominantly through regularly encouraging and gathering data feedback on how employees are feeling, what issues may be affecting their performance and how well they’re being supported by managers and the tools and processes they have to carry out their responsibilities.
You can use software solutions to create better surveys, run more efficient and regular employee check-ins, compose the right questions and analyze feedback to identify patterns, and issues, to take actions that will boost employee motivation and performance.
2. Communication issues
It’s very common for organizations to encounter issues with communication, whether it’s within teams, between managers and their staff or across departments. Poor communication can lead to siloes, reduced collaboration, teams and colleagues in competition with each other (rather than working together towards shared goals), and potentially even workplace conflict.
Employee engagement software can improve communication in the following ways:
- Helping HR and Communications teams to craft relevant and regular content to keep employees engaged and informed about company updates, events, opportunities, etc
- Creating a culture of inclusion where staff feel involved and valued
- Building and tracking campaigns to see what appeals and resonates with employees
- Promoting an environment where staff feel free to voice opinions and encourage collaboration and cross-departmental interaction
- Offering integrations with messaging platforms and communications channels for more seamless interactions
In a changing world of work, where companies are increasingly operating a hybrid model and having to improve remote working capabilities (accelerated by the pandemic), there is a greater risk of communication problems and employees feeling more isolated. However, when used effectively, digital tools are providing more efficient ways to initiate and manage communication, collaboration and information sharing.
3. A disconnect between the leadership and employees
Lack of clarity, direction or support from organizational leadership can lead to a disconnect and employees losing focus and feeling undervalued or underappreciated. By leveraging tools offered by employee engagement software, you can build bridges between senior figures and the wider workforce and give employees visibility over the direction and goals of the business. For example, Tivian’s Communicate XI platform not only lets you create and run effective internal communication campaigns but also enables you to deliver dynamic content that speaks to the mission, vision and core values of the business.
The result? More approachable leadership, organizational culture filtering down from the top, increased clarity over what the company is trying to achieve and an open flow of feedback that gives employees more of a voice and employers more capabilities to take actions that are informed by and benefit the people and the business as a whole.
Get further insights on how to improve leadership in our blog, Taking action to improve your leadership with 360 feedback, or explore our Tivian Leadership 360 solution, a powerful, self-service multi-rater tool that enables manager-driven, on-demand feedback to bring the power of 360-degree feedback to leaders at all levels.
4. Inadequate tools and processes for supporting employee health and wellbeing
If you don’t have internal protocols in place to properly support your employees’ health and wellbeing, engagement and performance can suffer. Worst-case scenario, you can expose your organization to risks. You’ll need senior-level buy-in and involvement in wellbeing strategies to encourage participation and to demonstrate intent to the wider workforce.
According to CIPD’s 2021 Health and Wellbeing at Work survey, just 50% of the HR professionals surveyed said their organization had a formal wellbeing strategy in place – although this was up from 44% in the previous year’s survey.
Embrace technology to help you create, communicate and measure wellbeing programs. Offer opportunities to join extra-curricular activities, such as yoga/meditation/fitness classes or social events, provide benefits, training or events that support employee wellbeing and reduce stress, and give employees safe spaces/channels for vocalizing any concerns or issues with work-life balance. Also, consider tailoring communications to people at different stages of the employee lifecycle, highlighting relevant support that is available to them.
For some extra reading, explore the 4 dimensions of employee wellbeing and discover 5 steps to run effective employee engagement surveys.
5. A greater need for inclusion
How can employee engagement software help with diversity and inclusion? Well, one of the key ways is by gathering and analyzing employee feedback and staff data. When combining insights gained from internal surveys and feedback sessions with profile information you have about your employees, you can gain a clearer view of your entire workforce, revealing things like how evenly balanced teams are, how diverse your business is at a hierarchical level, qualitative data about different departments, and how well supported and empowered employees feel.
This information can help you to:
- Make informed decisions about your teams and company structure
- Gain insights into how to provide a more inclusive workplace environment and culture
- Meet the needs of people with different backgrounds and cultural preferences
- Steer your recruitment strategies to ensure evolution
Explore Tivian’s employee engagement and experience tools
As you can see, employee engagement software can help your business overcome key challenges, offering the visibility and insights to make informed decisions and take actions to improve your overall employee experience and enabling you to initiate rewards, recognition and development programs and better communicate with staff to build a continuous listening environment.
Tivian offers a cutting-edge and comprehensive suite of employee experience tools, which combine both discovery and communication features to deliver a 360° solution for HR teams to keep employees engaged at each of their lifecycle stages.
Our software is helping countless businesses to attract talent, reduce churn, maximise performance, encourage diversity, inclusion and wellbeing, and develop leadership. See how we can transform your employee engagement and solve pressing problems in your organization.
