With the new millennial workforce, employee engagement is an HR metric that has been on the rise for the last few years. The mindset of this new, younger, workforce is leaning towards a culture of “perks” – which can be centered on work/life balance, opportunities for professional development, and technology in the workplace.
With large companies like Amazon and Google dominating the market with employee incentives, smaller employers are constantly trying to evolve their HR toolkit to keep their A-Players happy. But what does true employee engagement look like?
David Macleod, Founder of Engage for Success, says:
“Employee engagement is getting up in the morning thinking,“Great! I’m going to work. I know what I’m going to do today. I’ve got some great ideas about how to do it really well. I’m looking forward to seeing the team and helping them work well today.”
SPLICE, like other businesses, was searching for new & innovative ways to engage our employees for better transparency, trust, and loyalty. TINYpulse, a tool that combines anonymous employee-surveying with actionable data, enabled SPLICE to do just that. As a current member of the HR team, I was lucky enough to attend TINYcon, the annual employee engagement conference hosted by TINYpulse, in Seattle. Attending this conference was a great way to get to know the recently adopted software and the people behind it. So what did I discover?
While there was a lot to learn from the speakers, if I had to pick one thing I took away, it’s that: “people need to be responsible for generating culture, not just ONE person or group”. For this reason SPLICE has a monthly HR Meeting in place where the department heads meet to make sure there is alignment from the bottom-up and vice versa.
Are you looking for more Employee Engagement best practices? I have 4 listed below to help kick-start your search:
- Use a tool that matches your culture. TINYpulse worked for SPLICE, but each company is different. As a company that focuses immensely on corporate culture, the people at TINYpulse fit well within the SPLICE culture boundaries. Since implementation, we have seen our participation rates steadily increasing. It has motivated SPLICE employees to voice their opinions in a way that feels right for them.
- If you ask, you must give back. You must respect the time your employees put in to providing insights and suggestions on how you can make their lives better. You should be ready to act quickly, or be ready to explain how their suggestions will be implemented in the future and that they will not be forgotten. There is nothing more disengaging than the implementation of an employee survey, which employees take with good intentions, that produces no results or communication around the responses. Even a small change can provide big results.
- Create questions that focus on current processes/ideologies. SPLICE found that we got the most reflective feedback possible when our questions were a bit more company oriented and realistic. Always ask for comments when possible – nothing is worse than receiving a low rating on a question and not having the “why” to be able to improve it. TINYpulse also has a feature that allows you to anonymously private message individuals who provide a score of lower than 5 and didn’t leave a comment with a more detailed explanation. Anonymity is a big factor in getting honest results and employees are more engaged when this level of trust in maintained.
- Recognize employees for doing things right. For SPLICE, this means making use of the TINYpulse “Cheers for Peers” program which allows employees to recognize their co-workers for those extra efforts. This “Cheers for Peer” program has turned into a “Cheers for Beers” initiative that ties into HR Key Performance Indicators. We want to encourage a certain percentage of weekly recognition and so we provide a small incentive to employees for paying attention to the work their team mates are doing. When we hit a certain completion rate for the TINYpulse survey and “Cheers for Peers”, the last hour of the workday on the following Friday is reserved to “Beer Friday” – a great opportunity for the team to celebrate the week’s accomplishments.
Keeping employees engaged can be a challenge, but with the right tool and best practices, your engagement scores can go a long way. What are some ways you generate a culture of engagement and recognition within your organization? Comment below!