Did you know that, according to a study from Gallup, only 21% of employees are engaged at work? So, by trying to engage your employees with employee engagement app, there is considerable potential to be tapped into. Just imagine that you are also increasing employee productivity by increasing employee engagement, which leads to increased profits.
We will cover what an employee engagement app is, including an explanation of why an employee engagement app is important for your business, how to find the right one, and how to achieve multiple goals with one.
This posts covers:
- What is an Employee engagement app (and Why Does it Matter), and related terms?
- Why implement an employee engagement app?
- What should the right employee engagement app have
- How to implement an Employee engagement app
- Measure engagement with the employee engagement app
What is an Employee engagement app (and Why Does it Matter), and related terms?
First, to truly understand the meaning of an employee engagement app, we need to cover what employee engagement is and what are the characteristics of employee engagement.
Employee engagement and its characteristics
Employee engagement could be interpreted as employees’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral energies focused on positive organizational outcomes.
In other words, an engaged employee is not spending most of their time at work looking at the clock, doesn’t do the bare minimum, and their feelings for the company are significantly correlated with the sense of their colleagues.
Engaged employees have a mental and emotional connection to their colleagues, the work they do, and, lastly, to their organization. They strongly understand company goals and culture and always work for the greater good.
You may wonder, what are the characteristics of employee engagement? Innovative, creative, collaborative, communicative, adaptable, and devoted employees. When employees become satisfied with their workplace, they tend to become engaged, and ultimately your company gets a new ambassador.
A person giving their time and effort to the brand ends up promoting and living the brand they put in their work for. Those are the people that create and mold your company culture. The formation of thriving company culture is what every manager strives for, but it is challenging to control. So instead, the manager should strive to find, encourage, and, lastly, engage employees who are the foundation of your culture.
Employee Engagement App
Employee engagement app is much like closed social media for organizations. You may think, why would you give your employees opportunities to procrastinate on work and use social media to distract them? However, approximately 60.99% of the 7.87 billion people in the world use social media, and globally, the average time a person spends on social media a day is 2 hours and 24 minutes. Social media is already a big part of our everyday lives, and “banning” it makes no sense when you could benefit from its usage.
Scrolling at work is not desirable, but if your employee is scrolling through the company news feed, colleagues’ updates, and know-how, we are sure it would be a different story. Not only would it be easier for them to interact with your news, but it would also be easier for the news to be seen as our emails are piled with all sorts of messages. Furthermore, in this agile environment, time is of the essence, and a fast-paced information-sharing system is fundamental. Finally, you cannot control or ban your employees from “scrolling”, but you can give them useful content to scroll through.
An employee engagement app is a tool helping you to improve communication, reduce employee turnover, improve employee appreciation, mold organizational culture, improve employee satisfaction, and ultimately improve employee engagement which leads to higher productivity. For example, in a recent anonymous study, 42% of employees from OTP Bank felt more productive since using Jenz as their employee engagement app.
Why implement an employee engagement app?
Before we dig into why you would ever need an employee engagement app, look at the infographic below, with the statistics conducted by Gallup.
We hope you understand the problem with employee engagement and how much potential there is. This infographic is just a simple peek into this topic, raising awareness of low employee engagement. We are here to help you understand what this single problem consists of and how to solve it with a simple solution, an employee engagement app.
Employee engagement includes a lot of problems by itself; employee satisfaction, employee appreciation, transparent communication, and organizational culture. We will cover every single one and answer the question; why would you need an employee engagement app to deal with any of these issues?
High Employee Turnover rate
Employee turnover is one of the most crucial HR metrics and is a high-cost problem. Dealing with employees’ departure and finding their replacements is a tough job. Companies with high employee turnover rates are losing a lot of money and time in figuring out how to create and keep a great team of employees.
To reduce employee turnover, first, you need to discover what causes it. One of the first causes of employee satisfaction that comes to mind is proper communication. Humans are social beings, so it is essential for them to feel connected, understood, and a part of a group.
Many managers overlook the importance of opportunities to connect with employees and create relationships based on their business life. Connecting and understanding your employees and colleagues on an emotional side more than strictly professional is proven to reduce employee turnover. According to a study conducted by Forbes, 96% of employees believe showing empathy is an important way to advance employee retention.
Second, the most effective way to deal with employee satisfaction and reduce employee turnover is to communicate the issue. You may think it’s silly, but asking your employees about the workplace and their workload does wonders. That way, you could quickly detect the problem, then find the solution. If direct communication brings you uncomfortable feelings, then having a survey on an employee engagement app is the way to go.
Low Employee Performance
There can be times when your employee underperforms, but you need to know the real reason why. Detecting an employee underperforming is every manager’s job, but it is a bit harder to figure out why and try and fix that issue.
Why does my employee underperform? They may be facing burnout, are uncomfortable at their workplace, are facing personal issues, or are having problems with motivation. Whatever it is, your goal is to figure out how to bring them on track as soon as possible.
We may sound like a parrot to you, but we can’t stress this enough; Communication is the key. Make your employees feel comfortable talking to you, make yourself approachable, and let them know there is no harm in being honest.
If there is no chance to determine why the employee is underperforming, try to appreciate their work and motivate them for everything they have done. Whatever it is, it may affect their motivation and happiness at work. Business productivity increases by 31% when employees are happy. A workplace should always be a safe place for each of your employees.
No sense of organizational culture
Organizational culture is a proper way to behave inside and outside your organization. But what to do when your employees have no sense of that same culture? You may even think, how is that possible? There can be different cultures looking at your departments, offices, people working at the office, and people working remotely or even in a hybrid type of working environment. It depends on how you connect people while generally looking at the whole company.
Defining the culture
The first step in creating a unique and united organizational culture is defining the culture you would like to have and determining what type of employees would fit into that culture. For example, if you want to create an informal, creative, and energetic culture, you should target that type of person as your employee. That is where your Employer Branding comes in. Creating a brand out of the culture you promote attracts the right people for your organization.
Hiring the right people
The second step would be to hire the right people. After attracting the right people, you should evaluate their personalities and see if they match the picture you thought of while considering your ideal organizational culture. After recruiting those people, your onboarding process should also focus on getting them the right message of what your culture is and what is your vision of it if they differ.
Support and appreciate cultural values
As they are all onboard, they may respect and contribute to those values, but it is easy to lose sight and focus. So the best way to stay on the right path is to praise and reward your employees after they act according to the values you appreciate. After they feel rewarded for their behavior and efforts, their actions will become automatic. But that’s not where you stop. It would be best if you continued to appreciate your employees because the manager’s role is to keep the focus on matters like this. This is where a feature like kudos allows you to appreciate your employees effortlessly, transparently, and effectively.
What should the right employee engagement app have
Employee engagement software is a tool helping you achieve all those goals we talk about, building up to your employee engagement. But how would you differentiate amongst all the tools available?
Employee engagement app should be intuitive, enable two-way communication, anonymous feedback, and a feature to appreciate your employees. It should be a platform that lets you have transparent, secure, and fast access to company information. Besides sharing the company info, it should be a place to exchange ideas, know-how, news, and hobbies between colleagues. It is software where you can genuinely communicate on different levels, and that is important as each relationship we have is based on communication and interaction. According to a study conducted by Pumble.com in 2021, Teams who communicate effectively in the workplace may see as much as a 25% increase in their productivity. If you are still trying to convince, did you know that poor communication is responsible for 70% of corporate errors? Communication is the key.
Personalization
As communication is so important, you must ensure that the app can be personalized. You should be able to adjust your language and your writing system and even adjust it to your branding so you can communicate your message.
Content strategy
There should be different content to keep your employees engaged on the app. But it could be a real struggle to post regularly. That is why employee engagement experts at Jenz prepare content ideas and premade templates for your job of handling employee engagement apps much more effortlessly.
Anonymous feedback
How many times have you found yourself hesitant about complaining to your superiors? If the answer is at least once, then you found the answer on whether the feedback you get should be anonymous or not.
According to a report from Forbes, 74% of employees would be more inclined to give feedback about their company, workload, and culture if the feedback channel was genuinely anonymous.
There are two ways to approach feedback. First, it could be an open form to communicate feedback whenever possible, whatever the feedback’s point. Jenz even took it a step further to let the employees choose who can receive the feedback (Board, Office Manager, Department Manager, HR…). The second way is doing a survey, which limits their answers to your questions. In the case of surveys, prepare the right questions so you can collect the proper feedback.
Intuitive mobile experience
Did you know that out of 4.48 billion social media users, 99% access websites or apps through a mobile device, with only 1.32% accessing platforms exclusively via desktop?
The employee engagement tool should be fully optimized for mobile first. In addition, an intuitive, seamless, visually appealing user experience is also necessary for excellent user adoption and engagement.
Remember that 80% of workers worldwide don’t sit at desks daily. As a result, frontline workers often find themselves excluded or isolated from company information. The fact that frontline workers are on the go and far away from their desktops makes being informed an aggravating experience. They may access their email from their mobile devices, but it is hard to focus on the company newsletter among all the other work-related emails they receive. Let’s not even mention those without company email.
Advanced analytics
The possibility of seeing which of your employees has seen your post, liked, or commented on the post are some of the basic analytics you expect from a social media app. But to take the whole user experience to the next level, you would want to have some more advanced analytics.
One example of the more advanced analytics feature is the AI feature on Jenz Admin Interface. Artificial Intelligence on Jenz analyses the historical engagement of users and suggests to you what is the best time to post an official story and achieve the best possible engagement. In addition, Jenz AI calculates in what percentage your engagement will improve and shows how well the algorithm learns your users’ behavior.
Integrations
Many people use multiple tools and communication channels because of our everyday workload. That could be exhausting and difficult to handle altogether. That is why a new tool should seamlessly integrate with the ones you actively use.
Let us be honest there is more than one perfect tool for everything, which is why companies will continue to add tools for everyday usage. The problem should be different from the tool count if the devices are correctly integrated and create a unique and intuitive experience.
How to implement an Employee engagement app
Employee engagement apps should be strategically implemented, as any premature steps could hurt the user adoption rates of the app. Our Customer Experience department plays a significant role in the app’s implementation, onboarding, and maintenance.
Employee engagement strategy
To successfully implement the app, we in Jenz have our own goals and objectives in the employee engagement strategy.
Find key people
At first, we are detecting “key people” who could be Jenz Administrators. Key people are leaders, influencers, and extroverts. These people are the bridges inside your company’s network.
Detect weak points
Secondly, we present the app in depth to our key people. The plan comprises the most common and critical “weak points” in companies, from giving endorsements to one-way communication, transparency, company culture, and more. At this meeting, our key people get to know the benefits of having Jenz and resolutions to their concrete issues needing to be addressed. After this meeting, we are deciding who will be our Jenz Admins from all the key people. Admins are usually the representatives of the company culture, have good writing skills, and are familiar with the information flow and communication prompt inside the company.
Spread the word
The third step is spreading the word! People around the company start to hear around the bush that some new app is coming out, and the hype is building around. At that time, our Jenz Admins are giving their best in preparing content and using word of mouth to hype up Jenz.
Internal campaign
The fourth step is a logical step after the third one, and that is when we push an internal campaign to prepare for the usage of Jenz. The goal is to increase anticipation and excitement, and future user engagement. Our internal campaign has two options: online and live. The online campaign consists of activities such as a newsletter campaign, creating informational Jenz promo materials, C-level appeal, Presentation invites, Superiors impulse, and more. On the other hand, the live campaign consists of sharing cool and stylish Jenz promo materials with the employees, preparing live in-house decorations, and much more. The best use case is to combine both.
The Launch
The process continues with the direct onboarding of the users. We introduce our users to the story and goals behind the app because no matter how good the features could be, our users need to see the value for themselves to serve its purpose. While introducing the app, users get to know our values, which promote a creative way of thinking, loving your workplace, and feeling appreciated. Our effort is to show them how to transfer those values using the employee engagement software, which would translate into their workplace environment. This process is called the Launch. Here we launch the app amongst employees and have activities such as onboarding presentations and similar activities for better user experience and user adoption.
Usage preparation
And finally, we come to the last step, using Jenz—to prepare content ideas, know-how, and best practices. Of course, the main objective of this chapter is to create modern communication with rich storytelling. But, besides the primary goal, we also need to pay some attention to; the easy transfer of important information, building a self-sustainable work environment, creating fun and fresh content, and connecting people.
Measure engagement with the employee engagement app
Finally, after the launch, all the onboarding activities, and content creation, it is time to think about how we could measure the success of our employee engagement software.
Every organization is different, so the strategy for measuring engagement can sometimes differ. However, there may be some areas where you are well above the average and need to work somewhere. So the goal of measuring engagement is to:
- Identify strengths and weaknesses (even the ones you are unaware of).
- Build a transparent and sincere relationship.
- Recognize trends that should be captured.
Anonymous survey
The first step is to conduct an anonymous survey. It would help if you asked the questions you determine are necessary. The study must be anonymous so the employees could freely speak their minds and share their experiences. Remember to ask precise questions and try to extract as much information from different perspectives around the same topic. That is the proper way to objectively look at the situation and determine in what state your engagement is and how far you are from the goal.
Detecting the problem
After the survey, analyze data to recognize what is essential to your employees. What are the obstacles in their day-to-day workplace and workload? What values do they appreciate the most, and how to adapt your management style to improve their productivity based on their needs? Once you create a healthy, fun, and safe environment in their workplace, their engagement will significantly improve.
Important tip: Measuring engagement is a process that takes time. It is a continuous process of listening to and valuing your employees’ opinions and needs at their workplace.
To evaluate the results of using your employee engagement strategy, you should conduct another survey sometime after implementing the employee engagement software. Finally, compare the results from all the surveys you have run.
For example, these are some statistics from anonymous surveys conducted by Jenz with a few of our clients.
Conclusion
Employee engagement app is a handy tool, but to use it effectively, you need to know your strengths and weaknesses, develop the right strategy based on your goals, implement the plan, and measure your results.
If you are struggling with any of the mentioned problems, email us at inbound@jenz.app, or fill out this form . We can not only offer you a tool, but we could also offer you employee engagement consulting services and content creation campaigns for your employee engagement software.
We hope we have given you a clear overview of employee engagement apps. If you feel we should have added anything else, feel free to recommend it to our marketing@jenz.app .
If you would like to know more about Jenz, click here.