How to Boost Employee Engagement Using Technology

 

It was technology that kept us going when the world was shaken during the pandemic. We know how difficult it was for companies to motivate their employees to work under such circumstances, but HR Technology made it possible.

We can increase employee engagement by providing trainings to employees, listening to them, giving them attention, recognizing them, or empowering them with the right tools.  

let’s take a look at what exactly employee engagement is.

 

What is Employee Engagement? 

When we talk about employee engagement, we talk about the employee’s emotional commitment to the organization. In simple language, employee engagement means an employee that feels wanted in the company, is valued, and genuinely wants the company to succeed. 

Have you ever thought about why startups always have higher employee retention than well established companies? That’s because startups create an environment that makes the employees feel connected, which in turn, improves productivity and engagement. Startup companies know how to use technology to its fullest, which gives them the upper hand.

There are several ways that organizations can improve their employee engagement. But with technology, the percentage can go higher than expected. How? Read on to find out.

1) Make Use of Virtual Collaboration 

Whether you are working remotely, hybrid, or from the office, it’s essential to collaborate with your colleagues to keep them engaged.

That’s where virtual collaboration tools come into the picture. By using these tools, you can let your employees connect via audio and video calls, collaborate on projects, brainstorm ideas, and much more. 

Besides, a collaboration tool can also improve the onboarding process of newcomers as they would get to know their team members and understand work processes simultaneously.

2) Collect Feedback From Employees 

Startups and new companies emphasize employee feedback, which is useful to increase employee engagement. How? By collecting regular feedback from our employees, we can understand the areas that the organization is lacking and make improvements in those areas..

Moreover, such feedback platforms can store the survey information for a long time for future usage. You can also create surveys and feedback based on your requirements. Whether it be a weekly pulse survey or monthly feedback, it’s essential to understand employees’ needs and act accordingly.

Organizations that pay attention to their employees’ concerns are the ones that have higher engagement and productivity rates.

3) Invest in an Employee Recognition 

Every human being craves appreciation after accomplishing their goals. And no, it doesn’t mean just congratulating your employees after completing the project on a tight deadline and producing great results. You must appreciate them in a way that further motivates them to keep up the good work. How? By using technology. 

Nowadays, many organizations started using employee recognition platforms.ly to reward employees. These tools enable organizations to provide a personalized recognition experience to each employee. You can offer gift cards, branded merchandise, and different customized rewards with these tools. 

These small things can help in encouraging your team members to work enthusiastically and hence, increase employee engagement in the company.

 4)Allow Personal Devices At Work 

It’s quite common for offices to prevent employees from using their mobile phones and personal laptops while working. But, it has been seen that by allowing personal devices to work, the engagement rate has increased a lot.

Who know how to multitask and give good results. By allowing them to use their devices at work, you are giving them the liberty to take their time off work, relax, and then return to work with a fresh mindset.

References

Ihttps://www.gallup.com/workplace/321965/employee-engagement-reverts-back-pre-covid-levels.aspx

https://blog.jostle.me/blog/5-reasons-why-employee-engagement-is-important

https://www.springworks.in/blog/employee-engagement-guide/

How Performance Analysis Help to Employee Retention

 

 Employee Retention …

People leaving any organization can have a huge impact. It can affect team morale, impact productivity, and put a big dent in the organizational budget. Strong retention strategies, such as those supported by solid performance analysis, can greatly affect business success. These strategies must be present from the recruitment stage until new hires become established employees in the company.
Employee retention is a critical aspect of talent management because it promotes the growth and scalability of an organization. Hiring is costly, especially considering the time and resources a company spends to onboard and train a new employee. In fact, loosing talent is much more expensive than retaining it. 
More than the economic cost, losing an employee can also cause a shift within an organization,  decreasing employee morale. When an employee resigns, it can also mean that another team member loses a friend.

 

Performance Analysis  &  Retention

 Organizations can apply the following performance analysis strategies to boost their employee retention.

1) Start at the Recruitment Stage

 Retaining the employee means hiring the right talent at the onset through clear goals and objectives, the HR team should know if the candidate is the right fit for the company and its culture. Avoiding bias is critical. One effective approach to curb this is by using artificial intelligence to analyze candidates. 

Onboarding is a critical that can help ground the new hire in the culture and workflows of any workplace.

2) Track Employee Productivity

Assess employee performance through time tracking tools and measure output against the number of hours they’ve worked. This strategy allows you to determine each person’s current load, giving you an idea of the overall bandwidth of your employees. It can also help to surface employee preferences, strengths, and weaknesses, allowing you to assign tasks to the most suited individuals. As a result, they’re not overburdened and become happier and more connected employees.

3) Set Attainable Goals to Motivate Employees 

Each employee must have goals to keep them motivated. Setting and meeting small goals helps build focus, and knowing they are meeting expectations leads to feelings of satisfaction. Tracking employee progress and performance means managers will know how people and projects are coming along and can be sure to recognize staff achievements. This promotes engagement and assures staff they are a valued part of the team.

4) Have a Clear Mission Statement 

Employees are more connected when they understand what the company stands for, so it’s imperative that business leaders develop a clear mission statement and communicate it to the team. Staff should be aware of what the company is trying to achieve, and how that will be accomplished.

Be sure company mission statement is authentic and make it part of a flexible and supportive company culture.

Don’t let the efforts go to waste. Employees who choose to leave often take more than what company initially invested in them. Invest in the right systems, technology, and processes but more importantly, invest in your people.

 

References

Hom, P. W., Lee, T. W., Shaw, J. D., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 530–545. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000103

 Toward a Greater Understanding of How Dissatisfaction Drives Employee Turnover

30 Nov 2017https://doi.org/10.5465/3069441

Can the digitalizing benefit the Talent Acquisition?

 

In the past few decades, hiring process in the organizations have been changed alongside the other business priorities. Specially in the past two years, Covid pandemic reasoned to change all fluctuations of digital recruitment processes and identified the importance of changing from traditional recruitment methods to digital recruitment methods.

With the recovery of global financial crisis in 2008, many of large and medium scale organizations have identified that the recruiting of top talents has been more demanding. So, the acquisition professionals were looking for the competitive advantage of changing their traditional recruiting methods to emerging technologies in order to find, attract and select the best talents for the said positions.

With the global pandemic in last two years, most of the organizations respectively size of the business have identified the importance of operating and moving to digital businesses, digital recruitment went from nice-to-have to a must have in Human Resources sector. Talent Acquisition professionals around the world have explored the effective ways of remote hiring and now become a sustainable investment for most of the leading organizations around the world.

 

What should the digital recruitment process looks like?

It has been always a doubt about how the organizations can go digital from traditional recruitment methods. Some organizations, even in top businesses like finance were had second thoughts of eliminating the human component of hiring process. Let’s focus at the full recruitment process, from sourcing to onboarding, and see what it looks like before and after digitizing.

 

The benefits of a fully digital recruitment process

Manual recruitment process can take hours of recruiter’s time for each step of sourcing, selecting, hiring, and on-boarding. Moreover, it can be over budget without expected outcome. Besides, recruiters ang hiring managers spend considerable time on job postings, pre-selection assessments, interviewing, screenings and onboarding. Not to mention, this can highly impact on organizational priorities on revenue-driving.

Digital recruiting process can get rid of the bottlenecks of traditional methods. Most of the traditional recruiters struggle with consistency of writing and posting job advertisements. In digital recruiting process, recruiters can use their own templates to save time and consistency. Digital recruiters are now using LinkedIn profiles to pre-identify the suitable candidates without contacting them. They can see the candidate who open to opportunities, so recruiters know they are looking for new opportunities can approach with their job posts. LinkedIn retrieve and review candidate profiles and compare with other candidates who have already applied for the same position. So, these digital platforms are saving time massively on talent acquisitioning these days. Success candidates can be moved to interview booking systems and they can select the available slots. Also, most of the leading global organizations use digital platforms for the pre-employment checks where everyone can track and see the progress which save time of both parties from being as fast, efficient, and cost-effective as they could be. No more unpleasant recruiting experiences for both candidates and hiring managers.

 

Reference

PWC Careers (2020), Digital Recruitment, retrieved from; https://www.pwc.com/c1/en/careers/digital-recruitment.html

Study.com (2022), Digital Recruitment Strategies, Retrieved from; https://study.com/academy/lesson/digital-recruitment-definition-strategies.html

Digital Clock-in: Who can have most benefitted?

 

Amid the recent global pandemic, most of the organizations have been moved to remote working patterns, tracking and recording employee attendance evident to be a time-consuming, unreliable and imprecise. Therefore, many global organizations have been introduced  a digital clock-in method to record attendance and will replace the traditional methods of tracking attendance. Who can be most benefitted?

Digital attendance can get rid of the frustration of manual attendance process. This can be take over manual work of day to day employee management tasks such as panning daily/weekly workflow and budgeting. Automating this process can eliminate manual record keeping that allow access to employee attendance records from anywhere. It is evident that most of the global organizations enjoy the benefits of automated attendance tracking.

This is not surprising as we are living in digital era, everyone has smart phones in their hands. Why any organization rely on paper records of their employee attendance? Perhaps, they haven’t realized massive benefits of digital attendance recording could be for their businesses.

Let’s explores the benefits of switching digital clock-in, and recording attendance.

1.     Increased Productivity

Manual payroll can be complicated and more time consuming for organizations. Managers and HR have to go through every record of their employee attendance and analyzing their late attendance/work patterns. This can be several hours per day which can reduce productivity. Managers can use this time for other business priorities. Most importantly, you can’t be certain of the accuracy of these data collection. Using a digital attendance recording can save time, enhance data accuracy and increase productivity of the business.

2.     Enhanced Security

Use of digital attendance recording system can be more secure than manual recording. Keep digital records can protect data for future reference as reliable sources for important decision making. As example, companies rely on attendance records when deciding annual bonuses and increment as well as certain records of punctuality can use for promotion decisions.

3.     Hassle-free Shift Management

Real time attendance data can helps companies to take daily planning decision effectively. Also, these data can be use for evaluate and decide operations and planning on other departments too. For example; overtime records can use for budgeting and staff allocation among the departments. If any of the department has lack of staff, digital attendance records can be used for staffing arrangements with real time notifications to staff as well as supervisors.

4.     Flexible Working Arrangements

Covid-19 pandemic has made many organizations realized their employees can work remote or on-site. They identified that they can continue to work and meet targets even during the lockdowns. Digital clock-ins made easy to track employee attendance and keep records on time. Implementing this method was an encouragement to most of the employees as they knew they can work from wherever they can management has a track of their working hours and availability.

 Reference

Aon UK (2021), Online Benefits And Communications That Really Work, Retrieved from https://www.aon.com/unitedkingdom/employee-benefits/online-benefits-and-communications/default?msclkid=5de136c4ef971fcdcc9e5547be999c4f&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=S%20%7C%20UK%20%7C%20EB%20%7C%20Online%20Benefits%20%26%20Communications%20%7C%20Retainer&utm_term=Digital%20benefits&utm_content=P%20%7C%20Technology

HR Artis (2022), 5 Benefits of using digital time and attendance, Retrieved from https://www.hrartis.com/za/5-benefits-of-using-digital-time-and-attendance/

 

Key Ingredients for a Successful start of HR Digital Transformation

 

Digital technologies are transforming operations, products and services in organizations large and small. The digital transformation of organizations is extolled as a solution to organizational challenges related to both efficiency and effectiveness.. 

So here are few starting points for creating successful digital transformations in organization.

Goal is the Important 

Again, before going off on a big transformational HR journey, first establish a clearly defined goal that makes sense from a business perspective. Most of the time, this goal will be to solve an issue employees encounter.

That’s why, in a process of HR transformation, the focus should always be on the employee as an end-user. It’s also why you want to let your employees test any new technology themselves first before you implement it.

 Get everyone on Table

This means all stakeholders, from employees to the C-suite and everyone in between. When it comes to a digital HR transformation  something that will affect the entire organization  you need all the support you can get in order for it to become a success.

Start with Simple

Always start simple and small. Look at the areas of your HR processes that could do with a digital makeover. Preselection & recruitment,  learning and development, payroll management and etc. Talk about this with your employees and the members of the C-suite. Ask them what they think should be a priority. 

Prioritize Ideas

This will undoubtedly result in a long list of ideas. Prioritize them based on impact and effort. The former meaning the business impact of digitalizing the ideas and the latter meaning the time and money it would take to actually get the ideas to go digital. Start with the ideas that are high impact and low effort. They will help you build the business case for digital HR and get you going quickly

Assess Performance

Trying and implementing digital technologies is great, but doesn’t make much business sense if we don’t look at their results. Hence we need to critically assess what works and what doesn’t. After all, the only way for us to advance is to solve actual problems with technological solutions that truly solve these problems.

Work Place Culture

Digital technology alone is not enough for an HR transformation. Let alone a digital transformation of an entire organization. It’s just as much  perhaps even more about the mindset of everyone involved. And that has everything to do with your company culture.

From the new people you hire, via your current workforce all the way up to the C-level, a digital mindset in the broadest sense of the word  is essential for a successful transformation.

References

Spiceworks  2020, What Is HR Digital Transformation? Definition, Strategies, and Challenges
https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/innovation/articles/what-is-hr-digital-transformation-definition-strategies-and-challenges/
AIHR : What is Digital HR
https://www.aihr.com/blog/back-to-basics-what-is-digital-hr/

Digital & Traditional - Two sides to the HRM coin …?

 

What is HR digital transformation

 HR digital transformation is the process of changing operational HR processes to become automated and data-driven.

Digital & Traditional - Are there Two sides to the HRM coin …? 

The HR peoples in a traditional HR jobs does not have almost as many software and tools to work effectively. Instead of educating employees about their roles and responsibilities or how to conduct their employment, HR thinks that the supervisors will examine their work with them and that the employee will learn on the job. Traditional HRMs target to manage employee issues, handle labour relations, and keep their employees happy in general. Technology was used more less in traditional HR.

The HR professionals in digital HR are aimed on constructing a sustainable plan. When they are in recruitment process, for example, they focus the organization’s projected future development and long-term goals. In digital HR, most of the processes/functions are managed in a different way. In digital HR, the majority of processes and labor are functioned by numerous tools and software. In essence, technology has grown in digital HR.

Approaches…Behaviors…Attitudes… Creating more outcomes on Transformations

The three digital HR approaches that today’s leading firms use include empathizing with employees, focusing on data, and allowing analysis to drive strategy. Even though change and transformation are difficult to achieve, some simple tools and platforms can assist you in taking your practice to the next level. Many tools and software are available in digital HR to assist HR in their daily activities. As a result, HR tasks become simple and convenient.

However, these types of tools and software are not available in traditional HRM, therefore the burden was higher at the time. However, one consequence of modern HR management is that as a result of these tools and software, HR employment has been lost as humans have been replaced by these software and tools.

Human resource management has been greatly influenced by technological advancements. HR has undergone a transformation as a result of technological advancements. Human resource management becomes more methodical, accurate, and dynamic as a result of technological advancements. Using tools and technologies incorrectly can have a negative impact on an organization’s structure. When employees have discipline issues or cause difficulty, traditional HR steps in. It does not affect the escalation of the issues.

Traditional HR sees itself as doing the same thing with the same tools or Software year after year with the same technique. The only thing that changes over the period is the employees’ looks. However, technology has had a significant impact on modern HRM; tools and software make a significant difference while performing various HR tasks.

As a result of digital transformation, the way firms hire and manage personnel has changed. As technology has matured, the HR role has grown to include end-to-end talent management duties. There was a time when HR professionals had to do everything by hand, including hiring, firing, and payroll but now there are many technologies that can accomplish everything with one click.

 There are two sides to a coin, just as there are two sides to traditional and modern HRM. Modern HRM has a higher impact because it allows for the automation of most tasks. However, the downside of modern HRM is that it has resulted in the reduction of jobs due to the use of advanced tools and software.

References

AIHR (2019), The future of HR is digital. Are you ready?: Retrieved from; The future of HR is digital. Are you ready? - YouTube

Altamira (2019), The Digitalization of Human Resources: 7 Key Steps Retrieved from; https://www.altamirahrm.com/en/blog/digitalization-of-human-resources

Deloitte (2017), Digital HR: Platforms, people, and work: 2017 Global Human Capital Trends Retrieved from https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/human-capital-trends/2017/digital-transformation-in-hr.html