How To Boost Employee Engagement Through Technology

by Abhishek K. Digital Marketer

In today’s era, keeping your employees engaged has become slightly tougher than before and therefore requires more effort from the company. With so much technology used in offices, you can utilize it to improve employee engagement in multiple ways. You can explore new tools to integrate within your existing systems or provide collaborative tools to improve engagement and performance.

Let us take a look at how you can boost employee engagement drastically with the help of technology at your workplace.

Use collaborative tools for better productivity

One of the biggest and most effective ways to improve employee engagement and productivity is by using virtual collaborative tools. According to a PGi’sTelework Week Survey, a strong 82% of employees feel less stressed if they telecommute instead of making the actual commute to their workplace. Also, 80% of people have higher morale and 69% of employees take fewer leaves.

Furthermore, this is great for creative work as not everyone is comfortable in creating new ideas and products at a place where they might not be comfortable. Through virtual collaborative tools, employees can now work from where they want and still stay in the loop of things.

Wikis, shared whiteboards, forums, and project management tools are some of the many things that you can incorporate to provide the information to your employees working from home.

Gamification still packs a punch

If you think that the culture of gamification is a thing of the past, then you are mistaken. It may not be too popular nowadays but it surely is as effective as it was in the earlier days. Gamification is basically bringing a competitive edge to the workflow by rewarding the employees through badges, vouchers, and several other prizes.

You may create leaderboards, levels, and challenges and post the badges and rewards as well on an online portal that every employee can access. This has been seen as extremely productive for Gen Y employees or the students who are still in the training period. It could be something as simple as a hackathon contest within your software development team or a unique content creation contest for your content team.

Keep in mind that even such small contests have a large output – employee engagement. This engagement benefits the company with better results and higher customer retention.

A BYOD work culture

To be very honest, no employee likes to work on old clunky laptops or smartphones. The new culture of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has received huge appreciation across companies where employees are allowed to use their personal devices at the workspace. If they have better devices, then you should let them use them as it will only help them perform in a better way by completing their tasks quickly.

Mobile Learning

Mobile Learning is changing the game for sure. Several surveys have come out with findings regarding how young employees are keen to learn new things on their mobile phones and improve their skillsets. Gen Y prefers to learn at their own pace and convenience and hence believe in utilizing their free time to learn more.

There is no denying the fact that the younger generation works in a different manner as they seek the perfect balance between work and other aspects of life. They engage in their hobbies, travel around and look after their family, and at the same time, also want to grow professionally. Therefore, they educate themselves through various online courses and workshops which they attend at their own pace, be it during the commute or before sleeping.

As a company, you should encourage such practices by helping them participate in online courses and workshops. With Gen Z coming up as the next working force, this practice will be there to stay.

Incorporate an Employee Recognition tool

As an extension to the gamification process, you should incorporate an employee recognition tool in your online portal so that everyone involved in the company can recognize performances and help each other grow. It could be an employer to employee recognition process or even a peer-to-peer setup.

The latter is particularly important as there are cases when the seniors do not get time to give feedback and this can affect the morale of the employee, which is why the recognition shown by peers does help a lot.

Final Thoughts

Technology definitely helps you boost employee engagement and for the coming times, it is much more important than it has ever been. As a company, you will have to be proactive about it and incorporate as many of the above ideas as possible.

For further assistance, you can contact Domus Inc., a women-owned employee engagement agency with having over 25 years of experience. They will help you put a customized employee engagement plan together to facilitate a meaningful connection with your employees.