Putting Your Employee Engagement into Context

If you invest in employee engagement, your employees will invest in your customer experience. More and more, this means not just ensuring your employees have an excellent work-life balance but building wellbeing directly into your employee experience. The stats speak for themselves with potential business gains of "Highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability", and the losses of "Disengaged employees cost U.S. companies up to $550 billion a year". But what does employee engagement look like? Is it about filling offices with bean bags and snacks? While we love a comfortable seating arrangement and delicious treats, establishing a strong employee experience isn't just based on finding the perks other companies don't offer. Instead, it is about understanding what your employees feel about your company, their jobs, the day to day operations, and getting information in a manner that gives you context. That's where our Employee Engagement solution can help.

Our goal in offering an Employee Experience Management solution is to allow businesses to gather anonymous insight (with optional employee identifying information collection) at the points where it makes the most sense for your employees. For example, if 80% of your workforce is deskless, an email survey may not get great returns. Instead, a feedback terminal near your timeclock or employee entrance may give you all the feedback you need. We have a whole list of collectors you can add at the points that make the most sense for your employees so that you can engage their feedback in a non-disruptive manner throughout their typical workday. Best of all, we funnel all that data into our analytics dashboard. You'll know what parts of the employee experience impact your overall employee success.

Context Is What Makes the Number Useful

The phrase "employee engagement" gets flattened into a single annual score, but engagement is really a bundle of distinct drivers — and a blended number hides which one is actually the problem. A useful measurement program looks at engagement across four dimensions:

• Organization — do people feel a sense of belonging and believe in where the company is going?
• People — do colleagues and managers live up to the organization's stated values?
• Work — is the job itself satisfying, and are people set up to do it well?
• Well-being — is the day-to-day environment healthy, safe, and sustainable?

A team can score well on three of these and quietly crater on the fourth. An engagement score of "68%" tells you nothing about which; feedback tied to the context of when and where it was given tells you everything. That's the difference between knowing morale is down and knowing morale is down on the night shift, at one facility, because of a scheduling change.

What This Looks Like on the Floor

Consider a warehouse where turnover has crept up. The exit interviews are too late to help and too vague to act on. But a Smiley terminal at the clock-out station, asking one quick question as people end their shift, starts surfacing a pattern within days: satisfaction drops sharply on the shifts run by one particular team lead, and the open-text comments point to how breaks are being scheduled. That's a specific, fixable problem — caught while the employees who raised it are still on the payroll, not after they've already left. Context turned a lagging, unactionable number into an early warning.

Your people are what power your company and are the building blocks of your customer experience. Without them, your business wouldn't be possible. So take the time to know precisely how you can create the best employee experience through employee engagement — and see why employee experience is the other half of CX for how the two connect.

Ready to put your employee engagement into context? Book a demo to see how in-the-moment feedback captures how your teams really feel. You can also follow our LinkedIn page for more employee experience tips.