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What matters most when choosing an engagement platform?
Leith Mansour
January 17, 2023
5
Minutes
The right employee engagement platform helps you understand how your employees feel about work and take practical steps to make their experiences more positive. When you get this right, you enjoy much lower turnover, stress, and burnout, and much more job satisfaction, productivity and engagement. You create a culture that unlocks everyone’s best.
But all this depends on you choosing the right employee engagement tool – and there are plenty of options. Keeping reading for the 14 priorities we think are most urgent.
Annual surveys have profound limitations. They take too long, both for employees to answer and for you to analyse. They’re so sporadic and infrequent that they don’t empower employees to talk about, or HR to understand, the day-to-day things that really matter. It becomes nearly impossible to identify true underlying issues.
The upshot is, annual surveys aren’t an effective way to drive change, from the perspective of both the business and your people. Pulse surveys are a much stronger alternative, sending short bursts of regular questions across the workforce all year long.
Most survey solutions deliver either quantitative or qualitative employee insights. The problem is, both methods have limitations that hurt effectiveness:
• The mainstay of traditional surveys, qualitative data offers depth. But this depth comes at a price: it demands impossible HR muscle to analyse.
• Quantitative data offers the opposite. It’s much easier and faster to analyse. But it lacks the depth to illuminate nuanced issues.
The answer is an employee engagement platform that accommodates both. Winningtemp achieves this through our conversation portal, which encourages employees to give qualitative context to their quantitative survey feedback and chat directly with their manager. Anonymously.
Employee surveys are valuable when they uncover deep insights about your people’s experiences at work. But those insights hinge on employees being willing to share deep insights. Anonymity is the price of this honesty. Anonymity is crucial and in our product you can always trust that no one can see how you answered the temperature questions.
Did you know that Winningtemp also is ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certified? This means that your data is safe, and that we comply with rigorous best practice standards (developed by the best and brightest information security experts) to protect your information and keep your data private 🎉
Employee engagement has long had a reputation for being ‘fluffy’. That couldn’t (or shouldn’t!) be further from the truth. Success is a science – and performance can be reverse-engineered.
The employee engagement platform you choose should take this science as its foundation so you can trust its output. Or risk surveys becoming a vanity project. Winningtemp’s survey methodology, for instance, is based on more than 600 international research studies. Learn more in this guide.
The engagement questions you ask should be validated by scientists – but they can’t be ‘set and forget’. Organisations are in a constant state of transition. If your question set is static, it’s as unagile as annual surveys.
Rather, a great employee engagement platform should use AI to optimise how questions rotate depending on employees’ responses. For example, to unearth more detail about a recent response and gather follow-up data to show trends over time. This means question sets are automated but personalised: employees get different questions at different times, to suit their situation.
A great engagement platform should empower you to send custom surveys to different parts of your workforce – like millennials, for example, or new hires. Nuanced segmentation like this allows you to uncover trends and tackle issues within different demographics.
Better engagement data is still just data. To build engagement across the business, the right platform should pull data into compelling visual dashboards, in real-time. Dashboards should also be personalised to different stakeholders, so employees, managers and HR all see info that’s relevant and useful to them.
A great employee engagement platform should make deep, complex analysis feel simple.
Winningtemp, for example, analyses data constantly to show you real-time temperature scores against several categories (that according to science, matter the most for employee engagement). Our platform has a host of features to make data meaningful, like automatic temperature analysis, heatmaps, eNPS analysis, and trend analysis. Plus managers don’t just get data—they get easy-to-understand Insights, split into Strengths, Improvements, and Predictions.
The platform you choose should facilitate easy benchmarking. Internally, you should be able to quickly compare results between different locations, departments, and subdivisions. That way, you can understand unique strengths and challenges, provide extra support, and scale bright spots by empowering teams to learn from one another.
Externally, you should be able to see at a glance how your temperature scores stack up to other industries. What does an Autonomy score of 5.5 really mean? The answer could be radically different depending on your peers’ scores.
Gathering data is only the first phase of effective employee experience management. By itself, gathering data doesn’t achieve anything. Rather, it’s all about what you do with your data.
That’s where the right employee engagement software really comes into its own. Using Winningtemp, for instance, managers can quickly create Actions (based on suggestions or adding their own) to address challenges in their team, and the system automates the workflow. A great platform makes it easy for managers and leaders to act on your engagement data, with intelligent suggestions and automated workflows.
Peer-to-peer recognition is integral to strengthening workplace bonds, building team spirit, and creating a culture where everyone feels valued. (That's why why Deloitte finds that employee engagement, productivity, and performance are 14% higher in organisations with a culture of recognition — driving a 2% increase in margins.)
Look for a platform that makes peer-to-peer praise simple, so employees can instantly send positive messages to colleagues.
Your platform has to be used to be useful. Low adoption is a major barrier to success – and your people won’t thank you for another tool that complicates their day. The right software must be intuitive and streamlined for employees.
Global pharmaceutical leader Bayer have a 90% employee participation rate with Winningtemp, for instance, thanks to our super engaging interface (including our popular emoji scale) and mobile app option.
Investing into employee engagement software isn’t just about gathering feedback. If it were, a basic standalone survey tool would suffice. But it doesn’t – because “employee listening” isn’t the point. The point is empowerment.
As Harvard Business Review put it, “empowered employees are more likely to be powerful, confident individuals, who are committed to meaningful goals and demonstrate initiative and creativity to achieve them.”
Self-leadership is a crucial prong of empowerment, giving your people the autonomy to enact change. With Winningtemp, employees are much more involved than just sharing feedback. Each employee also has a dashboard with a constant stream of insights and science-backed guidance to encourage individual ownership for change.
1:1s are a major mechanism underpinning the manager-report relationship. Great 1:1s foster great relationships, improve productivity and boost engagement.
But 1:1s often don’t fulfil their potential. They’re often seen as a time-consuming burden; more of a checklist activity than a true value driver. Look for employee engagement software that makes 1:1s better for both sides, to unleash the potential of this largely-untapped management tool.
For example, Winningtemp offers structured templates for both sides to prepare, full digital documentation with verification on both sides, and follow-ups to track effectiveness.
This list so far adds up to one thing: an employee engagement platform that delivers true impact. The right provider will have a thriving list of happy customers enjoying fantastic results. Like ours.
On average, organisations who've been using Winningtemp for more than one year have:
• Lowered employee turnover
• Reduced negative workplace stress
• Boosted workplace satisfaction
• Increased job satisfaction
Leith Mansour is a Sales Manager at Winningtemp who joined the company in 2019 as an SDR. He became an Account Manager and then a Team Lead, before moving into his current role. Leith holds a bachelor's degree in Economics and believes it’s important (now more than ever) to listen and hear what employees have to say in order to keep them at their current workplace. He feels it is the responsibility of a manager to do everything in their power to make that happen. Leith is also passionate about making an impact and he believes that tools like Winningtemp can help improve the work environment, therefore driving positive change in the lives of employees.
If you are interested in finding out more about what Winningtemp can offer your organisation get in contact with our sales team.
