The Most Important Features of Effective Employee Engagement Tools

Fortunately, there are tools that can help organizations better manage and measure employee engagement, ensuring that they achieve results that align with their business goals.

Are you looking for tools that can help you tap into the power of employee engagement to improve your workplace culture and achieve better productivity and profitability outcomes? Here are the most important features to look for in employee engagement tools to ensure you choose one a tool that will meet your needs.

What Do Employee Engagement Tools Do, Exactly? 

Employee engagement tools are technology-driven solutions — software or platforms — designed to improve employee engagement, facilitate communication, nurture community, recognize good work, and more.

They take the friction out of the process of managing employee engagement, reducing the administrative burden, while also offering add-on benefits like communication platforms, tracking mechanisms, tips, and toolboxes for both managers and employees.

Effectively engaging employees using the right employee engagement tools can boost performance, productivity, and engagement levels. It’s important, of course, to choose the right employee engagement tools for the job.

Choosing the Right Employee Engagement Tool for the Job

Each business is unique — and their employees are also unique. Selecting the right employee engagement tool to meet both both your business’ and your employees’ needs is critical to ensure that engagement levels contribute to desired business objectives. Here are some of the key features that impact engagement levels and the overall success of your employee engagement initiatives.

User-Friendly Interface

If your employee engagement tools aren’t easy for employees to use, they won’t use them. It’s as simple as that. When the platform you select has an interface that is familiar and intuitive, it will be more widely adopted. Think of the friendly feel of the social media sites that many people are accustomed to using. That’s the kind of interface and ease of use you should be looking for.

Company-Wide Communication Capabilities

Whether your company is located in a single building or in multiple locations around the world, the ability to communicate company-wide with ease is critical. Communication helps keep employees connected and helps them feel valued. The platform you select should have the ability for company-wide distribution to ensure that everybody is included and everyone is informed.

Ability to Personalize Experiences

Employees are different — and their needs and interests are different. Your platform needs to accommodate those differences. Personalized experiences translate into employees feeling valued. When a company cares enough about its individual employees to tailor communications and programs to meet individual needs, employees feel valued.

Flexible Ways to Recognize and Celebrate Employees

While one employee might be overjoyed to be recognized at a company event, another might prefer more personal and private recognition. Having a variety of flexible ways to recognize and celebrate employees means that you can thoughtfully accommodate individual preferences.

There are a wide range of ways you might want to recognize and celebrate employees: from service anniversaries to birthday celebrations, from kudos for team accomplishments to individual recognition, from recognizing employees who live the brand values to rewarding those who achieve sales goals. Sometimes you’ll want to have public celebrations; sometimes private. Sometimes you’ll want to plan ahead; other times you’ll want to be able to recognize employees in the spur of the moment.

That kind of flexibility is critical when considering a software platform to meet a wide array of needs and preferences.

Real-Time Feedback and Reporting

How are we doing? It’s a question that organizational leaders and managers should be asking frequently. When they do they want answers — now. Having reporting tools available on dashboards that can be easily accessed 24/7 ensures that your leaders can make budget decisions quickly, monitor financial information for payroll and budgeting, stay on top of recognition activities, and monitor rewards that have been claimed or that remain unclaimed.

Employee Insights and Surveys

Collecting employee sentiment and addressing employee feedback gives organizations the insights needed to shape their people strategies. Staying on top of what employees are thinking and how engaged they are can help create a thriving culture where employees know that they’re being heard and that their feedback is contributing to business decisions and driving real results.

A Trusted Solution Provided to Support Implementation

Your vendor partner should stay with you every step of the way as you implement your employee engagement solution. An experienced provider will create a strategic roadmap that aligns the employee engagement strategy to business objectives. They’ll conduct discovery and stakeholder analysis to help prepare a program launch that includes a robust communication plan and platform training.

And they’ll stay with you after training. Support shouldn’t stop on launch day — it should continue with ongoing strategic guidance, day-to-day management, and technical support.

Solutions That Support Engagement Strategies

Employee engagement is critical in today’s volatile employment environment. Organizations need top talent to be committed, productive, and loyal. The right support solution will strengthen your engagement strategy to help ensure that you’re maximizing the talent that you have — and keep them on board.