Best Practices for Optimizing HR Employee Engagement Platforms

Your employees are the biggest asset in any organization. To excel, your team must be engaged in their work in order to perform at a high level. The key to fostering engagement and productivity is designing, managing, and scaling high-level employee experience programs. And using HR employee engagement platforms helps you measure and elevate that employee experience.

What are HR employee engagement platforms?

An employee engagement platform is software that organizations use to evaluate employee experience and job satisfaction. Employee engagement platforms help measure whether team members are really immersed in their work — engagement is a key metric for performance, productivity, and profitability.

An employee engagement platform helps highlight the state of employee engagement, such as:

• Sense of feeling valued
• Likelihood to recommend the organization for employment
• Organizational pride
• Commitment (environment encourages career longevity)
• Enthusiasm
• Sense of accomplishment

An effective employee engagement platform also helps you track and analyze the results over the employee lifecycle to optimize actions that improve the total employee experience and aid in performance management. They help you identify gaps so HR & employee experience teams can deploy programs to evolve the company culture and create customized action plans.

Measure key employee moments

The people in your organization can go through a range of emotions and attitudes about your company and the work they are doing throughout their tenure. To get the full picture, a best practice is to measure their feelings at each of these stages, or moments:

• Talent acquisition
• Onboarding
• Training
• Development
• Career milestones
• Offboarding
• Separation

When you measure these moments, you get a better sense of how your workforce perceives their work and your organization. Tracking these changes at significant stages can help you craft strategic priorities in improving the employee experience. Employee engagement software can help you analyze that feedback, relate it to specific lifecycle stages, and drill down to demographic and work-related differences in real time.

Save time through automation

The best employee engagement software can automate much of the process to capture, analyze, and deliver relevant feedback for employee experience. Real-time feedback can help staff and managers take more timely action to resolve pending issues.

Additionally, individual performance data can be measured against benchmarks to surface opportunities for coaching and development.

Best practices for HR employee engagement platforms

The most effective way to monitor and measure employee experience is to embed feedback channels into every stage of the employee lifecycle. Use surveys for real-time opinions and sentiment with an employee engagement platform right from the start. 

Here are the three key habits that make employee experience leaders stand out: 

1. They capture timely data, and do so using a diverse set of direct and indirect signals.

2. They do not shy away from difficult topics.

3. They place employee experience at the heart of their overall strategy for success and growth.

Make it easy to gather timely data

Employee experience leaders are more successful in gathering timely data because they survey their employees more often. 

• 43.3% of leaders surveyed employees two to four times a year
• 26.8% of leaders surveyed employees monthly
• 18.1% of leaders surveyed employees weekly or more frequently

From simple surveys to more detailed open-ended queries, the easier you make it for your employees to participate, the more likely they are to provide valuable and relevant employee feedback.

Medallia employee engagement software makes it easy to capture data using video, audio, or text responses across mobile devices, apps, or employee portals to help get relevant feedback in the moment. Querying teams at milestones in their career journey, key moments in projects, or when there is a change in the work environment can reveal important insights.

A key to improving the employee experience is soliciting open and honest feedback, demonstrating a commitment to the process, and acting based on suggestions. This creates a more collaborative environment where teams feel invested in the organization and can drive innovation.

Tackle difficult topics when gathering feedback

Leaders in employee experience proactively include difficult or sensitive topics within their feedback surveys and other methods, including questions surrounding work-life balance, diversity, inclusion, or fair treatment. Leaders include these sensitive questions within their surveys and other feedback methods.

To ensure that you are improving employee engagement, creating a positive relationship between employees and your company, prioritize the inclusion of rapidly changing and sensitive topics when conducting feedback. 

Make employee experience a core organizational task

Companies who lead the way in employee experience prioritize improving overall employee experience and employee engagement as a core business strategy. This is because they recognize that without a healthy culture and thriving employees, the entire company will be unable to succeed. 

Executives who are invested in employee retention and creating a positive employee experience make engagement initiatives a company-wide, collaborative effort. These leaders are more likely to include client-facing roles like customer service, sales, and marketing teams into the greater conversation for improving the company’s culture. 

Implement a consistent approach

A commitment to building a culture that values employees requires you to be consistent in your approach and measurement. That said, measuring the key moments in employee lifecycles and analyzing the data can be difficult to do when you are gathering feedback in both structured form (such as surveys and help desk tickets) and unstructured (such as open-ended queries, chat, or video).

AI-powered analytics can help discern actionable feedback from large data sets. Text analytics can reveal themes and patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. These patterns can be the key to unlocking gaps in employee experience or to learn what actions led to positive or negative results in your employee experience programs.

Share feedback results

The most effective employee engagement programs consist of not only collecting feedback but also sharing it with employees. This helps create a culture of transparency and shows that you are invested in the results of your surveys.

It can be tempting to hide poor reports or problems that are uncovered, but these can be opportunities to show your willingness to listen and adapt, especially when you can respond quickly.

Ensure a rapid response

When problems are identified that need action, a prompt response helps demonstrate commitment to the team, especially when patterns emerge. For example, when multiple employees mention a poor wireless connection in meeting areas or network slowdowns at peak times, acknowledging and addressing the problem promptly can turn a negative into a positive.

When you get timely, relevant feedback about issues that impact employee or customer satisfaction and you act on it, it shows you care and take feedback seriously.

Creating a positive employee experience

The employee engagement platform you use, the data you collect, and what you do with the data will help determine your effectiveness at driving a positive employee experience. Achieving this starts with recognizing employee experience as a core business strategy and then staying consistent with collecting feedback and implementing changes throughout the employee lifecycle.

Ready to learn more about improving your employee experience? Check out Medallia’s Definitive Guide to Employee Experience.