If employee engagement and experience is one of the top priorities for your organization, you would have definitely come across the rising trend of employee pulse surveys. 

Do you want to gauge the pulse and sentiment of your workforce at regular intervals, take real-time action and drive business success? 

If you are nodding yes to these statements, you should leverage an employee pulse survey tool for large scale impact.

Through the course of the article, we will cover all aspects of the employee pulse survey tool and answer any questions that you may have.

What is an Employee Pulse Survey Tool?

By definition, an employee pulse survey tool is a technological intervention that enables organizations to gauge the pulse and sentiments of their workforce in a strategic and process driven manner. The objective is to leverage the potential of technology and platform expertise and reduce manual labour involved in capturing employee opinion. 

As a people manager focused on building an empowering culture, you should see an employee pulse survey tool as something that goes beyond just rolling out questions and capturing responses. 

An employee pulse survey goes beyond this to help you set the right tone, ensure scientific relevance for the questions and conversations, augment operational efficiency and completion rate and finally, help you to understand and use pulse survey results to drive business performance. 

Why do you need an Employee Pulse Survey Tool?

Now that you have a better understanding of what an employee pulse survey tool is, it’s time to explore how adopting one for your organization can make a big difference. 

On a macro level, an employee pulse survey tool can relieve you from manually maintaining survey records and sending out forms at very short intervals. Without such a tool, conducting pulse surveys on a regular, sometimes daily basis, can be an administrative nightmare. 

Fortunately, the right tool can automate a great deal of the work and bring in scientific basis for all the questions you send while maintaining a history of all the previous pulse surveys for your easy reference in the future.

Therefore, with an employee pulse survey tool, you can effectively carry out pulse surveys and gauge key trends, while you focus on translating the AI driven people insights into action and empowering your workforce. 

In addition, an employee pulse survey tool can help you to:

1. Conduct pulse surveys consistently and seamlessly

Maintain a timeline and consistency to conduct the pulse survey. Without such an employee pulse survey tool, chances are business as usual will take over and after a few times, the rhythm of conducting the survey will be lost. Thus, the right tool can help you eliminate such obstacles and create a culture of regular survey, continuous feedback and communication.  

An employee pulse survey tool can help you maintain a pre-decided cadence and remove any slippages in survey roll out due to choked bandwidth. Invariably, a regular process will improve participation over time as employees will start seeing it as a part of experience building, rather than simply a tick in the box. 

2. Get real time insights

An employee pulse survey tool is not only meant to gather responses, but will also enable you to translate the responses to generate important insights. Your pulse survey tool can help you gauge key trends on different aspects of employee engagement and experience such as job and manager satisfaction, wellbeing etc in real time. 

Armed with such information, you can bridge risks in real time before they turn into challenges and lead to voluntary attrition, lower levels of productivity and employee disengagement.

3. Take action

Finally, a holistic tool, like SuperBeings, goes a step beyond to help fast growing organizations with heatmaps and AI driven recommendations. These interventions can help HR leaders and line managers to take the right action with guided templates and eliminate any roadblocks to a seamless experience. 

Not only can you benefit from potential actions, but your managers can also leverage competent conversation frameworks and templates, provided by the tool. Such templates can help facilitate better communication between your employees and managers, without the need to invest in extensive coaching. Invariably, this will lead to continuous improvement in performance and drive business growth. 

Not only that, you can customize your manager development program based on the feedback given by your employees by linking employee feedback with learning recommendations. Thus, bridging the gap between feedback and development.

Top features of an Employee Pulse Survey Tool

If you have reached this section, you must be convinced that adopting an employee pulse survey tool will make a business case for your organization. To make an informed choice about the right tool, there are a few features that you must look out for. This will help you from getting overwhelmed when an internet search throws numerous results for you to choose from. 

Based on you needs and scope, a few features that you must check include:

1. Custom integrations

The objective of adopting any engagement tool is to improve employee experience. However, if you expect your employees to toggle between different tools for work and then an additional one to share their opinion, chances are you will not achieve productivity or pulse. On one hand, it will be a waste of time and bandwidth; while on the other, the inertia of toggling will reduce participation. 

Therefore, an effective employee pulse survey tool will come with a feature of custom integrations. This suggests that you will be able to offer your team members the ability to share their opinions and sentiments from within the tools you commonly use for communication and collaboration. For instance, SuperBeings provides integrations with some of the most used tools like Slack, MS Teams, Gchat etc. that scaling organizations generally leverage. 

Organizations can simply integrate the tool to their existing platform and encourage their team members to participate. While there is no inertia of toggling, familiarity to existing tools will also increase participation. 

2. Ability to scale

If your organization is growing fast, you are likely to grow from end to end in terms of your team size. As you increase your scope of operations and reach, you will invariably onboard more people. Therefore, the right tool for you would be the one that can support your journey to scale. There are several facets here that you need to consider. 

First, the tool should be able to accommodate more and more employees, with incrementally increasing the cost. It should have the capacity and the resources to support a growing team. This does not only include the technological strength and resources, but ongoing support as well. If you onboard a new person, your employee pulse survey tool should be able to help them navigate the process with knowledge resources or other support that they might need. 

Since the focus of adopting such a tool is to elevate employee experience, if you keep switching tools, the entire process will be self defeating. Therefore, a key feature to look out for is whether or not the tool will be able to facilitate your ambitions to scale.  

3. Customizable templates or Custom survey

To effectively conduct the survey, it is important to have the right questions in place. An employee pulse survey tool will help you achieve the same as well. It can help you with a bank of questions that you can leverage or customize, based on your needs. SuperBeings even helps you to build your own custom pulse and choose frequency, questions, integrations that reflect your unique specific need.

The major objective of this feature is that such a tool can give you a starting point for the right questions to ensure that they are relevant from a pulse survey perspective. 

Since it is a more regular affair than normal engagement surveys, you need to make sure that the questions are limited, maybe to one a day, are self-explanatory and do not require a lot of effort for answering. An employee pulse survey tool can help you accelerate your question preparation journey and also help with a grading template.  

4. Comprehensive parameters and framework

Finally, a feature that you must be on the lookout for, for your employee pulse survey tool is a focus on comprehensive parameters and framework. You simply cannot focus just on wellbeing or satisfaction. Your focus should be all encompassing. This is where a tool like SuperBeings can help you. 

You can leverage its out of the box pulse survey framework based on centuries of employee engagement research. It caters to 40+ organizational parameters that most HR leaders and line managers consider critical for employee success and organizational health. This framework and parameters can help you create a roadmap to drive an empowering employee experience. 

Choose the Right Tool

As we come to the end of this article, it is important to note that an employee pulse survey tool has great potential to fuel the growth for your growing organization. The right tool can help in not only gathering employee pulse, but also manage employee performance, facilitate goal alignment and leverage daily feedback to turn strategy to results. 

If you make the right choice, an employee pulse survey tool can enable you to stay on top of all employee trends, needs and expectations to reduce turnover, promote productivity and build a thriving culture. 

For fast growing organizations, employee performance is critical for success. However, simply expecting employees to perform well and keep improving as they spend more time in the organization may not be the best way forward. If you believe that the performance of your team members will improve without any interventions, you need to realign your focus. 

Invariably, HR leaders and line managers need to double down on employee performance review, strategic goal setting, training and development and much more to foster a high performance culture. Undoubtedly, employee performance review software is extremely important for better performance whether you are scaling up or a unicorn already.

Leaders from many fast growing organizations believe that holistic, consistent and continuous performance review is critical for sustained growth and success. Thus, through the course of this article, we will help you understand how an employee performance review software can bring you one step closer to better performance and the various other benefits it brings along. 

Decoding Employee Performance Review Software

Amongst the various components of employee development and performance, performance review is very important. On a macro level, employee performance review involves taking a stock of different aspects of an employee’s performance, its impact, expectations, areas of development, challenges and way forward. A review is generally integral to ensure an alignment between employee and organization expectations and goals. 

While employee performance review is likely to be an established practice for your organization, chances are you follow an annual approach. As more frequent reviews require greater efforts, bandwidth and commitment, most fast growing organizations that have diverse priorities tend to stick to an annual cadence. However, annual reviews often have limited impact for a variety of reasons. 

First, addressing performance challenges at the end of the year gives no room to employees to improve, leading to a decline in motivation. 

Second, they are unable to create impact for the organization as objectives and OKRs might change in the next year, and these reviews might lose effectiveness and relevance. 

However, that’s where employee performance review software comes in to help you mitigate the challenges of annual reviews. (To learn more about the perks of Continuous Performance Management, read this)

An employee performance review software seeks to augment the effectiveness and the efficacy of the entire review process. By offering customized reviews, automated roll out and follow-ups among other features, an employee performance review software can help you gather feedback, compare performance, generate insights and formulate next steps in a strategic manner. 

Purpose of using an Employee Performance Review Software

You must be wondering whether or not employee performance review software is actually worth the hype. Well, to begin with the right software can help you address various aspects of employee performance that might be missed out during a manual process. 

If you adopt an employee performance review software, the entire process will feel less like a burden and more like a business asset. It can help you directly impact the bottom line by addressing performance gaps and focusing your efforts to make the most of your workforce. With an employee performance review software, you can ensure the following:

1. Continuous review

You no longer have to wait till the end of the year to identify and address any gaps in employee performance. It can enable you to continuously monitor and review progress on goals and objectives and acknowledge performance challenges as soon as they surface. 

2. 360 degree review

An employee performance review software will provide you with the capabilities to review and evaluate all aspects of an employee’s performance and contribution. On the one hand, you can review and learn about their performance and progress on OKRs beyond their KRAs to gauge their overall impact and contribution to the organization. 

On the other hand, you get an insight into what others in the organization think about the performance of any particular team member. Invariably, it can help you get a big picture about employee performance, their attitude and its organizational impact beyond profits. 

3. Performance management

If you are passionate about creating an empowering culture for employee development, an employee performance review software is an important investment. In addition to helping you review the performance of your workforce, you can leverage the software to identify the way forward to enable your employees to take the right steps with the best opportunities and resources to accelerate their professional growth. You can easily manage their performance to facilitate organizational and individual success. 

Employee Performance Review Software: Top 5 Benefits

With an understanding of the purpose of employee performance review software, you must explore the top benefits that the same can bring to you. Here is a quick snapshot of the top advantages you can reap:

1. Uniform and standard approach

The right software can enable you to adopt a uniform and standardized approach to performance review. While you can customize review templates for each employee or team, the process can be uniform and bias free. Leverage AI driven recommendations to ensure that insights on performance of each employee are uniform and consistent. 

2. Easier documentation and record keeping

You can leverage an employee performance review software to bid farewell to large spreadsheets and documents for keeping records. As your employee base gets bigger and the workforce spends more and more years, managing the documentation and records will be a mammoth task. 

However, the software can capture all the records in one place and make it available to you with one click. You no longer have to bear the burden of year on year record maintenance for performance improvement. Furthermore, the platform can enable you to undertake a comparative analysis on employee performance seamlessly. 

3. Automated reporting

Benefit from the availability of automated reporting. You can relieve yourself from the burden of collating and calibrating responses to create visually appealing reports for generating insights. Employee performance review software can do the same for you and help you identify what’s working in favor of the organization and what is not.  

4. Performance improvement

Leverage the employee performance review software as a means to facilitate performance improvement. It can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of each employee and delegate work and developmental opportunities accordingly. 

Consistent and timely feedback with regular reviews using the software can help your employees perform better over time. Furthermore, regular interventions can enable you to focus on one performance area at a time and give your team members the space and opportunity to develop the same before moving onto the next one. 

5. Improved productivity

Finally, the right performance review software will help you set goals and OKRs for your team members. Furthermore, it will enable you to track and monitor progress against these goals and OKRs in real time. 

On one hand, it can act as a source of motivation for employees to constantly perform well to achieve their goals, thereby increasing productivity. On the other hand, it can provide you with real time gaps in performance to spearhead interventions as required. 

Software Checklist to Make the Right Choice

In this last section, we have created a quick checklist that you can use to ensure that the employee performance review software that you choose will help you augment your performance levels.

• Does it provide an intuitive interface with a modern look that can attract the attention of your employees?
• Does it have a pleasant user experience to facilitate a higher rate of completion?
• Is there a possibility to customize integrations with your existing tools to increase participation?
• Does it offer automation capabilities to ensure there is no lag and all employees are covered without manual intervention?
• Does it offer comprehensive reporting and data insights for you and your managers to identify challenges to high performance?
• Can it help you managers in creating a culture of continuous performance improvement with AI driven templates to guided 1:1 conversations
• Does it provide you with insights and industry best practices to address challenges?
• What are the key parameters that the software captures with respect to employee performance?
• Does it suit your budget and has the capacity to support your scale up needs?
• Can it help you set effective OKRs and measure and track progress against them?
  

If you are looking for an employee performance review software that caters to all the above points and can help you create a high performance culture, you should explore partnership options with SuperBeings. Leverage the unique capabilities of SuperBeings to augment business performance by connecting OKRs, Continuous Performance Management, Employee Engagement, and Manager Development in one unified solution.

Book a free demo today!

Are you struggling with streamlining all your employee engagement efforts? 

If yes, then chances are that you are trying to achieve everything manually and not leveraging the best employee engagement software available in the market today. 

These software support cutting-edge features like pulse surveys, insights and action plan, guided templates, and much more to create a culture of high level of engagement and belongingness. However, you need to choose the right one to ensure maximum value for your organization.

In this article, we have compared the price, features and suitability of 12 best employee engagement solutions as well as the key features you must look for while investing in any such platform to ensure maximum ROI. 

How to choose the best employee engagement software?

Choosing the best employee engagement software for your organization can go a long way into augmenting your engagement quotient. Before we jump onto discussing the top 12 platforms you can choose from, let’s explore a few best practices to make the right choice. You can get a detailed understanding of the same from our article on 12 steps to choose the best employee engagement software. 

1. Be clear on what you need. Specify your requirements before you start scouting the market.
2. Check out the basic features as well as integrations available to gauge whether or not they suffice your primary requirements.
3. Explore whether or not there is an option to suit your scale up needs as a fast growing organization.
4. Enquire if a trial version or free option for a short time is available to test out the solution before a long-term commitment.
5. Understand the intellectual support and user interface offered before technical features.
6. Check out the pricing to see whether it fits in your budget or not. 

12 best employee engagement software for fast growing organizations

Here are a few of the best employee engagement software, currently available in the market to take your engagement quotient to the next level: 

1. SuperBeings

Contemporary employee engagement software for fast growing organizations to facilitate engagement, performance management, OKR based goal management and manager development 

Key features

• Single 3-minute assessment free for all for personality based engagement efforts
• 30+ research backed survey templates to choose from on various organizational parameters
• Analyze company health with real-time & monthly reports and filterable heatmaps
• NLP backed sentiment analysis and personality based communication tips to facilitate engagement
• Enjoy flexible anonymity for survey responses and integrate engagement and daily pulse survey questions with existing collaboration tools (MS Teams, Slack, Gchat etc) 

Pros

• Ability to control EX with intelligent alerts to prevent survey fatigue
• Nudge managers on chat tools to promote conversations
• Organizational culture analysis and report for leaders
• Guided 1:1s with talking points on what to share, questions to ask and actions to do
• Great customization flexibility, in-depth survey analysis and AI powered actionable recommendations for managers

Cons

• Mobile app is not yet available
• Employee view of the scores is not yet supported

Pricing:

SuperBeings offers a modular pricing for different needs. The Engage model is priced at $2.00 per user per month, ideal for scaling organization. SuperBeings offers a 21 day free trial

2. Glint

People success platform by LinkedIn which focuses on employee engagement using real time people data ideal for teams of any size

Key features

• Personalized insights and AI-powered recommendations for action to HR teams, leaders, and managers
• Integrations such Workday, ADP, UKG, and Namely for automatic collection and analysis of data 
• Interactive dashboards display a holistic breakdown of an entire organization's health

Pros

• Ability to analyze engagement on metrics such as weekly collaboration hours, workweek span, and weekly 1:1 time with managers
• Glint’s AI-for-HR: Generate real-time alerts for employee populations that are at-risk for increased attrition, decreased performance, or other KPI changes
• Glint's Narrative Intelligence: Most advanced natural language processing (NLP) to synthesize open-ended feedback 

Cons

• Inability to get access to past survey responses
• All responses are erased if you retake a survey
• Survey responses are not integrated with a company's primary HR platform.

Pricing:

The pricing and plans are not available in the public domain. To know about packs and pricing, you could always get in touch with the Glint team. A demo for this employee engagement software is available to get a closer understanding of the product.

3. Culture Amp

Employee engagement solution focused on engagement, employee development and performance management ideal for teams with 25+ team members

Key features

• 30+ science-backed and customizable survey templates
• Survey focus agent to highlight areas of high impact for action
• Ready to implement action plans backed by industry benchmarks 

Pros

• Advance algorithms combining engagement and performance data to predict turnover
• Customized and intuitive reporting for managers aligning individual and company performance
• Powerful analytics to draw relationship between performance and engagement

Cons

• Integrations could be better and more expansive
• Admin functionality is not robust

Pricing:

You can ask for pricing and plans depending on your team size. The self-starter plan is suited for 25-200 employees followed by the standard plan for 201-999 employees and the enterprise plan for 1000+ employees. Furthermore, the plans differ on the functionalities you need. Culture Amp doesn’t offer a free trial

4. Engagedly

Employee engagement, performance management and performance review platform leveraging recognition, gamification ideal for medium sized organizations

Key features

• Surveys, goal-setting module, badges and social platform
• Gamification-based points, badges, and leaderboard for active engagement
• Ability to praise team members with rewards and gift cards

Pros

• Supports remote work collaboration and engagement
• Increased communication with social platform, bulletin board feature, and goals tool 
• Ability to manage everything from an integrated dashboard with customizable templates

Cons

• Can be overwhelming for a first time user
• Lack of live chat function for support

Pricing:

The starting annual agreement for Engagedly, employee engagement software, is $5,000. There is availability of a free trial

5. Officevibe

Employee engagement software with 10 metrics of employee engagement ideal for teams of all sizes with free capabilities for teams of 1-10 members 

Key features

• Ability to measure 10 key metrics and 26 sub-metrics of engagement endorsed by Deloitte, Gallup, Aon, and more
• Smart algorithm that sends relevant questions without being repetitive
• Anonymous communication channel for honest employee feedback

Pros

• Freemium and paid plan
• Powerful reporting with anonymous answers aggregated and then converted into scores
• Ability to look back at engagement metrics from previous employee surveys for a simple view of trends over time

Cons

• UX could be better, difficult to navigate
• Lack of depth and variety in the questions

Pricing:

Officevibe is free for teams of up to 10 members. Beyond that, the essential tier is priced at $5.00 per month per user and the pro tier is at $7.00 per month per user. In case of 500+ users, you can get in touch with their team. OfficeVibe offers a 14 day free trial 

6. TINYpulse

Employee engagement and feedback software for teams of all sizes to make employees feel heard, celebrated and valued

Key features

• Science-backed questions and 300+ survey templates
• Real time, safely anonymous feedback from employees
• Easy and effective recognition via Cheers for Peers functionality

Pros

• Find operational improvements and fill communication gaps
• Get suggestions for employees who haven't received recognition
• 10+ integrations to promote participation and ease of use

Cons

• Confusing user interface, especially for admin
• Some questions can be framed in a more meaningful manner

Pricing:

The pricing for TINYpulse can be requested on demand by filling up a quick form sharing the number of employees. TINYpulse offers a free demo with a product expert

7. Lattice

Employee performance and engagement software leveraging surveys, pulse and eNPS ideal for small and large enterprises

Key features

• Ability to observe how new initiatives and changes impact the employee experience with pulse surveys
• Automated requesting, tracking, and measuring onboarding and exit survey feedback
• Deep-dive engagement surveys with actionable insights

Pros

• Ability to gauge eNPS and identify top performers and promoters
• Expert-built survey templates and cohort analysis and reporting

Cons

• Non-intuitive interface
• Unsatisfactory analysis on pulse surveys

Pricing:

Lattice pricing starts at $8.00 per user, per month and increases with additional products, if you want to add on the engagement product, that comes at an additional cost of $4.00 per user per month. 

8. Motivosity

Employee engagement and recognition software with eNPS, pulse surveys, and report dashboards great for remote teams

Key features

• Personal profiles, personality maps, and interest groups to know employees better
• Social feed, intuitive appreciation tool and last thanked widget to facilitate recognition
• User-friendly, searchable organization chart with HRIS and API integrations

Pros

• Anonymous eNPS and pulse surveys to understand team satisfaction
• Easily distribute automatic, consumable reports 
• Recognition based engagement

Cons

• Too many pop ups
• Presence of bugs and limited usability of many features

Pricing:

Motivosity has different pricing tiers for different licenses. The startup features come free of cost, then different features come at different costs starting at $2.00 per user per month. Motivosity offers a free product and platform demo

9. 15Five

Employee engagement software that combines performance management and manager effectiveness to create highly engaged employees, ideal for organizations of all sizes

Key features

• Easy-to-use surveys which can be completed on any device in just 6-minutes
• Science-backed assessment paired with an insights dashboard

Pros

• Support from executive advisors to create an employee engagement strategy
• Manager coaching to help drive engagement 

Cons

• Navigation can be a little confusing
• Need more detailed reporting and analytics capabilities

Pricing:

15Five’s pricing for the engagement platform is at $4.00 per user per month and other capabilities can be added on. 15Five offers a free trial for 14 days

10. peopleHum

Complete suite of tools to connect, collaborate, measure and optimize employee engagement for organizations of all sizes

Key features

• Ability to recognize teamwork and excellence on mobile, web, chatbot with company-wide visibility
• Make announcements effortlessly, and leave behind traditional memos
• Facilitate honest conversations with anonymous feedback

Pros

• Gamification for collaboration and interaction
• Quick and easy installation with multiple integrations
• Tech based reward system for better engagement

Cons

• Some aspects of UX/UI need improvement
• Some terms can be made easier to understand for first time users like NPS

Pricing:

The pricing starts at $2 per employee per month. peopleHum offers a free trial for 7 days 

11. Qualtrics

Experience management software focused on employee, customer, brand and product experience ideal for organizations of all sizes

Key features

• Pre-configured dashboards and results to deliver the right data to every leader 
• Pre-packaged expert content and surveys, to capture feedback and drive engagement
• 20+ filters to enable managers to identify engagement drivers from feedback
• 50+ survey templates designed by industry experts

Pros

• Spot themes and trends from feedback with sentiment and topic analysis with Text iQ
• Find relationships between employee engagement outcomes with powerful statistical analysis through Stats iQ
• Spot problems early with automated at-risk alerts for critical issues like attrition with Predict iQ

Cons

• Data analytics and results can be more effective
• Customization capabilities are limited

Pricing:

Qualtrics offers a free account with survey templates for fast growing organizations. 

12. Leapsome

People enablement platform with engagement, performance management, employee development and OKR functionalities ideal for organizations of all sizes

Key features

• Easy-to-set-up employee engagement surveys
• Customizable best-practice questionnaires developed by psychologists
• NLP and ML driven analysis and scoring of sentiment of written responses

Pros

• Ability to segment responses by tenure, team, or manager to help spot important correlations
• Option to choose survey frequency, rotation, anonymity threshold, duration
• Praise wall to create a culture of recognition

Cons

• Flows are not optimized and the UI is not very attractive
• More options for automated messages needed

Pricing:

Leapsome is priced at $6.00 per month per user. Leapsome offers a 14 day free trial 

Basic features of the best employee engagement software 

There are certain basic features that most employee engagement software will offer, which will be beneficial for you at the beginning of your engagement journey. Here is a quick snapshot of the top 5 basic features that you must look out for in an engagement tool —

1. Engagement reports and insights

First, it should be able to create reports based on employee feedback and surveys and create insights based on the data points. You would want the employee engagement software to go beyond just collecting the responses and sharing the results.

‍Ensure that you are able to receive reports which can be understood easily, preferably with visuals and data points to identify gaps and areas for improvement.

It should be able to provide you with key insights based on the responses on levels of engagement, drivers, challenges, etc. to help you reinvent the wheel wherever necessary. 

2. Pulse engagement surveys

Only relying on annual engagement surveys is a thing of the past. You cannot only gauge employee pulse once a year and ensure high levels of engagement and retention. Thus, a basic feature for any employee engagement software you need to look out for is its ability to conduct pulse surveys which are conducted at frequent intervals. This suggests that you should be able to control and customize the frequency at which you roll out different surveys based on the needs of your organization. 

3. Benchmarks

An employee engagement software generally comes with the feature of providing benchmarks based on your requirements. Depending on your industry and nature of the organization, your employee engagement tool should share insights on what the benchmarks look like and compare your performance to them. 

Put simply, absolute results may not be enough to gauge the engagement quotient for your organization. For instance, an e-NPS of 8 is good from a macro lens, however, if all your competitors and others in the industry have a score of 9, you need to relook at your engagement efforts. Thus, the employee engagement solution should share benchmarks and associated best practices. 

4. Anonymity 

If you want to get a true and honest opinion from your employees, you need to offer anonymity and confidentiality, especially around some aspects. Thus, another basic feature for any employee engagement software is its ability to offer anonymity for the employees. In recent times, there has been a rise of need based anonymity, where you can activate or deactivate anonymity for your employees based on the need. 

5. Pre-built customizable templates

If you are just starting out, you may have apprehensions about how to take the first step. Thus, a basic feature in employee engagement software is the presence of pre-built templates. The software should have multiple templates that you can choose from based on your needs. It must have questions that you can use and get an understanding of the market as well. Furthermore, you should look out for the software which allows high customization of its templates in terms of the number and wordings of the questions along with length, while maintaining the context. 

Advanced features of an employee engagement software

While these are some basic features, depending on your needs and the level of engagement maturity, you may want to check out some advanced features that are possessed by the best employee engagement tools out there. They can help you further capitalize on the benefits from the basic features to further add value to your engagement efforts.

1. Strengths based assessment

First, you may want to look out for an employee engagement software that can help you run personality tests for your team members to understand their strengths and overall personality with individual reports for all. This will enable your managers to facilitate more effective task allocation and conduct comprehensive 1:1 meetings by integrating personality insights. Such directed workflow allocation and conversations will significantly increase the engagement quotient for your employees and also enable interest based working. 

SuperBeings has an advanced free personality test to help you Know Your Team. Check it out

2. Sentiment analysis

While data points are integral to gauge engagement insights, they may not be able to give you a complete picture because there are sentiments that may not be captured quantitatively. Here, some of the best employee engagement software can help you with Natural Language Processing based sentiment analysis. This can enable you to decipher the sentiments behind the feedback which may not be apparent at the first glance, especially when it comes to open ended responses, etc. 

3. Guided templates for manager coaching

Effective employee engagement requires manager coaching to ensure meaningful conversations and feedback. An employee engagement tool with advanced features can help here as well. It can offer AI driven recommendations to managers based on insights and sentiment analysis to drive high impact conversations. Furthermore, it can help them prioritize top action for employees that can boost engagement and collaborate on it without losing track. The objective is to help managers have robust interactions with guided templates. 

4. Dynamic alerts

The best employee engagement software is not only able to tell you which employees are engaged or disengaged, it can help you predict and even curtail disengagement with the help of dynamic alerts and audience mapping. First, it can help you categorize your employees as different audiences based on different engagement efforts. For instance, you may want to send one survey for a specific department, while some efforts may be for those completing a professional milestone from different departments. A software can enable you to toggle between different cohorts. Furthermore, it can release real time alerts when more surveys than the saturation point are being sent to an employee which might lead to engagement fatigue, to help correct the action. 

5. Real time heatmaps

Finally, an advanced feature of employee engagement software that can take you over the top is real time heatmaps. Here, the idea is to receive actions to facilitate engagement in real time, without waiting for the end of the quarter, etc. It can help you look at data across cohorts or trends in real time in a visually understandable manner for quick and robust action. 

Wrapping Up

The importance of employee engagement can never be overstated, as it has been proven to reduce staff turnover, improve productivity and efficiency, improve customer service and retention, and deliver higher profits. The above mentioned employee engagement software can truly make a difference in your organization's work culture. 

However, you need to make sure you make the right choice, because while all the tools mentioned above are attractive and competent, your needs and expectations need to be the focus while choosing your employee engagement solution partner.

If interested, book a free demo with SuperBeings to see how we can help you drive engagement with ease

Suggested Reading

How to measure the ROI of your employee engagement software

As a fast growing organization, building the right company culture is integral to your business success. It practically impacts every part of your employee lifecycle. If you are able to create an empowering and positive company culture, you will be able to attract and retain top performers, promote employee satisfaction and lay the foundation for an engaged workforce. According to a study, 46% of job seekers cite company culture as very important when choosing to apply to a company.

Clearly, the right company culture has the potential to transform the people you attract, how they perform and how long they stay. This article will comprehensively discuss three major ways that fast growing organizations like yours can build a thriving culture. 

A) Identify, communicate and practice core values

Whether you are an HR professional or the founder of your company, the knowledge of core values of your organization is integral to building the right company culture. To put simply, core values are beliefs and principles that represent the mission and vision of the organization. They reflect the attributes that the company stands for. 

Why are core values important?

In most organizations, the onus of upholding the core values falls on the HR professionals. In case of new companies, the responsibility lies on the shoulder of the founder. If you have been entrusted with building the right company culture with core values, you must understand that core values play a critical role in: 

1. Setting priorities

Core values can effectively help your organization from getting distracted with multiple changing priorities in a dynamic market ecosystem. Having strong core values ensures that key priorities that align with the larger vision of the organization are given more importance over anything else.

2. Ensuring organization wide alignment

As your organization keeps growing, it will eventually become difficult to get everyone on the same page. Core values can help you create a culture where everyone inherently understands and personifies behavior that is directed towards a collective goal.

3. Facilitating decision making

If you are conflicted about a decision and unable to make a choice, reflecting on your company’s core values can facilitate the process. This can further help you create a culture of aligned decision making as upholding core values becomes the foundation for every decision.

How to leverage core values to build the right culture?

As a fast growing organization, you can seamlessly leverage your core values to build the right culture with a few simple steps:

1. Determine the values

Start the process by making a list of values that your company stands for. Most companies use attributes that they desire to be associated with their brand. Therefore, to identify your core values, undertake collective brainstorming to answer, ‘which are the values we would want our employees and customers to think of when they hear our name?’ Some of the top values that organizations have are integrity, innovation, customer success, passion, etc. 

2. Communicate and ingrain the values

Simply having a set of core values is not enough to create the right company culture. As the custodian of building a culture, the onus is on you to put those values into words, constantly communicate them across the organization and ingrain them in every team member. 

However, simply sending emails on the list of values will not drive the company culture. Explore different ways to facilitate the same. For instance, you can reward employees who best personify one or more values. 

3. Promote values aligned hiring

If you try to ingrain new values in employees who may hold conflicting personal values, you will find yourself rowing in two different directions. Therefore, it is best if you take care of the same before a new employee gets onboard. 

During the hiring phase, share what values your organization stands for and the company culture you promote. While during the interview, it is rare that someone will say they don’t align with your company values, however, deep conversations can help you get a fair idea. 

For instance, if your company culture promotes agility as a value, someone who likes to work in a very structured environment is unlikely to be the right fit. 

4. Ensure values driven decision making

Finally, make sure the values are not simply a tick in the box, but you manifest them in every company decision. The right company culture ascertains that every decision reflects the values the organization stands for. 

As an example, you can’t say that you have a company culture that promotes innovation, but in practice do not give your employees the freedom to reinvent processes and unleash their creativity. 

One of the top companies to follow the core values path to company culture has been Amazon. For instance, one of its core values has been boldness, and the company encourages its employees to take risks with an openness towards new ideas. 

Therefore, focusing on core values can help you create a company culture that is authentic and promotes an enriching employee experience. 

B) Follow the Competing Values Framework

As a people manager, you must have come across the Competing Values Framework or the CVF. According to this approach, the right company culture is based on a fair mix of four attributes or quadrants, including:

Innovate

This enables companies to be pioneers in their field to do something first and become market leaders. Creativity, risk taking, adaptability, etc. are key characteristics here.

Compete 

This attribute refers to a company’s ability to fight and successfully capture market share. Leaders here are generally focused on profitability, productivity and customer success to gain competitive advantage.

Control

This quadrant comes into play when companies are focused on driving standardized procedures and uniform structures. Timeliness, processes and a structured approach defined this attribute. 

Collaborate

Finally, the last attribute or quadrant pays attention to the art of working together to create shared value. This happens when everyone in the organization comes together to achieve a collective goal.

Decoding CVF for fast growing organizations

On the first glance, you might claim that your organization resonates most with one of these quadrants and that’s what defines your company culture. However, while one of these culture types might be predominant, if you look closely, you will see manifestations of all. Therefore, a fair balance of each of these is critical for the right company culture. You may not see all of them at once, and some precede or succeed the other, but all of them do co-exist. 

The lifecycle approach for CVF will closely resonate with the story of your scaling organization. You may start with an innovation driven approach to become a pioneer in what you are doing, focused on incremental transformation. Once you develop your proof of concept, you will focus on competing with others in the market to create your position and gain customer confidence. Gradually, you will incorporate some aspects of control to ensure there are standard processes and structures to minimize the chaos and promote seamless operations. All through the course, you will need to facilitate organization wide collaboration for meaningful impact. 

Implementing CVF for a thriving culture

If you are contemplating the next steps from here, we have got your covered. You may be wondering how to step up your focus on one of these quadrants to create the right culture. Well, you can count on your managers for that, as they are the main point of contact between employees and the leadership and bear the onus of driving the right company culture. 

As an HR professional, your focus should be on identifying and investing in the right training and skills building for line managers to drive your company culture in the right direction. Fortunately, CVF also shares a comprehensive list of manager competencies and behaviors for each of the quadrants. 

However, even before you start the process of manager development, you need to start with employee feedback. This suggests that you should gather employee feedback on a continuous basis to understand your position and progress on each quadrant. Furthermore, employee pulse can also help you understand the employee sentiment in terms of job, team, managers and workplace as a whole. You can then compare it with the key characteristics as mentioned in CVF. 

Here, collaboration with SuperBeings can become instrumental. On the one hand, you can implement pulse surveys to capture employee feedback on a daily basis and get a comprehensive view of their sentiment. On the other hand, you can leverage their AI driven guided conversation templates and other resources to develop manager effectiveness around areas suggested by their team members. With SuperBeings, you can create a high performance company culture based on a fair balance of the competing values framework by leveraging employee pulse and promoting manager development. 

C) Manifest covert values and attributes

The final path to building the right company culture is what most fast growing organizations resonate with. In the initial phases of your growth journey, you may not have a concrete list of values or attributes that you stand for. This suggests that there is no overt reflection of the values that drive your company culture. However, the absence of overt expression doesn’t necessarily mean that your organization lacks values. It only lacks an overt manifestation. 

To put it simply, there will be behaviors and thoughts that will be common to all your team members which will be manifested and visible in their decision and actions. However, what may be lacking will be a concrete expression of the same. That’s where a collaboration with a platform like SuperBeings can be beneficial. 

How to translate covert values into company culture?

A simple and straightforward approach with SuperBeings can help you transition from covert beliefs to create the right company culture.

1. Gauge employee pulse

Start by leveraging employee pulse surveys to gauge what your team members think. Questions on different aspects of their work, workplace, engagement, experience, etc., can help you capture their opinion on different aspects. A continuous approach can also help you study trends and understand changes and transitions in behavior. 

2. Analyze the response 

Once you capture the employee responses, analyze the pulse survey responses to identify attributes and values that are common to most. SuperBeings’ real time analytics and insights can help you get a clear picture about what drives your employees.

3. Evaluate the heatmaps

A unique capability that SuperBeings brings to you is the creation of heatmaps. Based on the AI driven analytics and experience in working with fast growing organizations, SuperBeings will share with you a heatmap on what the key driving behaviors are for your organizations and which values are most common to all your employees, manifested in their feedback. With these heatmaps, you will understand the company culture that is currently the foundation of your organization. 

4. Create or change the values

Depending on the larger vision and mission of your organization, you can decide whether or not the company culture identified by the heatmaps aligns with your long term goals. If the answer is positive, you can codify your core values to drive a thriving company culture. If not, you may want to pause and reflect on what your ideal company culture should look like and make efforts to inculcate the same all across. 

There is no competing view to the fact that the right company culture can help you drive high performance, promote customer success, capture market share and most importantly nurture a happy and engaged workforce.

As a fast growing organization, you have the flexibility and opportunity to create a futuristic and empowering company culture that promotes value and development for both the business and those who run it.

We've all been in the situation when we've left a meeting with no idea what to do next. You might have thought you were the only one who felt this way. But hang in there because, studies say that most employees don't get clear orders, while some managers say they're uncomfortable speaking with their employees in general. Improper communication can even lead to problems like delay in completion of tasks or can sometimes even lead to losing out when it comes to achieving the perfect outcome.

Table of contents

• What is workplace communication 
• Types of communication in the workplace 
• Importance of maintaining good workplace communication
• Challenges in workplace communication 
• Ways to improve communication at work
• Benefits of having effective workplace communication 
  

What is workplace communication?

Workplace communication is the verbal and nonverbal exchange of information and ideas between one person/group and another inside an organization. It includes emails, text messages, notes, and phone conversations, among other things. Effective communication is essential for getting the task done, as well as for developing trust and enhancing staff productivity.

Workers come from a variety of cultures and origins, and they may be accustomed to different norms. 

Effective communication is essential for increasing employee cooperation and avoiding missed deadlines or activities that could harm the organization. Communication gaps result from ineffective communication, which generates confusion, loses time, and diminishes productivity. For example, an employee will not be able to complete his/her task if not the required task is not communicated in the right manner. To achieve certain development goals, managers and lower-level employees must be able to communicate clearly and effectively with one another through verbal and nonverbal communication.

Information is absorbed in various ways by different people and so, in order to ensure that everyone understands what is being said, the communication approach must be simple, clear, and precise. Using visuals to illustrate important information can help people understand it better. 

The presence of trust in an organization will also make communication easier to employ. To build a tension-free workplace, coworkers must establish relationships. Messages should be delivered and received in their original format. Bullying, taking credit for someone else's work, and free-riding should all be avoided in the workplace if you want to have healthy relationships.

Types of communication in the workplace 

Each category that comes under the various types of communication, plays a crucial role in exchanging information with your coworkers and consumers. Furthermore, when you prioritize effective communication in your company, the natural result will be a positive, efficient, and productive working culture.

Understanding the major benefits and cons of each style of workplace communication can help you discover the appropriate balance of successful communication in your company. 

Here are the main types of communication at workplaces:

Oral Communication / Verbal Communication

The use of words to communicate information is known as verbal communication. Written and spoken words are both included in verbal communication. Oral communication, on the other hand, refers to the act of speaking words. 

However, these days, words are frequently used interchangeably, and you'll see verbal in many job adverts when referring to spoken communication. If you've worked for any length of time, you'll probably agree that talking to people is usually the greatest option, at least in the beginning if it's available. For example, if your boss needs you to create alterations in a given project, communicating where exactly the alterations are required verbally, could save time and bring out better results. Aside from being the quickest and most efficient means to convey your message, there are other advantages.

Non-Verbal Communication

When communicating, it's impossible to avoid using nonverbal clues. You will be offering them whether you intend to or not. The important thing is to make sure that the cues you give off are appropriate and consistent with your message.

To make your message obvious, all of your non-verbal communication must be consistent with your verbal communication, just as you wouldn't shake your head and say yes. When used effectively, good nonverbal communication leads to improved overall communication, reduced confusion, and improved rapport.

You can speak the right words in the wrong way and receive a completely different response. One specific word can have different meanings to it, which is why clarifying what exactly you mean to your fellow employees is very important. For example, if you require no changes in the beginning of a document but you do require changes at the end, specifying exactly where you need those changes will eliminate chances of misunderstandings. And chatting to someone without making eye contact makes them seem as if you aren't paying attention. 

Horizontal or Lateral Communication

Communication between individuals, teams, groups, or departments at the same hierarchical level in an organization is known as lateral communication, sometimes known as horizontal communication. 

More open discussion, better collaboration, and idea-sharing are all advantages of lateral communication, which can lead to improved creativity and reduced miscommunication, confusion, and duplication of effort between teams where roles overlap or both teams are working on the same project. For example, create more room for brainstorming more often so that all your team members feel included and valued and at the same time you get more ideas to make that will help you make better decisions.

Formal communication

Formal communication is another example of the various sorts of workplace communication, and it means exactly what it says. When you communicate in a formal manner, you are communicating in a formal manner. Formal communication's goal is to convey information in a professional, business-like manner. This isn't to say that you can't be professional when chatting casually, but it does indicate that you shouldn't use slang or communicate in a way that's too familiar or casual. With time, you should be able to form positive relationships with your coworkers, manager, and anyone else with whom you do business on a daily basis.

Communication from top to down

Vertical communication is the communication between people, teams, or departments in an organization at different organizational levels. It is the polar opposite of horizontal communication. Consider the relationship between you and your supervisor.

Communication in Writing

Written communication exists in addition to email. Anything that involves putting pen to paper or typing is considered a written communication. Emails, chat, Slack, text, PowerPoint presentations, or even simply taking notes that may be utilized or referenced later are all examples of this. Anything in which the words are written down.

Communication through images

If you've ever had to give a presentation, you've almost certainly employed visual communication. Visual communication includes more than simply words; it also includes images, graphs, and other visual displays. 

Because people absorb information in different ways, employ visuals if you're giving a presentation to a group of people. This will ensure that everyone's attention is captured. When you're trying to convey a hard topic or have a lot of facts to give, visual communication is also useful. You'll be able to explain the complexity in a concise and straightforward manner by using visuals, tables, graphs, and photos.

Listening

Listening is the last but certainly not the least of the various types of professional communication. Which may come as a surprise. While listening is included in nonverbal communication, it is such an important aspect of communication that it demands special attention. 

When it comes to workplace communication, ignoring listening or not giving it the credit it deserves is the best way to stay stressed. When people don't listen, they make mistakes, lose time, duplicate work, and even break up relationships. Despite this, it isn't usually regarded as one of the most important forms of communication in the workplace.

Why should you maintain good workplace communication? 

Communication is essential for the smooth running of the workplace, and the quality of communication has a substantial impact on job outcomes. 

Improving communication can be accomplished by using signs or symbols that are familiar to all participants in the communication process, which may include not only words but also imagery, gestures, and other elements derived from the company's shared culture and experience. To better communicate the information to the employee, gestures or drawings can be employed. Because quality communication is the foundation for work success, successful communication is carefully thought out and purposefully given.

Effective communication in the workplace can help to eliminate difficulties and boost productivity. This means, there will be fewer complications when it comes to task completion, leading to a higher level of productivity. The ability to communicate effectively at work can boost overall productivity and help to build a strong team. 

Employees will be more interested in cooperating and finding the best answer jointly if they consult with each other and consider the opinions of others. Managers can better understand their employees' talents and skills by establishing strong communication, and then giving clear directions to the people who are best suited to the task, boosting the overall efficacy of each project. It's not only about how well you collaborate with others in the office when it comes to communication. It's all about forming connections, reducing errors, and, most importantly, functioning as efficiently as possible. As a leader, one of the most important things you can do is encourage effective communication patterns in the workplace. Because numbers aren't deceiving.

7c’s of effective communication 

Completeness

The communication must be complete. It should convey all facts required by the audience. The sender of the message must take into consideration the receiver’s mind set and convey the message accordingly.

Conciseness

Conciseness means wordiness, i.e, communicating what you want to convey in least possible words without forgoing the other C’s of communication. Conciseness is a necessity for effective communication.

Consideration 

Consideration implies “stepping into the shoes of others”. Effective communication must take the audience into consideration, i.e, the audience’s view points, background, mind-set, education level, etc. Make an attempt to envisage your audience, their requirements, emotions as well as problems. Ensure that the self-respect of the audience is maintained and their emotions are not at harm. Modify your words in the message to suit the audience’s needs while making your message complete.

Concreteness 

Concrete communication implies being particular and clear rather than fuzzy and general. Concreteness strengthens confidence.

Correctness 

Correctness in communication implies that there are no grammatical errors in communication

Courtesy

Courtesy in message implies the message should show the sender’s expression as well as should respect the receiver. The sender of the message should be sincerely polite, judicious, reflective and enthusiastic.

Clarity

Clarity implies emphasizing on a specific message or goal at a time, rather than trying to achieve too much at once.

Here’s what can go wrong

As our company grows and we begin to interact with additional people, we establish different relationships and communication channels. A sender, a message, and a recipient are all part of every communication. 

This may appear to be a simple concept, but communication is a really complicated issue. When all communication is multiplied by the number of possible communication routes, we obtain a complex network of possibilities and options with a number of common communication problems and obstacles. Here are a few challenges that can come in the way:

Using technology to spread information

Email and intranet communication are faceless conduits. Stepping out and speaking to people face-to-face is one of the most challenging hurdles to successful communication in the workplace, especially when you have a difficult message to deliver.

Ease of communication

When it comes to professional communication difficulties, the belief that everyone can communicate well is possibly the most destructive. Some managers are unable to communicate and are unable to assist others in expressing themselves.

Expectations and prejudices.

This might lead to stereotypes and incorrect assumptions. People frequently hear what they expect to hear rather than what is spoken, and as a result, they make incorrect judgments.

Cultural differences.

People's social interactions, as well as how they express their emotions, differ drastically among countries. For example, the concept of private space varies widely depending on culture and social circumstances.

Smart tips to improve communication at work

Laying a solid foundation

When an employee has faith in you, they are more inclined to come forward and discuss when an issue arises. Establishing a rapport with your staff is a terrific method to start laying that foundation.

Schedule 1:1s on a weekly or monthly basis

Setting a time to communicate can often be all that is required to establish channels of contact. If you're busy and your employee wants to share recent struggles, concerns, or even accomplishments, she could feel that she's bothering you during the day. You'll learn more about the inner workings of what's going on at the office and have a better understanding of how to iron out the wrinkles if you schedule a recurring meeting to touch base.

Get outside the office

Spending hours and weeks at a time in the workplace can have a negative impact on our mental health, particularly during the winter months. A change of location might often be all it takes to wake individuals up and revitalize their vitality. Leaving the office does not imply squandering productive time. Introduce periodic work-from-home Fridays or suggest a local coffee shop where your team can meet. You can bring the office wherever you want if you have the correct equipment.

Pay attention

People frequently associate communication with conveying one's own message, yet effective communication is truly a two-way street. It's tough to get on the same page if you're not actively listening to what the other person is saying. Ask clarifying questions and give the conversation your whole attention. Avoid multitasking or formulating an answer before the other person has finished speaking. Active listening is difficult, but it is worthwhile.

Company culture

Your company's culture should include communication. It enables teams to connect with one another and aligns them with the aims of your company. This can be accomplished by incorporating employee engagement strategies into the workplace. Also, brand your intranet, office design, business documentation, and other locations where you may symbolize what your company stands for to promote your fundamental values.

Reach out

Some folks are bashful no matter how you slice it. Introversion is not a medical condition. Introverts are equally as useful and skilled at their jobs as aggressive workers. Reach out to introverted personnel and engage in interactions with them in which they feel free to offer their thoughts. If a group of employees is absent from the workplace, it is impossible to improve communication at the workplace.

Benefits of having effective workplace communication 

Better employee engagement

In today's workplace, employee engagement is a constant problem. And, while some companies use all sorts of strange and amazing strategies to increase engagement, they frequently forget the basics. All other tactics or ideas should be built on the foundation of open, day-to-day communication. Employees have a clear grasp of their function and how it fits into the business in a climate of transparency and trust, which is a vital step in ensuring they are engaged with their work and their management.

Encourages creativity.

When employees are encouraged to share their ideas and perspectives, a conducive climate for innovation can be created. Workers who are free to provide feedback and fine-tune ideas are more likely to think outside the box and express such ideas and methods to their coworkers and management.

Maintains a positive work environment.

Maintaining the status quo in the workplace relies heavily on open communication. People of various races, cultures, religions, and personalities are commonly seen in the workplace. With so many variances, it's only natural that there will be some friction.

It helps in crisis management.

Any company coping with a crisis, whether internally or publicly, needs to communicate clearly and transparently. In reality, without communication, a crisis can spread and affect other divisions as well as a company's brand. Internally, proactive communication will ensure that employees respond in a coordinated manner, reducing the impact of the event.

Creates a better impression

A corporation that is known for its ability to communicate effectively both internally and with clients has a positive public image. These businesses are demonstrating that they have nothing to hide and are open and transparent in every element of their operations. This can have a favorable impact on hiring, investment, and corporate expansion.

The earlier you try to get rid of factors that give rise to Improper communication, the better you can grow both, as an organization and as a team. All it takes is going a step further to pave the way to achieve goals faster, and this can only be possible with proper communication at your workplace.

What is employee experience?

Employee experience is a buzzword for many fast growing organizations. Increasingly, you must also be looking at your employees more as the end assets than simply as means to an end. Here, employee experience can be your greatest tool to attract, retain and develop the best talent in the marketplace. According to a report by Deloitte, 80% of HR and business leaders believe that employee experience was “important” or “very important” to them. However, only 22% of these leaders said their organization was “excellent” at establishing a differentiated employee experience. The gap in these two figures clearly creates a case for you to step up your efforts with a comprehensive employee experience strategy and best practices to achieve the same.

Decoding employee experience: Meaning and definition

Before jumping into the detailed approach on how to improve employee experience, its importance and impact on different business verticals, you must understand what employee experience is. According to Denise Lee Yohn, “EX (employee experience) is the sum of everything an employee experiences throughout his or her connection to the organization.” Looking closely, this suggests that employee experience entails every encounter for an employee from the time they first interact with an organization as a potential candidate to the day they formally leave the organization. Thus, it is not a one off observation or feeling, but encapsulates everything an employee experiences at work.

Why is employee experience so important: The business impact

Why is employee experience so important or why invest in employee experience has been a question that would be in your mind for a long time. For many of your business leaders, investing in employee experience may be a good thing to have, and not something pressing for your organization’s sustainability and scalability. However, studies and surveys have time and again illustrated the business impact to answer why is employee experience so important.

1. Engagement and performance

You can directly link a positive employee experience to satisfaction, happiness and engagement at work. While these may not be directly quantifiable, their impact surely is. According to a study, happy employees are up to 20% more productive at work. On the flip side, actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. between $450 billion to $550 billion per year. Thus, if you create a conducive experience you will be able to engage your employees as well as augment their performance and productivity.

2. Talent attraction and retention

You can also answer the question on investing in employee experience by throwing light on its impact on talent attraction and retention. Invariably, if you offer a positive experience from the first step of the employee lifecycle, you are able to attract and retain the best talent. At the same time, poor culture and experience is what pushes top performers to look for a change. 47% of people actively looking for a new job pinpoint company culture as the main reason for wanting to leave. Therefore, employee experience is a great resource for employer branding and getting the best talent.

3. Profits and bottom line

Finally, employee experience focusing on satisfaction, engagement, wellbeing, belongingness, etc. has direct business repercussions. Research shows that companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share. Thus, employee experience can have a positive impact on your organization’s bottom line. 

How to measure employee experience: Key milestones and employee experience metrics 

On learning the business impact of employee experience, you must be excited about identifying the right employee experience strategy and learn the best practices on how to improve employee experience. However, it is important to take a pause to actually measure their experience score to identify the gaps and challenges. Here are the top employee experience survey questions that can help you answer the question, how to measure employee experience:

1. eNPS

You can start measuring employee experience by calculating the employee net promoter score. Like customers, you can understand whether your employees are willing to recommend your organization to others. Employee experience survey questions may include, on a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our organization to your family or friends to work?

Depending on the cumulative score, you can have a decent understanding of the overall employee experience. Anything below 6 reflects poorly on the experience and above 8/9 is a good score.

2. Employee referrals

While employees might display a willingness to recommend others to join, if they are actually walking the talk is one of the employee experience metrics that you must track. Here, tracking referrals is important. The number of quality referrals which an employee brings in which actually convert to successful hires illustrate employee satisfaction and a positive experience. It is vital to note that simply focusing on the number of referrals is not enough as they might be just a sign of incentives attached to referrals. You should majorly focus on successful hires.

3. Ratings

Finally, not all employees might be vocal or open about their experience. But, that doesn’t signal a positive experience. Therefore, you must constantly track and monitor employee rating and feedback sites like Glassdoor. Here employees anonymously share their experiences at different organizations. While you may not get the name, however, a broad sentiment becomes clear by analyzing such surveys.

What is employee experience management?

Employee experience management at the very basic level ensures managing employee expectations and providing the right resources, support, tools, etc. to create a positive experience. Here, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can be a foundation for employee experience management and garner a better experience. If you look closely, there is a clear match between the needs of individuals that Maslow states and what employees seek at work. The 5 major needs namely physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem and self- actualization all can be realized through organizational offerings to augment employee experience.

1. Physiological Needs

You must make an extra effort to focus on employee wellbeing and ensure that the basic necessities, like food, rent, etc. are taken care of, even in the face of salary cuts. You need to constantly monitor employee pulse in terms of their physiological needs and offer reassurance accordingly.

2. Security Needs

Job security has been one of the top stressors, time and again, for almost all employees and a direct threat to the second rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. There is a lot of anxiety about losing one’s job, which is coming in the way of creating a positive employee experience at work. You can cross this bridge by facilitating transparency to the largest extent possible. It is important to keep the communication channels open and constantly educate your employees about the state of affairs, instead of hasty firing to prevent ambiguity and confusion among the employees which creates a feeling of insecurity.

3. Belongingness Needs

Next, you must focus on fostering belongingness by helping employees gain a sense of purpose. Here helping employees realize the impact they are creating at work and giving them a purpose to strive for is important. Additionally, facilitating communication and collaboration to build strong bonds between colleagues can bridge the belongingness needs to create a worthy employee experience.

4. Esteem Needs

To address the esteem needs, you can step up the appreciation and recognition game. This involves celebrating small milestones, acknowledging even the smallest of contributions and constantly appreciating employee performance. This employee experience management practice will help you boost motivation and, thus, create a desirable experience for all team members.

5. Self Actualization Needs

To contribute to the final rung in Maslow’s hierarchy and empower employees to unleash their full potential, you should ensure that the work being given to employees contributes to their growth and professional development. Mentoring, training, coaching and development in a personalized avatar can further actualization. 

Employee experience strategy: The employee journey

Managing and fostering a positive experience requires creating a comprehensive and robust employee experience strategy which addresses each step of the employee lifecycle.

1. Pre-employment: Attract and hire

The first step towards creating an effective employee experience strategy starts in the pre employment phase. Here, you should consider having a seamless application and hiring process. Firstly, the application form must be easy to comprehend and relevant to the role. A cumbersome form which is difficult to access and complete will negatively impact experience. Secondly, the whole interview and hiring process must involve constant communication and touchpoints. Make the process entirely employee centric and evolve it constantly based on feedback.

2. Employment: Onboard, engage and develop

Once the employee is in the system, onboarding is the next touchpoint. A pleasant onboarding experience can do wonders and the opposite can make blunders. According to a study by Gallup, 88% of organizations don’t onboard well. Additionally, companies lose 25% of all new employees within a year. The right onboarding experience involves proper induction, expectation setting and giving the new hore time and space to absorb all the new information. Upon successful onboarding, you must focus on constantly engaging employees via different initiatives as well as investing in their development. Such development programs are likely to augment employee competencies, creating a win-win for all stakeholders.

3. Post employment: Depart

Finally, the last stage of the employee lifecycle is when employees move to a new organization or retire. While they might be leaving the organization, it is very important to have them depart with a positive experience. In any scenario, you should focus on having i an exit survey to encourage them to share their experience and areas of improvement. At the same time, helping them depart on a positive note, with no delays, left dues, etc. are signs of a positive employee experience.

How to improve employee experience

With an understanding of a robust strategy in hand, you are now ready to understand how to improve employee experience. Well, improving employee experience is closely related to augmenting the experience across every step of the strategy mentioned above. Here are some best practices that you can leverage to improve employee experience:

1. Communication

You should start with improving your internal communication. This has multiple layers to it. Firstly, communication must be clear to ensure that expectations are clear and employees understand every word. At the same time, you must encourage all your managers to practice active listening to ensure two-way communication to improve employee experience. According to research, 85% of employees are most motivated when internal communications are effective. A robust communication strategy is likely to augment collaboration, decrease conflict and, thus, increase belongingness and augment experience.

2. Recognition

Any answer on how to improve employee experience will definitely focus on appreciation and recognition. Research shows that recognition is the most important motivator for 37% of employees. Your leaders and managers must appreciate and recognize employee contribution to organizational success. At the same time, encouraging peer-to-peer recognition can be effective. When you acknowledge a job well done, employees tend to believe that they are making a difference which is being recognized and, thus, adds to a positive experience.

3. Technology

You may overlook the impact of technology in improving employee experience. Right from recruitment to departure, technology has the potential to augment every employee experience touch point. Within technology, leveraging gamification to facilitate performance and experience is most important. According to sources, 90% of employees are more productive with gamification, with 72% of them reporting it inspiring them to work harder and 95% enjoying it. At the same time, using technology to promote seamless collaboration and communication, automation, etc. can help you improve employee experience.

4. Culture

You also need to focus your efforts towards building a thriving and inclusive work culture which aligns with employee expectations. Here, offering flexibility and autonomy to employees to experiment and innovation, ensuring all voices are heard and a culture of respect, fairness and transparency are vital. According to a survey, companies with a thriving corporate culture achieve over 4x higher revenue growth. Therefore, to improve employee experience, you must transform the very fabric of the organizational culture and make it employee centric.

5. Development

A critical part of employee experience is the holistic development of the workforce. Here, understanding the unique developmental aspirations for each employee and align its learning and development efforts will help you make a difference. A balanced combination of training, upskilling, mentoring, coaching, etc. can go a long way into creating a positive employee experience. However, according to SHRM, only 29% of employees are “very satisfied” with their available career advancement opportunities. Thus, you must focus more on the professional development opportunities available for your employees.

6. Feedback

You might see feedback is a way of performance reviews, given to employees by their managers and leaders. However, it is time that you invest in employee experience surveys to gauge feedback from the workforce and understand their opinions, sentiments and perspectives. Some of the top employee experience survey questions include:

• On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend the organization to your friends and family?
• Do you enjoy your work?
• How would you rate the company culture on empathy, inclusivity, collaboration, etc.?
• Do you feel that the organization is open to change and feedback?
• Do you feel valued for your contributions?
• How would you rate the communication across the organization?
• How would you rate the engagement efforts led by the organization?

How employee experience impacts customer experience

Employee experience and customer experience are intrinsically linked. On the face of it, you might dismiss this thought and suggest that employee experience and customer experience are mutually exclusive. However, research shows that companies with excellent customer experience have 1.5x more engaged employees than others. Let us quickly explore how employee experience impacts customer experience:

1. People connect with people

While automation and digital transformation is on the rise, customers always desire human connection. This connection they get from your employees. Your employees are touch points for your organization and the only human interface customers interact with.

2. Employees define your brand

An organization not only goes by the quality of its offerings, but also by the attributes of its people. Therefore, it is your employees that have a role to play in defining your brand to your existing and potential customers. By capitalizing on individual employees, you can pull together customer interest and boost experience.

3. Employees are the ambassadors

You might have six figure marketing budgets, but employee reviews like customer reviews have the potential to make or break a brand. Employees define the public image for an organization. Customers generally prefer to engage with organizations that have a non-controversial public image.

4. Innovation and creativity

When an employee feels engaged at work, he or she will go the extra mile to onboard more customers and add a few new tips and tricks to your customer acquisition playbook. Positive experience can also act as a motivator to help the employee come up with newer strategies and techniques to keep the customer satisfied.

5. Building trust and credibility

Trust and credibility builds and breeds on relationships which are based on human connections. Only when your employees are engaged enough to enthusiastically perform their responsibilities will they make an effort to build that relationship of trust and credibility with the customers.

On a macro level, employees are the face of your organization in the market. Customers sense the authenticity of an organization in the way its employees communicate and project it to the outer world. Thus, good customer experience directly links to a robust employee experience.

Towards an effective employee experience program

You cannot improve employee experience in a single day. It requires years of strategizing, implementation, monitoring and refining the strategy based on feedback. The objective is to keep improving the process to augment experience. In such a situation, you can facilitate collaboration with SuperBeings. With a vision to create a conducive work environment, SuperBeings helps fast growing organizations like yours to create a pleasant employee experience. It will support you  to gauge employee pulse and opinion, identify roadblocks to a positive experience and provide data backed insights for a seamless employee experience.

Suggested reading:

Employee Experience in remote work

Improving EX : A Road to Better Customer Experience

Take your employee experience to new heights with our customizable employee engagement module. Book a free demo today!

A major challenge faced by a majority of organizations these days is to create high levels of employee engagement and commitment. Employee Engagement works as a catalyst for HR Managers to ensure successful modern businesses, as it indicates how committed your workforce is to the organization. It refers to the kind of dynamics or relationship that the two share with each other. Employee engagement is when one feels totally included as a team member, being focused on clear goals, being trusted and empowered, having regular and constructive feedback, being supported in acquiring new abilities, and being praised and recognised for accomplishments.

Employee engagement cannot be achieved through a mechanistic method that manipulates employees' commitment and emotions. This is because employees can soon see through such methods and often tend to get  disappointed.

The more personally invested you are in something, the more it matters to you. Improving employee engagement necessitates equal efforts from all members of the leadership team. This combined with an effective engagement strategy necessitates careful preparation. Don't let this stop you, because a highly engaged  workforce would increase profitability, efficiency, and employee retention, taking your organization to the next level.

What is employee engagement?

Employee Engagement is defined as the emotional involvement and attachment that employees have with their organization. Positive attitudes and behaviors lead to enhanced business outcomes in a way that triggers and reinforces one another. This is pretty much what employee engagement is all about. Employee involvement refers to company actions that are in line with the company's ideals. It is about promises that were kept or even an explanation for why they couldn't be maintained.

Let’s break this concept down a little into something simple. You become a bigger stakeholder in whatever it may be, be it your kids, your health, or your career. And you will be far more likely to put more into it if the result is worthwhile to you. Employee engagement is founded on an organization's members' trust, integrity, two-way commitment, and communication. It's a strategy that helps businesses succeed by improving organizational and individual performance, productivity, and well-being. It is quantifiable. It ranges from mediocre to excellent. The same goes for your employees as well. The more personally invested they are in their work, the more it matters to them and encourages them to keep contributing more. This is an amazing way to raise everyone's level of personal investment, paving the way for more and more positive contributions to the organization.

How important is employee engagement for your organization

Did you know that engaged employees outperform other employees by up to 202%? 

Pretty mind-boggling right! Well, it's true.

Effective Employee Engagement leads to the emotional investment of employees in your company, going above and beyond what is needed and thus, delivering exceptional results.‍

Employee engagement is so much more than just a  fancy foosball table in the break room or flashy perks like flexible work hours. Employees who are truly engaged are more likely to produce their best work every day and stay with a company that prioritizes employee engagement. 

Have you ever wondered why exactly is employee engagement so crucial for your workplace? 

Well, here’s why:

1. Boosts productivity:

Various studies have proven that employees who are invested in their jobs are more productive than those who are not. Apart from this, employees who are engaged are also said to be 21 percent more productive than those who are not. Finding ways to engage your employees, whether through a challenge or more responsibility, means you're also increasing the productivity of your company. In a nutshell, it benefits everyone involved.

2. Customer satisfaction at its best

Why and how is it that people who are passionate about their work are often the best people to interact with your customers. Well, that’s probably because passion is infectious and your customers can never go without taking notice. When your employees are engaged in the best possible manner, they tend to put in a lot more effort, translating into buzzing productivity levels at your organization, almost in no time! Those who believe in the importance of assisting customers and who believe they are respected by their employer are considerably more likely to provide a better customer experience and boost satisfaction.

3. A sign of success

This does not necessarily just mean business success. Rather, it is crucial to understand that engagement is usually the result of personal or team success.

In other words, engaged employees are engaged not because they’re productive or easy to work with, but because they feel valued and that their work matters. And when their successes are recognized by everyone else in the organization, your people will feel like they have succeeded in making a meaningful impact at work.

A fast-growing body of research demonstrates that employee engagement is a huge mover of fundamental metrics like retention and revenue. This is probably why senior executives and CEOs try their best to grasp and reap the bottom-line benefits of employee engagement to the organization.

4. Enhances culture

You would have noticed that people who are often engaged in what they do are, in general, easier to work with! Turns out, that’s true!

When you focus on the wrong things, not knowing how to consistently raise the level of personal investment by your employees is one humongous flaw that comes in the way and ends up ruining things for your organization.

In order to understand what motivates the personal investment of an employee, you will first need to understand how motivation even works, ie, what makes your employees feel good about work. This will lead to enhancing the culture of your organization even better.

How to measure employee engagement?

Some things are pretty easy to measure. This is because they are concrete. 

For example, the time it takes you to drive to your office or the number of red lights you can hit without being late! When it comes to employee engagement it is a bit more difficult. It isn’t concrete and is influenced by quite a few factors. An engagement survey would be just what you would need to know if you’re on the right track. 

However, keep in mind that it is not a place for random questions or curiosities. It is a designed measurement mechanism with several important components that represents the behaviors or feelings of an engaged employee. These questions typically measure several perceptions including organizational pride and advocacy. 

A survey question that depicts the behaviors or sentiments of an engaged employee is referred to as an engagement outcome. These questions are used to gauge feelings of organizational pride, commitment, and advocacy. The current status of employee involvement within your firm might be revealed through these outcomes. Keep in mind that these shouldn't just identify specific actions. Instead, they should be able to identify targets that your organization should maintain or improve.

Top 20 survey employee engagement survey questions 

1. How likely are you to recommend our company to your friends and family?

2. Do you plan to continue at this company in the next two years?

3. Do you feel comfortable contributing your ideas and opinions in our workplace?

4. Do you feel comfortable asking for help if you do not have the skills required to meet your day-to-day goals?

5. Do you feel like coworkers give each other respect here?

6. Do you feel aligned with the goals of the company?

7. Do you feel that the vibe of the workplace is positive and motivating for you?

8. Do you have the basic amenities to feel comfortable at work?

9. Do you think your organization operates in a socially responsible manner?

10. Are you recognized fairly for your contribution to team efforts?

11. Do you feel like this is a good place for you to develop your career?

12. Do you understand how exactly your role correlates to the company’s success?

13. Are you satisfied with the current benefits that the company offers?

14. Do you find your job role fun and challenging?

15. How prominent is office politics in your workplace?

16. Do you think that your company’s wellness policies are enough?

17. Do you receive meaningful rewards on special days like Work Anniversary, Birthdays,etc?

18. Are you provided enough time and the right resources to do your job well?

19. Do you have fun at your workplace?

20. Do you often find yourself working on weekends and holidays?

When should an organization measure employee engagement?

There is no such thing as the perfect time when it comes to measuring employee engagement. An employee engagement survey can be conducted at any time. While the timing of an engagement survey has an impact on survey outcomes, it always helps to discover the rate of engagement of your employees.

It's time to move past contentment and start talking about how to cultivate an engaged workforce. Staff happiness does not always equate to employee engagement. Employee pulse surveys are often conducted on a monthly or weekly basis. These are simpler, more routine employee opinion surveys, usually consisting of 10-15 questions and taking no more than a few minutes to complete. 

The easiest way to follow up and monitor progress from your baseline engagement survey results is to conduct a pulse survey.

A long survey often tends to repeat a question which is why daily surveys are considered to be the most effective when it comes to surveys and measurement of employee engagement. By simply asking a single question  every single day, consistently you can get valuable, accurate feedback that will boost your engagement levels even with a time constraint.

Key benefits of measuring Employee Engagement

1. Tackle obstacles

Measuring engagement on a regular basis will help you tackle obstacles before they become problems. Engagement data can be used to showcase what’s going well and connect weaker departments to stronger ones. Always remember that problems only get big when you let them. There’s no point wondering why your employee retention and sales suddenly plummet if you don’t put in the effort to take care of it.

2. Build trust

It also helps to build trust, for the plain reason being -asking for feedback from employees shows that you care about their opinions and how they feel at work. The data can be further shared with everyone in your organization -leaders, managers, and employees, giving each individual an opportunity to help contribute to a better culture. Trusted employees feel more valued which in turn helps them feel more engaged. A survey conducted by PwC showed that trusted employees are 76% more engaged than those who work in a low trust workplace.

3. Opportunity for Improvement

Surveys provide a clear picture of employee activity and thinking, in a single moment in time, as they struggle to think up thorough answers and complete the questionnaire to get back to work. It is important to encourage employees to keep track of their thoughts and feelings weekly and make sure they speak up. 

Employee engagement surveys are used to determine how motivated and engaged your staff are to give their best at work every day. You can learn about employees' ideas and opinions on their jobs and the entire environment by conducting these questionnaires.

Switch to better measurement tools whenever needed, especially employee-preferred ones. This will help to increase opportunities for improvement and engagement.

4. Helps to create morale

In order to reap benefits, it is important that you make employee morale a top priority in your company. As employee morale rises, productivity rises, enabling you to keep your employees for a longer period of time. Keep in mind to engage workers in constructive dialogue as they become disengaged. This doesn't even have to last the whole lunch hour; even a quick check-in would demonstrate that you care. This way you will be able to gain a better understanding of your employees' concerns as well.

Main Components of employee engagement

Employee engagement consists of elements that an organization needs to support in order to have a truly engaged team. People often believe that engagement is only about organizing team-building activities and providing their workforce a generous compensation. While this may promote short-term engagement, at the end of the day, the truth is that it just isn’t enough. If you wish to build highly engaged global teams, here are a few of the key components of employee engagement that should not be overlooked.

1. Leadership 

Employees yearn for meaningful relationships with their supervisors. 

Did you know that receiving praise from a direct boss is nearly twice as successful as offering workers stock options in terms of empowering them? And it's all for free! 

Achieving employee engagement is a commitment that starts with leadership. In order to get every individual to contribute their best efforts, leaders must have the ability to recognize the factors that cause employees to participate and those that cause them to disengage.

2. Employee Incentives and recognition

Employee recognition, also known as Social Recognition is nothing but the act of publicly acknowledging your employees for who they are and what they do. With employee recognition, workers recognize each other and make the workplace feel more inclusive and human. More than three-quarters of employees stated in a survey that if they were noticed and recognized more, they would work harder. This can be done even in a formal manner, such as years of service or employee-of-the-month schemes, or informal practices, such as business "points" or even small thank-you cards.

3. Culture and communication

It is a given, that employees who want to come to work every morning, have a good workplace culture. Always keep in mind that, the more prosperous the business is, the greater the atmosphere is.

Do you want to know what makes a good manager? 

Well, you can begin with effective communication. Ensure that you interact with your employees in a transparent, frank, and frequent manner.

4. Vision and Values

Employees who are deeply engaged in what they do are aware of the larger picture and how they fit into it. Employees should unite around a clearly communicated vision and declaration of core values. They are also much more likely to go above and beyond and contribute to a larger cause if they feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves.

How to Improve Employee Engagement?

In today’s digital era, monitoring and improving employee engagement is easier than ever before. There is a plethora of employee engagement tools, software, and platforms that you can implement to keep tabs on your workforce engagement. 

Surveys show that employees who are supervised by Highly Engaged managers are 59% more likely to be engaged than those supervised by Actively Disengaged managers.

In case you’re still not convinced, here are a few practices you can adopt at your workplace, to watch your employee engagement rate reach the skies. Here’s how you can achieve this at your workplace. 

1. Prioritize feedback

Positive manager reviews are associated with optimal levels of feedback. It is always a given that managers who offer too much input to their direct reports are scored higher by their team than those who do not provide enough. 

So what exactly is the bottom line then? Well, employees thrive on feedback, and it does have a significant impact on their level of commitment to the organization.

Many successful leaders consider employee feedback to be one of the most important techniques for professional development – claiming that companies who take a strategic approach to employee feedback can build employee confidence, increase employee satisfaction, and even improve organizational inefficiencies.

2. Create volunteering opportunities

Employees deserve to realize that they work for an organization that is concerned with having a positive impact on society. Volunteering brings employees together for the greater good and allows them to engage on a deeper level. Indeed, workers agree that service events increase productivity more than happy hours and that businesses that support voluntary efforts have a healthier work climate.

3. Provide flexibility

Employee involvement can be boosted by flexible work schedules and remote work opportunities. This level of adaptability satisfies workers' need for a work-life balance. Employees expect their employers to help them balance job and personal obligations, so make sure you do your bit to keep them happy.

4. Evaluate processes

Unnecessary activities and incomplete processes can cost your company a lot of money. Employees, on the other hand, find it quite aggravating. Employees turn on cruise control as a result of the extra measures. This is a sign that they are not engaged with their jobs and a sign that cannot be ignored. Analyze each team's processes carefully and search for ways to improve them for long-term success.

Top 5 Employee Engagement Platforms 

1. SuperBeings

SuperBeings allows an individual to measure, analyze, act and even learn with a set of carefully curated, easy-to-use tools that provide the best results when it comes to keeping a track of employee engagement in your organization. This platform takes daily employee feedback on the organization culture, manager’s leadership skills, and the nature of the employee’s role over existing chat systems such as Slack and MS Teams. Using this feedback, it identifies gaps and recommends personalized learning content and the best possible practices to each manager to close the loop from feedback to action. 

With SuperBeings, managers can even set and track priorities and run custom polls to get additional feedback. They can also automate their recurring stand-ups, 1:1 agenda gathering, and more with the help of this platform. This AI-powered solution for companies helps them drive Employee Engagement, building a high-performing culture. The Pro version is for $5 per employee per month.

Pros:

• Easy to use interface
• Amazing Customer Service
• Highly affordable
• Continuous and Real-Time 
• Holistic approach

Cons:

• Being a young platform with a high potential to understand human behavior, it is on the move to update features to meet customer demands and you will have to expect continuous changes.
  

2. CultureAmp

Culture Amp creates the forum that enables companies to prioritize culture. It aims to provide people with not only a tool, but also the education, network, and other resources they need to do it for themselves in their own business. Also provides top-quality community content such as the blog, whitepapers, webinars, etc. These are great and can help managers and employees improve their skills.

Culture Amp also offers comparable company metrics to show you how you're doing. It also provides benchmarks from similar organizations to show you how you're doing and allows you to track your progress toward company culture develops over time. 

Pricing starts at $4,500 per year for 50 to 200 employees and $10,500 per year for 201 to 2,000 employees.

Pros:

• In-depth reporting.
• Amazing clarity in action for surveys
  

Cons:

• Does not allow collaborators to complete performance reviews together with ease.
• Admin functionality is not robust.
• Expensive.
  

3. Glint

Glint is a People Success Platform that helps global companies increase employee engagement, grow their people, and optimize business performance by leveraging real-time people data. Glint surveys enable your company to elicit your feedback on a regular basis, listen to your concerns, and turn that information into timely, meaningful action. Employees select an answer from an 11-point scale, 0 to 10. Glint pricing starts at $0.01. They do not provide a free version. 

It is a really simple tool to launch and gain insight into your entire company's satisfaction; along with easy actions to address concerns or weaknesses identified. It allows organizations to take a holistic approach when it comes to engaging talent, developing people, and inspiring them to do their best work. Glint gathers more frequent feedback through pulses, surveys, and anytime channels and then applies cutting-edge analytics to deliver personalized insights and AI-powered recommendations for action to HR teams, leaders, and managers.

Pros:

• Easy and intuitive interface. 
• The dashboards and reports are clear, with the graphs being the best feature.
• Frequent pulse surveys let you provide feedback on an ongoing basis.

Cons:

• One cannot get access to past survey responses.
• Survey responses are not integrated with a company's primary HR platform.
• A little expensive.
  

4. OfficeVibe

Officevibe is a simple and highly effective forum for team growth. It gives managers the tools they need to improve trust, collaboration, and team performance. The platform helps managers get to know their teams by sending out weekly Pulse Surveys that provide confidential, written feedback options. The platform lets managers understand their teams by distributing weekly Pulse Surveys that include opportunities for anonymous, written feedback. It compiles comprehensive Survey Reports and provides tools for making improvements.

Officevibe also supports managers in mastering 1-on-1s by creating a collaborative structure for tough conversations while providing concrete ways to take action on individual and team goals. 

Officevibe pricing starts at $4.00 per user, per month. The software does offer a free version for users to try out as well. 

Pros:

• Provides a good platform for employees to provide anonymous feedback periodically.
• Keeps track of your team engagement continuously, having a zoomed-in approach to different metrics of engagement

Cons:

• Lack of clarity when it comes to the time span for the metrics.
• Lack of depth and variety in the questions.
  

5. Amber by Infeedo

Amber by Infeedo is a smart AI-enabled bot that assists in real-time management of employee engagement, predicting turnover, and measuring company culture. Amber connects with employees across organizations to gather actionable information for HR in order to improve employee engagement, reduce potential attrition, and get a real-time sense of general sentiment. Communications here are more timely, personalized, and tailored to key milestones in an employee's career, with an emphasis on not only asking questions but also listening and reacting appropriately.

Amber partners with workers from various companies to gather actionable feedback for HR in order to improve employee engagement, reduce future turnover, and get a real-time sense of overall sentiment. The communications are timely, personalized, and tailored.

With Amber, one can now deliver a seamless experience to their employees for every moment that matters to them in the employee lifecycle and remain human at heart. To use Amber's services, inFeedo has an annual pricing structure and the average cost is $25 per user per annum.

Pros:

• The software’s timely reach outs are personalized on a specific milestone in an employee's tenure, making the conversation even more interesting.
• Outstanding reports and insights.

Cons:

• Less satisfactory when it comes to customization.
• Only suitable for lifecycle surveys.
  
  

Never underestimate the power of understanding what’s going on between your employees and their peers as only this can help you identify opportunities to align and motivate teams and individuals.

Like Doug Conant rightly said, 

To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace

-it is now time to get ready for some major wins. 

Suggested reading:

Are your Employee Engagement Practices Really Working?

Conducting an Employee Engagement Survey

If you’re looking for a single platform to satisfy all your organizational needs and make the right decisions, SuperBeings would be your one-stop destination to help you shape the right culture for your organization. Book a free demo today!

The imperative towards managing wellness in the workplace has been on the rise for quite some time now. Organizations across all verticals are taking a comprehensive approach to employee experience.  Here wellness in the workplace which revolves around optimizing mental health and employee wellbeing is becoming a top priority. The rise of remote work, lack of social connect, ambiguity and uncertainty due to the unleashing of the pandemic, changes in attitude towards health have all contributed to a more pronounced focus on wellness, on personal and professional fronts. For organizations, increased levels of anxiety, phases of burnout, and the impact on performance have prompted the need to make wellness in the workplace a priority. 

What is employee wellbeing?

Let’s start by understanding what exactly is employee wellbeing. Conventionally, monetary compensation was seen as the only parameter for employee happiness and satisfaction. However, recently, the notion of employee wellbeing has come to the forefront. Put simply, employee wellbeing or wellness in the workplace refers to a state of physical, psychological, and social wellbeing at one’s place of work. This all encompassing term is closely dependent on the job expectations, work environment, workplace culture, roles and responsibilities, stress levels, etc. which impact the health, happiness and wellness of all employees at work and beyond. It goes beyond an employee’s physical health and being free from such ailments to include a state of cognitive, behavioural and holistic growth. Employee wellbeing has a direct impact on an employee’s productivity and performance, ability to contribute to their full potential and capability to forge meaningful relationships and collaborations to create shared value. 

Top 15 Wellness in the workplace statistics

Promoting employee wellbeing requires strategic interventions at an organizational level. Therefore, we need to answer the questions, ‘why is wellness in the workplace important?’ While greater engagement, performance, productivity are the obvious answers, a look at the wellness in the workplace statistics can offer a clearer picture.

1. Talent attraction

‍About 87% of employees said they consider health and wellness offerings when choosing an employer

2. Employee expectation

‍More than 68% of employers prioritize well-being as a business objective

3. Job satisfaction

‍70% of employees enrolled in wellness programs have reported higher job satisfaction than those not enrolled in the companies’ program

4. Economic loss

‍Work-related stress alone can cost up to $300 billion a year from productivity losses

5. Reduced absenteeism

‍56% of employees had fewer sick days because of wellness programs

6. Leadership priority

‍68% of senior HR leaders rated employee well-being and mental health as a top priority in 2021

7. Monetary sense

‍Average return on investment of workplace wellness programs is 3.27

8. Workplace culture

‍77% of employees think that employee wellness programs positively impact the company culture

9. Reduced healthcare expenses

‍The implementation of efficient wellness programs helped reduce health expenses by 26%

10. Bottom line impact

‍63% of employers offering wellness programs reported increased financial sustainability and growth

11. Better health outcomes

‍56% of employees had fewer sick days because of wellness programs

12. Employer branding

‍Employees are more likely to recommend a company that supports well-being efforts as a good place to work

13. Reduced turnover

‍Less than 25% of people employed by companies with wellness programs intend to leave their jobs within the next 12 months

14. Greater revenue

‍Company health wellness programs result in an 11% rise in revenue generated per employee

15. Increased productivity

‍Companies with workplace wellness programs in place report a 66% productivity increase

These wellness in the workplace statistics clearly illustrate the imperative for organizations to invest in employee wellbeing initiatives. While strategic interventions have the potential to augment engagement, experience, productivity as well as the bottom line, overlooking wellness in the workplace can lead to acute turnover, reduced profits and negative employer branding. 

Top 20 wellness in the workplace ideas 

1. Set boundaries

Finally, organizations need to ensure that they set boundaries beyond work time and home time for their team members. It is important that work doesn’t creep in during off hours and employees don’t have to stretch their work day, except occasionally. The space and ability to disconnect to reconnect is imperative for physical, social and mental wellness in the workplace.  

2. Mental health support

Increasingly mental health and wellness are becoming reasons of concerns for most individuals and organizations. Mental health support must come in the form of in-house experts, regular sessions on stress and anxiety management, etc. 

3. Flexible work schedules

Empower employees to choose their work schedule, if the job role allows. Most roles and responsibilities today are time agnostic and giving flexibility to employees to choose when they want to work can augment wellness in the workplace. In case of work from home, this can help them to manage both their work and home well. 

4. Insurances and benefits

Offer health insurances and covers to provide financial assistance for employees during a medical emergency. Explore options of at home care medical compensation, in addition to the convention in-hospitalization care, along with other healthcare benefits.

5. Breaks and day-offs

It is important to give employees sufficient break time and days-off to rejuvenate. If a particular week has been hectic, an off in the next week can help in preventing burnout and add to employee wellbeing. 

6. Wellness expert partners

Onboard wellness partners which offer different forms of wellbeing and health support for your team members. This could range from consultation for physical ailments to therapy sessions and consultation for psychological wellness. 

7. Meditation and yoga sessions

Organize regular, maybe even daily, wellness sessions for a short duration like 15 minutes. Keep it as a permanent feature before starting the work day or after ending it. Encourage employees to practice guided meditation and yoga with experts, online or offline to help them unwind and get relieved from stress.

8. Resources and newsletters

Make it a regular practice to share resources in the form of toolkits, newsletters, emails or posts which illustrate different health and wellness practices. Make the information easy to consume and interesting and relevant to your team members. 

9. Attractive rewards and recognition

Rewards and recognition for a job well done can cater to the cognitive wellbeing of most employees. Having a robust rewards and recognition program will increase engagement, satisfaction and happiness leading to greater wellness in the workplace.

10. Standing desks

The nature of most modern jobs involves sitting in front of the laptop the whole day leading to serious problems for the back and neck. Introducing standing desks can help employees avoid slouching by maintaining a straight posture. This can add to their physical wellness in the workplace. 

11. Hybrid working

It would be a good idea to adopt hybrid working wherever possible. While brainstorming and collective work can be finished in person, individual tasks can be completed virtually. This flexibility will allow employees to invest time saved during commute in furthering their wellbeing. 

12. Healthy work environment

The environment has a direct impact on wellness in the workplace. Having plants and greenery leads to physical and mental wellbeing. In addition, having windows, adequate ventilation, etc. all contribute in different ways to wellness. In fact, even the way the rooms are designed with enough open space and comfortable seating, have an impact on wellbeing. 

13. Sports and wellness

Having indoor and outdoor sports and recreational activities can contribute to an increase in employee wellbeing. While they directly lead to better physical health, they also enable employees to let go of anxiety and stress. 

14. On-site vaccinations and check-ups

Vaccinations today form a very important part of ensuring wellness in the workplace. Catering to vaccinations, routine check-ups and tests for common conditions in the workplace can help ensure that basic healthcare is taken care of for all employees. Such an initiative will also encourage employees to take seriously an aberration in their reports. 

15. Health groups

Like any other employee resource group, organizations can also experiment with health groups. They can meet regularly to discuss healthy practices and even organize different events to promote health and wellness in the workplace.

16. Pet friendly workplaces

Depending on the nature of work, organizations can make the workplace pet-friendly. Having some furry friends around can instantly bring down stress and anxiety. While this might not have the potential to become a norm, having a few bring your pet to work day can definitely promote employee wellbeing and wellness in the workplace.

17. Group outings and team building

Social wellbeing for all employees is dependent on their relationships with team members. Having group outings and team building activities can be crucial here. Even in the case of remote work, virtual happy hours, sending food to the homes of all team members or having a comedy night together can create a sense of belongingness and augment social wellness in the workplace. 

18. Fitness challenges

Any form of a challenge is often well received across organizations. Having a step count challenge or a water drinking challenge or taking the stairs challenge can all inculcate healthy habits in employees and aid their wellbeing. A small reward in the end can make it more exciting and drive greater participation.

19. Employee volunteering

Giving back to society is often full of satisfaction and adds to one’s wellbeing. Choosing a common cause and collective volunteering to create an impact will create avenues for social and mental wellness in the workplace. 

20. Fitness memberships

Offering membership for different fitness platforms can encourage team members to take care of their health. Conventionally, in the form of gym memberships, organizations are now also exploring virtual memberships for platforms which offer activities like zumba, yoga, exercises, etc.

These 20 ideas to promote employee wellbeing and wellness in the workplace have been vastly accepted and have worked for most fast growing organizations. Let’s now quickly explore a few practices that organizations are adopting in the new normal with the rise of remote work and associated challenges to wellbeing. 

How to promote wellness in the workplace during Covid?

Most organizations are struggling with promoting wellness in the workplace during Covid. Fortunately, many forward looking organizations already have strategic interventions in place which are enabling them to promote wellness in the workplace. Here are the best practices that organizations can take inspiration from to build their employee wellbeing strategy for a remote workforce:

Keep communication channels open and encourage interaction‍

One of the major reasons for mental distress among employees is the lack of organizational communication and the ambiguity that comes along. Make sure you constantly communicate with your team and keep them updated about what is going on. Also, depending on your company culture, it might be a good idea to have conversations beyond work and encourage employees to share challenges with one another. ‍

Check mental health pulse‍

It is important to be proactive in gauging mental health and wellness in the workplace. You could either get a professional to help you out or you could explore some organizations specializing in the field of employee experience and seek their help. The idea is to understand the distress level of each employee and focus on a tailor made solution for each. Simply having a mindfulness session will not suffice the need of the hour.

Have an expert on standby‍

It would be a good idea to have a professional psychologist or therapist on call in case any of your employees need it to promote wellness in the workplace. Due to the taboo on mental health and wellbeing, some of your employees might not want to share their problems with one another, but might feel more comfortable sharing with an expert. Give them all the possible options. 

Focus on digital support‍

Finally, with a remote workforce, it is very important to focus on as much digital support as possible. Share de-stressing content in the form of videos. It might be a good idea to even collaborate with a few HR- tech partners that can offer you digital solutions for managing wellness in the workplace. 

Workplace wellness tips for successful execution

By now, there is a clear understanding on the what, why and how of wellness in the workplace. This section will focus on highlighting some workplace wellness tips to ensure the practices shared above are able to reap the intended results. Let’s quickly discuss a few tips to successfully design and execute workplace wellness programs. 

Understand employee pulse and expectations

Organizations need to start the process by gauging employee pulse with surveys. This can include conducting pulse surveys not only to capture how they feel about the initiatives taken by the organization, but to also understand their level of wellbeing. For instance, questions like, ‘How stressed you are at work’ or ‘How often do you have to work on day-offs or beyond work hours’. Conducting such surveys on a regular basis will give a clear and comprehensive picture of what the employee feels is hampering their wellness and how can the gap be bridged. 

Get leadership buy-in and support

For successful workplace wellness programs, it is essential to have the backing and support from the top leadership. Only when the initiatives come from the top and trickle down will they have maximum impact. Additionally, leadership support will ensure significant budgets and investments to create impact. Share studies and in-house results to illustrate the need for wellness initiatives. 

Design the program based on identified priorities

Based on what your employees feel is important for their wellbeing, identify practices from the above ideas and create a full execution plan. Instead of simply saying that we will invest in these 5 or 6 initiatives, create a roadmap for each with timelines, expected results and partners. Also, identify some wellness in the workplace champions to drive the efforts. Communicate the plan across the organization to let team members know about the efforts.

Measure and strategize again

Once you have initiatives underway and execution in full force, it would be a good idea to measure the outcomes and results. For each initiative in place, monitor how well it has been able to augment wellness in the workplace. Don’t forget to communicate these results across to create greater buy-in and satisfaction. It would also be ideal to rethink and replan the strategic interventions at regular intervals. 

Getting started with workplace wellness programs 

The best place to get started with workplace wellness programs would be to understand what employees feel and how well the managers are armed to address any challenges. Partnering with SuperBeings can help organizations achieve holistic wellness for their employees. Working with various fast-growing organizations, SuperBeings can help you gauge what your employees feel about wellness in the workplace, share industry standards to check where you stand as well as provide data-backed insights and action points to facilitate employee wellbeing at the managerial and organizational level. This will enable organizations to create a healthy work environment to nurture high performing employees, facilitate higher retention and gauge reasons for attrition and low productivity. 

Only when organizations proactively strategize and invest in employee wellbeing, can they expect to have a productive workforce in the new normal. In a nutshell, this is an opportune time for organizations to don a fresh lens and reinvent their employee wellbeing strategy to ensure social connect, communication and wellness in the workplace.

Employee engagement is one of the most popular yet misunderstood organizational topics. It’s a key competitive differentiator in the modern business landscape, and unsurprisingly, highly-engaged teams perform much better than their counterparts. 

When we compare teams, we find that the most engaged ones:

• Are 21% more productive
• Experience 59% less turnover
• Have 22% higher profits

That’s not all, they avert inventory shrinkage, have more satisfied customers with an increased workplace safety. A highly-engaged workforce benefits everyone in the company, from individual team members to leadership, as well as customers and other stakeholders. 

Engaged employees work for more than just a paycheck. In this article, we’ll demystify employee engagement, and delve into eight concrete ways in which you can improve employee engagement for your organization.

Put everyone in the right role

As important it is for you to hire a competent and efficient workforce, it is equally important for you to place them in the correct roles depending on their abilities and caliber.

A research found out that 55% of employees value their work and are loyal to their employer depending upon the work they perform. When an employee is not put in place where their skill set can be utilized to its full potential, it leads to the employees getting disinterested and furthermore, disengaged. 

Feedbacks, Rewards, and Recognition

A crucial thing about any work environment is to strengthen positive behavior. This can be done when the individual gets a timely appreciation or is rewarded for his good performance. Giving honest and constructive feedback about a person’s work is also very helpful.  The trick is that it has to happen at the right time, not weeks or months later. The timing of the reward has a role to play in strengthening a behavior. A regular or ongoing feedback mechanism is very crucial for any organization.

By feedback, we don’t just mean an exchange of opinion. As issues surface, there should be a proper mechanism to tackle it. 

Value and Vision 

An essential component of Employee Engagement is to align the core values of an organization with the personal goals of the individual. This helps in motivating the employees to invest their time and energy to the organization.  

Half of the employees would sacrifice their salary, as much as 29% of it, to work a job they enjoy. This makes us realize the importance of keeping the employees aligned with the vision of the organization to ensure they understand the value of their work.

Create a Go-To Communication Channel

Linking this to the feedback point, as important it is for any organization to give and receive feedback. It is equally important to maintain a transparent and convenient communication network in their organization to receive this feedback.

If an employee is able to give his/her inputs in an open environment, it raises the collective efficiency of the team and makes the employees further motivated to make the organization and their work better.

Prioritize Mental and Physical Health 

Your employee's mental health is reflected in productivity, morale, absenteeism, engagement, burnout, customer satisfaction, teamwork, employee complaints, and incivility. Nearly every mental illness begins when an individual's coping skills are inadequate to handle the level of chronic stress experienced. 

An Aon Hewitt survey recently reported that 54% of employees complain about high levels of stress.

It is equally important to take the physical health of your employees into account. Thus, opt for team outing, group activities like table tennis and development of physiological skills in your workplace that can work as a stress buster as well as inculcate a team spirit in your organization.

Provide Training and Coaching

Companies with a higher number of knowledge workers grow at a much higher pace as compared to the competition and their growth is mostly sustainable. Businesses with a strong learning culture enjoy employee engagement and retention rates around 30-50% higher than those that don’t. Training programs, workshops, brainstorming sessions, and focus group discussions can help employees improve their knowledge. In addition, this process provides peer-to-peer learning opportunities that result in improved performance.                                                             

Frequently discuss Engagement

Successful managers are transparent in their approach to improving engagement as they talk about it with their teams all the time. They hold “state of engagement” meetings and “engage” everyone in the discussion and solutions building an engaged and comprehensive environment.

Supply the right tools

One of the most important drivers of employee engagement may also be one of the most overlooked: making sure employees have all the tools they need to succeed in their roles. Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016 report refers to it as providing an “enabling infrastructure” and lists it as the top driver of engagement globally.

Companies with employees who have both the psychological investment in their jobs and the resources to adapt to a changing world are better positioned to survive disruptive market conditions.

Employees are a company's best asset, leaders and managers should make caring for them a priority. Organizations have a valuable opportunity to transform their employees' work experiences into ones that are fulfilling and motivating which will allow workers to bring their best to work every day. If you're looking to create a more engaged and happy work environment for your employees, contact us for a demo.