Employee engagement is a metric most human resource (HR) departments use to gauge employees’ dedication and enthusiasm toward the business and their work. It also tries to measure how they exactly feel about their efforts and others.
Most companies favor engaged employees as they’re believed to be more loyal and productive business members. However, if you have a rather large company, finding and identifying if you have engaged employees in your ranks can be challenging. Thankfully, you can find them through workforce intelligence.
What is workforce intelligence?
Workforce intelligence is one process HR departments do. It involves the collection of employee data, which HRs use to manage employee-related matters. With workforce intelligence analytics, you can find engaged employees and discover how to convert the disengaged ones.
If you’re new to all of this, you will want to continue reading to know the ways you can use workforce intelligence to improve your company’s employee engagement.
- Start employee resource groups (ERGs)
With workforce intelligence, it will be much easier for you to group employees who share similar characteristics. Assigning them ERGs will encourage them to engage more with other employees. While ERGs don’t instantly create engaged employees, they can open them up to changes and make them feel more visible.
- Push innovations
Make it public that you want everyone to be innovative to help the company reach its goals. You can use your workforce intelligence to find weak areas in your company that your employees can focus on and apply any innovative ideas they have.
Allowing your employees to participate in these activities allows them to contribute to the company, making them feel good. As a result, they can be more engaged and even become more passionately attached to their job.
- Work on employee feedback
As one of the HR automation best practices, gathering employee feedback is where workforce intelligence shine. With it, you can aggregate opinions and comments about the company from your employees.
While sifting through all of them, you can segregate employee engagement, such as company culture, work motivation, and overall morale. Focus on the issues connected to those to ensure you can make your employees more engaged with their work and the company.
- Promote mental and physical health
Aside from employee feedback, workforce intelligence can let you also figure out your employees’ physical and mental well-being. While you can’t pry on what they’re suffering from, you can make it a point to make your workplace a much safer and healthier place for them.
On the other hand, you can sponsor outings and team-building ideas. In addition to boosting your employees’ physical and mental health, they would also be thankful for the sponsorship and the thought behind the health-oriented events you initiated. Also, these activities may let you discover your team’s strengths, know how you can coach them to become more engaged, and address inclusion and diversity issues. (1)
- Start employee recognition programs
Workforce intelligence can allow you also to monitor the performance of your employees. If you want to make them happier and more engaged with your company, you should make sure that they are always rewarded when they do good work. And you can make that happen if you start employee recognition programs. (2)
Employee recognition programs can be as simple as mentioning your performing employees in your company’s social media accounts or as elaborate as giving out an employee of the month or year award or monetary bonuses. (2)
- Focus on disengaged employees
Checking employee feedback from your workplace intelligence not only lets you find engagement problems in your company, but it will also help you find disengaged employees. Once you find them, it would be better to take matters into your own hands and talk to them. (3)
You can personally ask them the reasons why they’re not that engaged like their coworkers. Ask them what they need from you. Do they feel isolated in the workplace? Do they think that their work is meaningless?
- Find better managers or train new ones
Your workers’ performance isn’t the only aspect that you should monitor in your workforce intelligence. You should also track how your managers and coaches are doing. Unlike you, their primary role is to take care of their subordinates and ensure that everyone’s engaged. (3)
If you feel that they’re not doing their job, maybe it’s time to replace them. On the other hand, you may want to send them off to training camps or seminars to become better with employee management and disengaged employee conversion. (3)
Conclusion
It’s OK to focus on your customers, products, and services. However, don’t forget about your employees. If you want to ensure your business will be in operation for a long time, you should ensure that you have engaged employees. If you think you don’t, then be sure to do all the ways mentioned here to utilize workforce intelligence to improve your company’s employee engagement rate.
References
- “What Is Employee Engagement and How Do You Improve It?” Source: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/285674/improve-employee-engagement-workplace.aspx#ite-285791
- “Complete Guide To Building Successful Employee Recognition Programs”, Source: https://www.octanner.com/insights/articles/2019/4/3/your_comprehensive_g.html
- “How To Improve Employee Engagement”, Source: https://www.quantumworkplace.com/future-of-work/how-to-improve-employee-engagement
