Employee engagement is critical to building long-term relationships and boosting productivity across your team. And thanks largely in part to the latest technology, employee engagement has improved significantly in the past decade.
Many employee tasks that were previously manual or tedious are now automated, and technology empowers employees to tap into more flexible work arrangements when needed. Below, we’ve outlined benefits of tapping into the latest workplace technology to drive employee engagement.
Support Flexible Work Arrangements
The latest workforce technology has made it more feasible for your employees to have flexible work arrangements – such as working remotely. For example, most employers offer their employees laptops and there are an abundance of chat and video capabilities available to ensure remote employees stay connected – including Google Hangouts, Slack, Skype and Zoom, to name a few.
Recently, in light of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, many employers – and employees – who hadn’t previously experienced a remote work environment have had to quickly learn best practices to thrive as a remote team.
While the circumstances surrounding coronavirus are unprecedented, in normal circumstances, many employees would also benefit from a flexible work environment. For example, a lot of your team members likely have family obligations at home. Your employees want to succeed in their roles while still having time to see their children’s sports games, pick them up for school and participate in other activities. And an increasing number of U.S. employees are looking for more work flexibility to care for aging parents and other relatives.
Top job seekers – whether or not they have family obligations – have work-life balance as a primary consideration when deciding whether or not to accept a job. To stand out and attract qualified employees, consider offering flexible work arrangements. For example, you can allow employees to work remotely one day a week or adjust their work schedules to come in a little late or leave early, pending they don’t have any important meetings or deadlines at the time.
Facilitate seamless onboarding
The last thing any new employee wants to do when they get started is spend the entire first day in the HR office filling out paperwork. Your top, motivated employees in particular will be eager to get started right away with their day-to-day responsibilities. But with the right onboarding technology in place, you can easily kick off onboarding with employees before they even get started.
By partnering with a hiring platform that seamlessly integrates with your other HR systems – such as onboarding, payroll and scheduling platforms – you can make the transition from candidate to employee seamless. With integration between your hiring and onboarding platforms, hiring data is automatically transferred to kick off a digital onboarding process – before the first day on the job.
Digital onboarding steps employees can complete as soon as they sign an offer letter include: signing the employee handbook, filling out direct deposit information for automated payroll, completing tax forms and filling out benefits paperwork.
Sharing this information with employees before the first day can keep them engaged leading up to the start date and helps save time that would have otherwise been spent in the HR office on the first day. And if you have employees who are working remotely, you can ensure they’re set up for success with your onboarding – even if they’re not physically in your workplace.
Simplify Your HR Processes
Employees who are top contributors want to spend their time driving results for your team, not completing manual HR tasks. Starting with onboarding and throughout each employee’s time at your team, you must have effective technology and processes in place to make HR-related tasks as user-friendly as possible. If employees can’t find their pay stubs, or lose track of how many systems they need to log into – such as payroll, benefits, time and attendance and countless other systems – they might get frustrated with your company and seek other job opportunities.
Instead of tapping into several disjointed systems for your HR needs, your team can partner with a seamless hiring, payroll and benefits provider to decrease manual tasks. If an employee changes his or her benefits election or leaves your company, the change will automatically be reflected across your payroll and benefits, rather than your HR team needing to manually make updates and ensure all information is accurate.
Centralize Employee Benefits
Your employees want to have a full understanding of how much your organization is investing in them. It’s a good start to include a list of benefits on your career site or in your offer letters, but to maintain employee engagement, you should also make it easy for employees to access an overview of the benefits you offer.
Employee compensation consists of far more than simply paycheck and salary. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates benefits make up about 37.6 percent of employees’ total compensation. But some employees might not realize just how much your organization is investing in them if they don’t have visibility into their overall benefits statement.
An overall benefits statement enables employees to not only see their paycheck and salary information, but also such benefits as: health insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, flexible spending, life insurance, commuter benefits, retirement benefits, time off, and more. Ultimately, this will make employees feel valued when they have full visibility into how much you’re investing in each of them. As a result, employee engagement will increase and your staff will be motivated to positively contribute to your team.
Keeping top talent engaged doesn’t stop once they’re hired. By tapping into the latest technology, you can boost employee engagement and, as a result, drive positive results or your business. For additional tips on driving engagement from the moment prospective applicants become interested in your open roles, read our resource, “The Hireology Candidate Engagement Playbook.”
