How do you solve the employee engagement challenge?

 

Every year, employees take part in a global tradition – the employee engagement survey. It could be a series of questions answered in longhand, or a bunch of statements scored from 1 to 10. Whatever format yours is in, the outcome is usually the same, no matter what business you sit in.

Once the results from the survey come in, business leaders will usually gather in a meeting room to review the responses. They identify what the business is doing well and what needs to change. Between them, they try to figure out what’s causing the issues and come up with ways to fix them…

“The office is boring, but it wouldn’t be if we had a ping pong table.”

“People are too busy to get away from their desks, so let’s give them free lunches.”

“The work life balance is lopsided, so we should have a bring your dog to work day.”

Despite their best intentions, business leaders can find it challenging to affect significant change. With only the problem, and not the data to understand the why or how, the actions they put in place do not necessarily address the root cause.

Employee engagement surveys are a very important and valuable way to get information. But with plenty of assumptions and biases from leaders and employees alike, they can’t be the single source. You need real data from your business processes to back up your plans for improving employee engagement.

That’s where Workplace Analytics comes in.

Data leads to understanding

Look at the data already in your business. Data that deals with productivity, communication, and collaboration. The ways your people work every day – and how they might be getting in the way of employee engagement.

Workplace Analytics pulls meta-data from your collaboration systems – like your emails, calendar, and instant messages – and turns them into a set of behavioural metrics. With them, you can build a clearer view of how everyone spends their time, and understand the big trends that are happening in your business.

With Workplace Analytics you can:

• Spot the links between survey results and collaboration data. So you can understand exactly what is hindering employee engagement in your business.
• See which teams are working well together, as well as identify potential organisational silos.
• Identify management best practices that are driving higher engagement scores and better outcomes.
• Make better data-driven decisions in your business.

In short, Workplace Analytics helps you see exactly what your employee engagement challenges are. And how you can fix them. If that’s something you think could help you boost employee engagement in your business, let’s talk.

Learn more

The real driver of employee engagement

The key to measuring employee engagement

 

About the author

Having previously worked in Office 365 product marketing and within the Microsoft 365 business group, Stefano is now the Workplace Analytics Lead at Microsoft UK. His role is to help organisations get the most out of the data they already have access to within their business, so they can make smarter, more informed decisions.