The last two years have brought about several seismic work trends, some for the better and some for the worse. Millions of workers were forced into a remote structure, which is a trend that’s helped plenty of companies but hurt plenty of employees. In particular, employee engagement has dropped significantly since the beginning of the pandemic, which has led to The Great Resignation.
The Great Resignation has been ballooning turnover at countless companies for the past 2 years, and it hasn’t lost momentum. With many organizations embracing remote work, employees have more options and opportunities to pursue to forge their own path, which is a trend that’s throwing some companies into turnover purgatory.
So, if more workers are online-only than ever before, and engagement is lower than ever before, the solution is clear: why not try an Employee Engagement Software?
What is employee engagement software?
“We have to find a way to afford [remote tech], because we’re bringing in enough revenue to do so, whether we have to make some different changes, we have to drop some things, we have to do other things, I think you should come in with the mindset, ‘Let’s not worry about money, we’ll figure out how to pay for it, if it’s the right solution.’”
That’s advice from Focus Technology’s CFO Chris Caprio on the importance of remote engagement tech for the modern workforce – and if a CFO is remarking that something’s essential enough to ignore the budget, you know it’s a big deal.
Employee engagement software provides a solution that your team members can use to give and receive feedback, set and track goals, streamline communication, motivate one another, earn recognition, get to know and connect with their colleagues, and much more. It helps connect your remote, hybrid, on-site and deskless employees in one online community. No matter what, though, your employee engagement software will boost retention and promote your culture.
It can even help you before your new talent is hired by introducing them to their future colleagues and culture, which is critical for retention. Make sure engagement starts as soon as possible – you’ll get a workforce that’s been committed to success since day one.
Employee engagement is the secret ingredient to retention. A Gallup study of about 24,000 businesses found that those from the bottom quartile of engagement scores experienced an average of 40% more turnover than those in the top quartile. As of August 2021, 65% of employed adults were looking for a new job, while 79% say they’re disengaged at work. That’s no coincidence.
Finding your Painpoints
Now the challenge is figuring out what sort of employee engagement software you need, and why you need it. There are two steps to this: figuring out if you have an engagement problem, and figuring out if you have a turnover problem.
There’s no better way to assess your level of employee engagement than asking your team themselves – and hey, a great employee engagement software will have a survey feature built right in!
Asking your workforce to anonymously answer questions about company culture, job satisfaction, and compensation will get you immediate answers regarding what needs to be fixed the most urgently, especially if the questions are left open-ended. Posting surveys on a platform that employees are already gladly using ensures a higher participation rate than when they’re pushed out through emails that may get missed or ignored altogether.
Remember to be specific! Ask questions about their workload, how they feel they fit into their company, burnout, and anything else you think may be contributing to disengagement. Most team members won’t offer too much information up on their own, so it’s best to egg them on through questions from different angles.
Next, let’s determine how you’re doing with employee retention. We’ll be calculating the turnover rate, which is actually more commonly used than the retention rate. There are two main differences between the two. Most importantly, turnover rates include new hires, while retention rates don’t. A lot of turnover is found in new hires who either quickly determine they’re not a good fit for the company, or quickly demonstrate they don’t belong at their position at all.
The other difference is in their typical categorization – turnover usually includes involuntary departures like retirement and terminations while retention usually doesn’t. When you’re looking at turnover, you want a plain and simple picture of who’s leaving the company and how often.
While the definition of turnover is straightforward, calculating the rate isn’t quite so easy. The formula is as follows:
Turnover Rate = # of Separations / Avg. # of Employees x 100
What may stand out to you is the “average # of employees” bit. Let me explain:
SHRM recommends counting the monthly turnover rate and adding each month up to come up with the annual rate. This is because it gives you a clearer picture of when turnover was highest and why – and, believe it or not, it makes the equation a bit easier.
Let’s say a company named EveryoneStays Inc had 20 separations and 16 new hires in 2021, going from 200 employees to 196. The average number of employees, month by month, is 198. If 6 employees happened to leave in July, that would be six separations/an average of 198 employees for a 3.3% turnover rate. That’s on the higher side for them, but they might have had a month with 1 departure, for a .5% turnover rate. Adding all these months up would result in a 9.6% turnover rate, which is excellent for EveryoneStays Inc.
Once you do the math for your company, you’ll get an accurate picture after referencing the national average turnover rates by industry. If your rates are higher than the average, you need to act as soon as possible.
Of course, retention software is still a great investment for those with low turnover!
Your Features Shopping List
Your employee engagement software needs features that not only measure and encourage engagement, but also fuels communication and connectivity. It should be a system that employees want to use regularly. The mistake most HR platforms make is relying on tools for things like benefits, payroll and task assigning that aim to manage performance, when they should be providing tools that enable performance. With that in mind, your shopping list for an employee retention platform should include:
- An Online Social Workplace Community – Creating and enable a community that can engage and connect both remote and on-site workers, featuring a dashboard
- Consistent Recognition – Motivating and engaging your team through constant recognition, whether through your words or a platform’s feature
- Creative Rewards – Taking advantage of an innovative rewards program to give your team tangible prizes and incentives for outstanding achievement
- One-on-ones and Feedback – Developing a culture of feedback through 360° reviews and consistent communication
- Surveys – Filling your team on company activities and letting them influence them
- Learning Management – Promoting your team’s development with continued education
- Dynamic, Online Org Chart – Allowing everyone at the company to get an image of everyone’s position, skills, and contact info all in one place
- Integrations – Combining with essential tools like ADP and Microsoft Teams to maintain your workplace’s flow while enhancing their abilities
Meet HelloTeam – The Employee Retention Platform
As you read this, though, you probably haven’t yet gotten into the research or made your choice. We’d like to save you some time – there’s only one solution we know of that meets all these criteria, and that’s HelloTeam.
HelloTeam is employee engagement software that’s proven to beat turnover and boost retention for workplaces of all types. Our system has been engineered to perfectly fit today’s mix of remote, hybrid, and in-office companies without sacrificing any engagement or productivity. We truly bring you employee engagement software that’s actually built for the employee.
Our unique combination of connected goals, diverse integrations, manager-employee one-on-ones, learning, engagement surveys with instant people analytics, and real-time peer recognition empowers every employee to connect with and contribute to their culture wherever they work. This drives employee retention while making HR teams and managers more productive, giving your organization the competitive edge it needs.
The HelloTeam difference brings all these features to a social workplace intranet, which other similar platforms don’t support. Filling a workplace intranet with tools like surveys that employees want to use sets us apart from competitors that offer tools like timesheets that employees are forced to use. Your team should be happy to use their HR software. They will be with HelloTeam.
With 4.8 stars out of 5 on G2.com and over 100 5-star reviews to read through, HelloTeam is a proven industry leader that can transform your workplace from the ground up. If you want to improve retention, build culture, and engage your workforce, you can schedule a demo with HelloTeam right here and finish your shopping for good!