According to Gallup, companies with highly-engaged employees outperform their competition by 147%.* Yet, 87% of employees worldwide do not feel engaged.**

Ask yourself:

• Can you confidently say how engaged your employees are?
• Do you effectively measure engagement in your organization?
• What is your base for comparison?

These are important questions to consider when dipping your toe into the employee engagement arena.  Fishbowl Solutions has been working to help our customers improve employee engagement for many years with our award-winning solutions.

Employee experience considers­­­­­­­­­ engagement at all touchpoints throughout the employee lifecycle. Employee engagement is the end goal while employee experience is the means to that end. Thus, taking the “intranet portal” experience to the next level.

Evolution in Employee Engagement

The pursuit of a more engaged workforce depends on the consistency in delivering results. You need to use reliable, well-defined indicators to serve as guideposts to get to where you want to be. Over the last several years, Fishbowl has been involved in many portal/intranet solutions for our customers. From basic intranets to Digital Workplaces, the desire was the same: to provide a solution by which employees can be informed and provide a foundation for key functionality-like self-service capabilities (via integrations), employee directories, and search to drive engagement.

Employee engagement is a state of functioning within an organization, in which employees are motivated to contribute to the company’s success. They give their best and make additional efforts to accomplish important tasks to reach objectives.

With this in mind, we can roughly categorize employees into three types:

• Engaged – They are very enthusiastic about their situation and their employer. They consistently give their best and make significant efforts.
• Non-engaged – They show poor emotional allegiance. They contribute to the company, but at a minimal level.
• Disengaged – They are not at all invested in their work. Sometimes, they even actively work against their company. This set shows a much higher rate of absenteeism.

Understanding these three categories with your employee base helps define your strategy and features for an engagement portal. You’ll need to target experiences that hit upon all three with a focused approach to each.

The New Wave

As Fishbowl looks to enable organizations to implement and increase employee engagement, we focus on the following segments of the employee engagement spectrum to meet your company’s objectives.

Within these segments the following characteristics are key to a successful employee engagement platform and can be implemeted within your technology eco-system:

Measuring Employee Engagement

A decisive moment for improving employee engagement is learning how to receive and adapt to employee feedback. Without objective measures, there is no way of knowing if your efforts are working. Plan on tracking over time (quarter over quarter, year over year, etc.). Leverage a Dashboard to show  results for leadership and even publish the metrics to your site/app.  Metrics can be baked into the solution to give better insights.

Capturing metrics during the employee engagement timeline, within the features outlined above, can be of tremendous value in understanding where your engagement might sit today and eventually trend as time passes.

When it comes to back-end system integration, your source systems that would enable this platform will come in a variety of forms and technologies.  It is essential to evaluate how you can meet your goals and whether a singular platform will meet expectations of the employee experience you are looking for.   Providing a layer of integration between systems will help phase in experiences that require information form other sources.

Lastly your organization needs to be able to define what employee engagement looks like and decide how to accomplish it. Inability to do so prevents having good conversations around achieving these goals. Inevitably, a strategic plan is necessary.

Fishbowl’s Newest Offering

Fishbowl’s newest offering in this space is Atlas – an employee engagement platform designed to empower global workforces. Inspiration and ideas have been taken from modern, leading social and business platforms such as Yammer, Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter, and Google to create an integrated, uniformed, and brandable platform.

Atlas allows employees to:

• Access personalized content
• Manage personal profile
• Find and follow company influencers
• View the latest information on company initiatives
• Instantly communicate and share socially with their co-workers
• Engage with a library of training videos and social content
• Locate a coach or mentor and liaise with documents, video, and chat.
• Empower back-of-house HR staff to update and push content locally and globally
• Access the knowledge portal and interact with intelligent digital assistants to provide first line support
• Access social walls for microblogging

Atlas is the one-stop hub for all things and its purpose is to ensure that staff members feel engaged with the company, have a voice, and can feel connected.

Want to learn more? In our next blog entry, we’ll explore a real-life use case on how to enable employee engagement via a mobile application.

Footnotes: The Gallup studies mentioned above can be found on the Gallup website, and more specifically, through the below links.

* https://www.gallup.com/workplace/284180/factors-driving-record-high-employee-engagement.aspx

** https://www.gallup.com/services/190118/engagedworkplace.aspx