What do managers need to do to increase employee engagement on a daily basis?

SH : It is common for managers in today’s workforce to not say thank you enough. Employees come to work wanting to contribute as much value as they can to their organization. They want to leave work knowing that someone appreciated their contributions. The unfortunate truth is that, their work is often not validated. It’s a simple thank you that makes a difference in the employee’s life. We massively underestimate the amount of praise we give. Make an effort to recognize excellent performance. Don’t assume you are doing it enough. Too often, managers get caught up in their own workload and forget what truly drives performance, validation and recognition. Conduct lunch and learns to teach managers the impact of recognition, how it affects employee engagement and how to provide specific, timely and meaningful recognition.

How can I train managers to be better coaches and improve on daily recognition?

SH : Once HR recognizes there is a problem with lack of recognition in the workplace, then recognition can become a learning discussion during manager training through industry best practices. The most effective way to train managers is to recognize those managers that are recognizing their employees, which will organically create a culture of recognition. Every three months organizations should be bringing managers together regarding employee engagement in the workplace and share what other departments are doing to drive engagement in order to share best practices and keep building on the culture of recognition. Recognize those managers that are recognizing their teammates and implement leaderboards for top recognizers. There is nothing wrong with a little healthy competition.

We have 700 factory workers who are boomers with no technology interaction. How can we get to them through the 1% solution?

SH : Look at how you currently provide communications services and apply that with computers in break rooms with kiosks. Computers are inexpensive and can easily be implemented within the workplace. There are a number of our clients that use thank you cards that they hand out on the line. Kiosks are located in the lunch areas in order for employees to log-onto and recognize one another or input their reward code. Another advantage of our web-based solution is that it allows everyone to access the platform from anywhere, so they can recognize, redeem and receive their rewards at home or at work.

How can the 1% solution be measured?

SH : Engagement can be measured year-over-year with previous employee engagement/satisfaction scores. If you do not have previous scores, we recommend instituting a new survey on engagement prior to the new program launching. Then survey in quarterly increments to measure employee engagement. Also compare turnover and recruitment cost pre and post program implementation.

How do you engage those not particularly technologically savvy?

SH : The great part of being a SaaS product is that you can disable features or enable features based on the sophistication of your engagement strategy. We have a variety of features that have very simple UI screens that can be taught during lunch and learns or other type of training day in a very short amount of time. To make the process even simpler, offer reward cards that have QR codes on them so that employees can redeem at kiosks and see the recognition on their cards and then the points in their account. Low involvement and very high engagement for the employee as well as high returns for the employer. Win-win!