Employee engagement monitoring

Want to reward the best workers, and encourage the rest? Steve Cassidy explores what engagement tools can do for you

Let me guess: is this using AI to keep tabs on our employees?

You’re not far off, but the AI part is, in this case, optional. Employee engagement software is a class defined by its aims, rather than any particular technology, or indeed any industry sector. The key idea is simply to track the behaviour and performance of “good” and “bad” workers, and hopefully encourage the former with prizes and recognition.

So it does mean using technology to spy on workers?

That’s an emotive way to put it, but not a wholly incorrect one. The vendors of these systems like to focus on supporting winners, but a key plank of that is giving managers enhanced visibility of what everyone’s doing. And where there are winners, there will be losers – every league table has a bottom as well as a top.

Who are the dominant players in this sector?

There are a lot of platforms in the employee engagement space, many with clunkily constructed names such as Leapsome, Connecteam and Qualtrics. And there’s no single market leader: the right fit for you will depend on the industry you’re in, the sort of work employees are doing and your own management style; that’s why there are so many packages to choose from. Ultimately, a good indicator of suitability is when a tool maps onto your existing management structure and software portfolio without too much squinting.

Is all this necessary? What’s wrong with a simple performance bonus?

Well, different cultures do things in different ways. One business I examined back in the hedonistic 1990s handed out bonuses to its advertising executives in the form of small baggies of a mysterious white powder. Another company threw a big end-of-year warehouse party where every worker received a personalised mountain bike. The rewards were different, and you’d better believe the achievements they reflected were quite dissimilar.

Even so, do employee engagement tools help in a quantifiable way?

They can – as long as you pick the right product, deploy and implement it in the right way, and make sensible use of the data it collects. It’s a good idea to take a targeted approach: these packages can extend their tendrils into all parts of your business IT assets, but one area where they work well is in simple manufacturing and customer-management industries, where you really can put a number on success. You shouldn’t be needing to invent things to measures, or reasons to give out prizes.

If we’re focusing on raw productivity numbers, what value does the package actually add?

Even if you’re already tracking the important data, an employee engagement suite adds a formalised workflow, for both management and workers, to expose and streamline your employee reward system.

That doesn’t just improve your competitiveness by aligning your employees’ incentives with the company’s goals; if it gives them a realistic way to shoot for decent rewards, it can help attract higherquality employees to do the work.

Would you want to be watched over by one of these systems?

Selling employee engagement tools to the workforce can be a challenge – but again, if you’re worried that it will start a mutiny then that could be an indication that you’re trying to promote the wrong things. The ideal is to drive low-risk, low-impact changes to your workflow that yield worthwhile rewards.