Seventh Stop - How does Software Companies Enhance their Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is described in HR literature as, the enthusiasm that employees feel about their work (Roberts & Davenport, 2002). When you improve employee engagement, you improve performance and thereby increase your own value as an HR professional (Chow, 2019).

HR teams can take some important steps to ensure better employee engagement and effective communication. Here are some important drivers followed by product-based software companies on employee engagement:

• Develop clear internal lines of communication and execute the strategy effectively within the company.

Getting your employees on board with your business strategy will effectively make every person in the company a valuable brand ambassador who can help further improve the business goals (Anon., n.d.).Therefore software companies that do are like maintain cloud-based documents that outline the strategy. Implement training programs that emphasize actionable ways to implement the business strategy. Managers call upon meetings to the team weekly manner and give updates about the company strategies and goals confirming that employees at every level have their voices heard and questions answered.

• Recognize the efforts made by employees on various grounds and reward them well.

Recognizing the efforts of employees and ensuring regular feedback is essential for retaining the passion of engaged employees – and preventing the negative impact of disengaged ones (Hall, 2017). This can happen in two ways in a software company as peer-to-peer recognition and manager-to-employee recognition. Most of the time if an employee has made an exceptional effort in their job, perhaps helping to carry a project or staying after hours to assist a colleague, they can send tokens of their appreciation to that person. In the manager level, they arrange team outings/dinner outs and spare their time with his subordinates to appreciate their good work and dedication.

• Use a workforce communication platform to integrate your communication channels (intranet, email, mobile app, etc.) 

This will help you to target, personalize, and measure your internal communications. This will help you understand how best to communicate with your employees on the channel of their choice and will vastly improve your employee engagement (Brook, 2019). At IFS they have their own ‘Workplace’ which is very similar to Facebook where each employee can share their work experience, achievements, how they covered targets and met deadlines, etc. So, it is a place where every employee can engage and share their thoughts, appreciate each other and most importantly they can get to know each other globally. 

Finally, if you want to create effective engagement and communication as an HR professional, you need to adopt a clear, confident mindset. To increase the employee experience and improve communications, leaders need to cultivate this trust with engagement and the idea of “working as one.”

References

Anon., n.d. USC Annenberg. [Online]
Available at: https://communicationmgmt.usc.edu/blog/role-internal-communications-business-strategy/
[Accessed 4 June 2019].

Brook, J., 2019. Social Chorus. [Online]
Available at: https://www.socialchorus.com/employee-engagement-key-to-company-success/
[Accessed 4 June 2019].

Chow, C., 2019. Social Chorus. [Online]
Available at: https://www.socialchorus.com/are-you-ready-to-get-serious-about-improving-employee-engagement/
[Accessed 4 June 2019].

Hall, B., 2017. Interact. [Online]
Available at: https://www.interact-intranet.com/blog/thanksgiving-at-work-the-importance-of-employee-recognition/
[Accessed 4 June 2019].

Kahn, W. A., 2013. Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work. The Academy of Management Journal, 33(4), pp. 692-724.

Roberts, D. R. & Davenport, T. O., 2002. Wiley Online Library. [Online]
Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ert.10048
[Accessed 4 June 2019].