Welcome to the guide on employee engagement best practice. Here are tips on what we think you should be doing to get the best engagement from your staff, drive retention and improve your customer service.
Ask
The first step, before making any changes to how you engage with your workforce, is finding out how your workforce is feeling.
Pulse Surveys can be used to ask short, recurring questions to your workforce. Employees are more likely to answer when one or two questions are asked at a time rather than the historical ‘end of year’ survey. The surveys appear right inside the Quinyx mobile app that employees use multiple times a day and reminders can be issued to them so they don’t forget. You can select from one of our predefined questions or set your own, as well as different response scales, like emojis, numbers or free text. Answers can be anonymous, should you wish, and you can schedule questions in advance or repetitive cycles.
Remember, asking the right questions is only the first step, the next is to ensure you take action on the results, which can be emailed to you for analysis.
Communicate
Communication is key in any relationship, including those in the workplace. Qmail is Quinyx’ communication system. One of the best ways to ensure reliable communication of changes to schedules is to automate the process as much as possible. Qmail will help you avoid situations where WhatsApp or other messaging services are being used unofficially by teams to communicate.
Quinyx can automate communication to both employees and managers, notifying any changes to their schedules or employees requests. Qmail can also be used to send 1-1 or group messages, keeping communication between colleagues simple and easy. Marking a message as important will also ensure it pops up in the mobile app or webpunch time clock for acknowledgement before any other action is taken.
News broadcasts are also possible, providing a way to share information, pictures, videos and more to the whole organisation, or a part of it without cluttering an employee's personal messaging inbox.
Reward & Recognition
Keeping the workplace fun can help drive engagement levels. Using Badges, employees and managers can reward each other with a badge that recognises a specific achievement, or simply calls someone out for being a great colleague. Each badge can only be sent every thirty days to prevent overuse and a message can be entered to accompany the delivery of the badge. Employees who receive badges also have a unique icon placed beside their profile picture across Quinyx to show that they have been recognised by a colleague.
Flexibility
Flexibility can also drive engagement in many ways. It could be related to more flexible working patterns, how absences or swaps are handled (or even offered), and even pay. Tools like MySaly (an early access wage tool that is part of the Quinyx family) can allow employees to withdraw salary early from the shifts they have already worked. This can avoid someone needing money from taking a payday loan. MySaly can be completely controlled by the company, letting the business restrict how often and how much money can be withdrawn. Findings suggest that companies offering tools like MySaly find that employees are more enthusiastic to pick up more shifts.
The key to understanding what type of flexibility may benefit your workforce the most, is of course to ask for their input, but in the meantime, check out our Scheduling best practices to find out how easy it is to add flexible workflows to your schedules.
Tools
Providing the right tools is of course an essential part to keeping your workforce engaged with business interactions. With mobile apps as the default for almost everything now, it's fair to say that for a large part, there is an expectation from the workforce that they should be able to interact with their workplace the same way. Quinyx’ mobile app is the most feature rich in the market, combining all of the features mentioned above, and more, in an incredibly user friendly interface. We know our users open the app multiple times a day to interact with their workplaces, making our app the perfect place to communicate and engage with your employees. But don’t just take our word for it, check out our high rating on the App and Google Play stores.
Find out more about engagement, or alternatively get in touch so we can start a conversation today.