The issue of employee engagement has been a popular conversation in recent years in the Learning and Development community, as employers are constantly seeking new ways to improve commitment in the workplace. The 2017 Trends in Global Employee Engagement Report, which covered more than five million employees at over 1,000 organisations around the world, showed that less than one quarter of employees are highly engaged and in a single year, employee engagement globally dropped from 65% in 2015 to 63% in 2016.
Engagement within the workplace is vital as it involves employees being committed to their job role and working to their full potential, whilst adhering company values and goals and contributing to their organisation’s success. Companies with engaged employees outperform those without them by 202%, taken from Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/17/reversing-low-employee-engagement-in-manufacturing/#5dbcb82c28f0). Therefore, indicating how valuable engagement is to an organisation. But, how can you tell if your employees are becoming disengaged? Some signs might include lower quality work compared to others, falling behind deadlines and little interest in their personal or professional growth.
We at Wranx make it one of our aims to engage and motivate employees in regards to their training at work, in turn improving levels of employee engagement and, ultimately, business performance! But in what ways do we achieve this?
Engaging
We make our learning platform engaging in various ways. Firstly, our dedicated Content Team can convert our clients existing content, meaning lengthy, intimidating training materials get transformed into shorter, bite-sized learning. This results in training becoming appealing to disengaged employees, as the content is more digestible and relevant to the individual.
In addition to this, we utilise gamification to make training more engaging. The emerging trend is effective because it leverages the motivations and desires that exist in people for achievement, reward, community, and feedback. We implement hidden achievements and badges on our platform that can be unlocked by certain actions, in hopes to encourage our Users to be consistent with their daily Drills.
We also have leaderboards to introduce friendly competition between colleagues and our Seinfeld Chain encourages daily participation in training. The Seinfeld Chain records every day Users log in to complete training and each time you log in, a day is added to your Seinfeld Chain. When you don’t log in for a day, the chain breaks and goes back down to zero. The idea is to challenge employees to produce the longest chain.
Engagement
Our learning platform can also help clients identify disengaged employees through our in-built analytics feature which track engagement levels. Organisations can see the different levels to which employees are engaging with Wranx and the cumulative training data for particular Drills, which include Session Duration or Questions Answered. These actionable insights can then help our clients understand what areas of training needs improvement.
Engaged
Finally, we make it a priority to remain engaged with our Users. We do this through our in-app communication service, we like to call ‘the bubble’. We send out a variety of messages to Users, including brief explanations behind our learning techniques of Spaced Repetition or just general encouragement to finish their Drills! The bubble also allows us to engage with Users and obtain valuable feedback about their experience on the platform. Our team is also available throughout the week to help with any technical issues or queries.
So, it is clear to see that employee engagement is a growing issue within the workplace, but there are ways to tackle this. We combat the issue through making our platform and content engaging, through utilising metrics that track engagement levels and, finally, by making sure we are engaged with our Users! Higher engagement levels is vital to the growth of any business and encouraged participation and collaboration between employees will ultimately drive business performance.
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