How to crush your employee engagement goals with Unily

The secret sauce to employee engagement

Highly engaged employees are happier, more fulfilled at work, and more productive in driving outstanding results in their organization. When employee engagement peaks, customer experience follows suit, with improved innovation, increased efficiency and enhanced alignment all trickling down to create happier customers and a healthier bottom-line.

But meeting that engagement utopia isn’t an easy thing to achieve. Internal comms professionals and their surrounding teams must drive engagement within an increasingly dispersed workforce and digitally-fragmented working world. There is also a large amount of flux in employee expectations, with the power balance shifting – and organizations realizing that the bilateral relationship between engagement and performance is vital.

Any successful employee engagement strategy must operate using multichannel communications, intuitively geared and targeted to audience segments, and a reliable technical architecture holding everything together.

Improving employee engagement starts with setting the right goals for your people and executing against them with the right strategy and technology to take engagement to new heights. Before we look at how Unily helps to crush engagement goals, let’s start with how to set the right goals to put you on the path to success.

How to set impactful employee engagement goals?

The tried and tested method of setting effective and productive objectives is the S.M.A.R.T methodology. This approach has five components to setting goals. Our engagement goals must be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Let’s explore each component in a little more depth:

Specific
Engagement goals need to be specific. They should detail exactly what you’re aiming for in a focused way, avoiding jargon. For example, using action-orientated language is always a great idea.

Measurable
Measurement is crucial for proving that the goal has been met. For an engagement goal to be measurable, a numerical metric must be applicable to it. For example, a percentage, frequency, rate of improvement, or number.
By applying analytical method to our engagement goal, we can accurately track the recorded outcomes in relation to our objective. This step is important for evidencing return on investment.

Achievable
We need to set engagement goals that are essentially doable if we have the right resources (time, finance, personnel) and similar results have been seen by others. It is vital for your internal communications team’s motivation that they don’t feel the engagement goal is out of reach.
Alternatively, we must also ensure that the goals we set aren’t too low-bar. This will cause demotivation and disillusionment across the relevant teams tasked with driving them. It’s all about that sweet spot in between.

Relevant
The engagement goals you set must be relevant to the team(s) tasked with driving their success. They should align to the correct level of the organization and your organization’s overall vision and purpose.

Time-bound
As much as we may hate them, deadlines work. They create a sense of urgency and allow us to plot or action specific work at the right time. They will also provide a lazer-like focus to your comms team and boost motivation.
It’s also a great idea to set individual milestones along the way to greater engagement goal. This will keep you on track across a wider time period, and ensure key steps aren’t missed.

Now, let’s decide on an example set of engagement goals

So, you’ve applied the S.M.A.R.T methodology. It’s time to put pen to paper. We have devised a set of five key engagement goals that will be relevant to most organizations.

• Enterprise and employee, aligned in harmony
• Nurturing a culture to believe in
• Empowered people with sharpened productivity
• Smooth-out digital friction
• Elevated engagement that speaks to your people

#1. Enterprise and employee, aligned in harmony

Engagement starts with alignment. Before your people can contribute effectively to your enterprise’s success, they need to understand and invest in your company’s mission, vision and values. But with so many different workforce segments, all working in different ways, possibly even speaking different languages, communicating a consistent message to every employee is the first challenge to overcome.

Organizations need a sophisticated platform to communicate across channels and reach every employee with powerful messages tailored to them. For employees to reach mutual understanding of the company strategy, they need a trusted place to access this information, supplemented by distribution mechanisms that keep them up to date with the latest and greatest.

A central platform, accessible by everyone

Siloed information is the enemy of alignment, so step one to achieving alignment across the workforce is getting everyone reading from the same hymn sheet – and that means getting everyone on the same platform. Unily helps large enterprises connect people and purpose with a central hub that’s accessible by everyone. Whether a frontline app user, or a corporate desk-based employee, equitable access is the first step to achieving alignment across the workforce. 

With desktop and app experiences that work in tandem, Unily solves for equitable access by giving everyone equal opportunity to consume and engage. Unily removes language as a barrier to alignment with automatic translation capabilities that mean every piece of content can be understood by every employee around the globe.

Intelligent content distribution to unite your channels

But simply having a platform to house company strategy and the stories that bring it to life isn’t enough. Today employees expect the information they need to come to them in a way that suits them and doesn’t interrupt the flow of their day. A multichannel strategy is key to reaching everyone with the right message at the right time.

With Unily, you don’t just have to tools to centralize dynamic content, you also have the keys to distribute it intelligently across multiple channels. Leverage email broadcasting, mobile push notifications, Teams and Slack integrations, mandatory reading features, in-platform alerts and notifications to send personalized updates to your people that meet them on their preferred channel. To deliver a consistent message, you need to Unite your channels, and that’s where Unily comes to the fore.

At Shell, connecting a diverse workforce of 80k employees with company strategy was the challenge that motivated their partnership with Unily.

The perfect recipe for alignment? We think so.

#2. Nurturing a culture to believe in

The workforce is evolving. Gen-Z and millennial workers are soon to dominate the labour pool, and that means the quality of your company culture is more important than ever. Connection to culture is a fundamental part of employee engagement, and in today’s disconnected workplace, culture must adapt and be nurtured through digital tools.

Bringing employees together around shared values and fuelling connection and collaboration in an increasingly dispersed workforce cannot be achieved without powerful technology.

A social platform to connect communities

Unily helps enterprises to transform culture for the digital age with a consumer-grade, socially-enabled platform that unites dispersed employees and underpins culture transformation.

Our public and private channels, social integrations, and in-depth user profiles offer your employees the chance to curate a digital identity and make their voices heard. You can also nourish innovation with our ideation hub – giving your employees the ability to contribute ideas that make them feel seen, heard and invested in the growth of your business.

Kudos, badges & gamified recognition

By democratizing reward and recognition across the platform, Unily gives your people the tools to spotlight their colleague’s impressive achievements or recognize the little things that matter all the same. By building a culture of appreciation with Unily, your organization can support its people to live out its strategic values every day. Kudos points, badges, leaderboards, and celebration of successful work are just some of the ways Unily can help you nurture a culture your people can believe in.

The Estée Lauder Companies is crushing their culture goals with Unily, utilizing social channels, dedicated sites, and rich communications to bring their values to life and empower their people to build internal communities.

Find out more about ELC’s award-winning platform by downloading the MyELC case study.

#3. Empowered people with sharpened productivity

If you can empower your people to do their best, most fulfilling and impactful work, you will have achieved something amazing. People want to feel empowered to do their best. They flourish when they have what they need to perform at the top of their game, it’s simple psychology.

Google-like search for the enterprise

You can boost productivity among your workforce with Unily’s robust, intelligent search centre. By consumerizing your people’s experience of finding what they need, you can bring what matters to the surface. Our powerful search does the work, so your people can stay focused on all the other important bits.

By bringing together all knowledge bases across the platform, pinpointing information with intelligent filters or refiners, and fine-tuning relevancy, Unily’s sleek search unearths exactly what your people need sharpening their productivity every time. Thoughtful design, targeted content, and human-centric UX will also take your employee’s productivity to dizzying heights.

Unily’s beautifully crafted user interface makes finding what you need, fast a breeze. With an experience so good your people will keep coming back for more, how could their productivity not skyrocket?

#4. Smooth-out digital friction

Have you heard of the toggling tax? We have and it is frustrating thousands of employees every day as they lose valuable time and become increasingly irritated at repeatedly switching between apps and applications. Wouldn’t the employee experience platform be a better place if all those complicated systems and tools spoke to each other?

Plug-and-play integrations

Unily has designed a seamlessly integrated platform to end app toggling and give your people the consumer-grade digital experiences they deserve. We unite business applications from Workday, Slack, SharePoint and Salesforce to okta, DropBox, Teams or ServiceNow into a single pane of glass experience. One platform to rule them all!

This means your employees can save precious time switching between applications, minimizing digital friction and delighting your people with an experience that simply works. We have also established a feature store to simplify plug-and-play installation, seamlessly connecting your people to more useful tools for their everyday. And the best bit is, our feature store is constantly growing with enhancements or new add-on options.

For Shell, integrating third-party systems into a centralized platform was a key objective for their Unily partnership. With hundreds of apps and tools used across the business, being able to bring everything together into a single-pane-of-glass experience enabled a productivity increase which the enterprise equates to a $42m annual saving.

By enabling multichannel comms you can also ease digital friction and reliably reach your people anywhere. Our enterprise-ready interface also makes catering to complex requirements a piece-of-cake, and we mean it.

Calm your people with an experience that works and banish digital friction for good.

#5. Elevated engagement that speaks to your people

It’s no secret that personalized experiences increase engagement. Too often, the communications experiences your employees get vs your customers are worlds apart. Where customers are taken on personalized journeys that nurture their relationship with your brand, employees are left with sub-par experiences that make them feel second best.

It’s time to apply the same level of granular personalization to the employee experience as the customer experience, and this is where Unily brings its A-game.

Consumer-grade employee journeys to amplify engagement

Aside from our OOTB personalization and targeting features, and consistently award-winning UX, it’s Unily’s latest innovation that really bring marketing-grade experiences to the enterprise.

Our amplify module focuses on leveraging automation to optimize engagement, and take your people on personalized journeys that build towards the desired outcomes.

By enabling Unily’s journeys functionality, we can design and automate journeys at every stage of the employee lifecycle to boost engagement. From onboarding, to upskilling, to celebrating career milestones, journey automation lets your design and orchestrate dynamic, repeatable campaigns that recognize and support moments that matter to the individual employee.

With dynamic enrolment, a personalized journey timeline with considered, conditional events, you can speak directly to your people at a more granular level. Our journeys execute via multi-channel approach so your people can track engagement across a wealth of apps and tools. By setting intelligent engagement goals, and then measuring with benchmarking to fine-tune your journeys – you can truly elevate your employee experience to speak directly to your people.

Crushing your engagement goals doesn’t have to be hard. Trust us.

Successfully engaging your people across a set of well thought-through goals should be a non-negotiable. If you feel that your current intranet is holding you back from doing just that, it might be time for a change. At Unily we know what world class looks like. We know that a modern employee experience platform should offer a fully connected suite of tools. We know that you want the power to make your platform completely your own. We can help you design and craft an employee experience to blow your people away. We’re ready. Are you?