What your intranet can tell you about employee engagement

Emerging engagement challenges in the new world of work

While cultivating a compelling employee experience was always challenging, the global pandemic and the transition to remote working have added another layer of complexity. Workplace engagement levels have taken a hit in recent months, dropping to an all-time low, with 54% of employees disengaged.

As employee engagement dwindles, sentiments of overwork and isolation are on the rise. Nearly 60% of employees note that they feel disconnected from colleagues when working remotely and 93% of HR leaders are increasingly concerned about employee burnout.

Since remote working is here to stay, leaders need to devise new engagement strategies that will set their employees up for success in the hybrid environment. But when you’re in uncharted territory, how can you ensure that your approach will get the results you’re looking for?

Using digital technology to give your employees what they want

The secret to improving engagement is deceptively simple: ask your employees what they’re looking for and listen to them. However, gauging employee sentiment can become difficult because some of your people might hold back on telling you the hard truth. In fact, only 21% of employees feel comfortable being entirely honest about the details of what they want from their workplace experience.

Rather than relying on a single channel, leaders need to leverage as many forms of feedback as possible. That includes not only the commonly utilized annual survey, but also non-traditional listening techniques like sentiment analysis, social recognition, and feedback channels.

Increased digitization of the employee experience presents us with new opportunities to collect and analyze data on employee engagement. Modern intranets have the analytics capabilities and feedback channels needed to build a detailed picture of employee sentiment in real time. 

5 employee engagement insights you can learn from your employee experience platform

What exactly can your employee experience platform tell you about how your people are really feeling? By leveraging built-in analytics capabilities, you can learn what your employees truly care about and even monitor their reactions in real-time. Your employee experience platform can provide the following takeaways:

#1. Discover what resonates

Most internal comms professionals understand that their audiences put a premium on relevancy, especially when they are pressed for time. While some content may speak to specific audiences, it’s not always easy to predict which messages will resonate most. Take the guesswork out of your content strategy by leveraging analytics to learn what each sub-audience is looking for. Break down statistics on the number of views, likes, and comments your content receives based on department or team to uncover user preferences and finetune your approach.

#2. Make sure you’re reaching your frontline

Engaging frontline teams is an ongoing challenge. When it comes to satisfaction rates for your deskless colleagues, the statistics are less than ideal: 84% of frontline workers feel like they’re not kept properly informed and 50% don’t understand the strategy of the company they work for.

Many leaders acknowledge that improving frontline engagement is linked with significant benefits, including a 12% increase in customer loyalty rates. But what does it take to drive lasting change? The first step to enhancing frontline engagement is to understand where your deskless teams are coming from.

What percentage of frontline employees are connecting to your intranet via mobile? And when they do, what kind of content are they reading? Analytics can answer these questions, in turn helping internal communicators devise a content strategy specifically for deskless teams. With real-time analytics, you can even track when frontline employees are most likely to be reading content and use these insights to inform the timing of your messages.

#3. Learn whether your users are getting the answers they need

Now more than ever, your people need knowledge at their fingertips. As the pace of change accelerates, employees rarely have a minute to waste. In an ideal world, your digital workplace should pave the way for improved productivity by offering users near-instantaneous access to key knowledge.

If you want to make sure that your search experience stacks up, look no further than your intranet’s analytics capabilities. You can learn how often your users are running searches and what terms are most frequently searched for, so that you know what content needs to be front and center. To take user satisfaction to the next level, give employees the option to rate their search experience with a thumbs up or thumbs down, or include a feedback form so that everyone can share their opinions.

#4. Uncover the social initiatives that get results

In the hybrid era, you can’t rely on the office water cooler to serve as the hub for socialization. Instead, leaders need to actively work to keep employees connected and cultivate a sense of camaraderie amongst peers.

Virtual initiatives like talent shows, trivia nights, and book clubs are gaining traction, but how can you know which events are really making an impact? Look to analytics to reveal how many users are reading the content you put out around various initiatives and the reaction and comment count on related content. Get an idea of how many people are participating in various events and use these insights to inform future social opportunities.

#5. Evaluate and improve cross-functional collaboration

Hybrid working can take a toll on collaboration. Since the start of mass-scale remote working, the ability to meet and brainstorm has dropped by 11%. Your Digital HQ should encourage employees to break out of their bubbles and connect with colleagues in various departments to achieve the best results.

If you want to see just how many people are putting these collaborative practices into action, review the number of user profile searches that are being conducted on your employee experience platform. Social commenting and tagging can also provide clues into just how connected your internal network really is.

Take the guesswork out of analytics with feedback forms

Analytics will pinpoint your audience’s interests and highlight the content types that perform best, but what about the why behind these choices? To gain a comprehensive understanding of employee sentiment, you need to combine metrics with qualitative user satisfaction measures like feedback forms.

Employee surveys will put your analytics results into context and shed light on the engagement trends behind the numbers that you’re seeing. With both analytics and form development capabilities built-in, an employee experience platform can uncover key insights that will shape the future of your engagement strategy.

Level up employee engagement with analytics and forms

While there’s no secret formula for enhancing engagement, you can use analytics to unlock the hidden insights that will pave the way for a superior employee experience. If you’re looking to leverage a next-generation intranet to upgrade your engagement strategy, get in touch with our digital workplace experts.