Engagement Is About So Much More Than It Used to Be

There’s no doubt that effective engagement has moved far beyond clanging the bell in the office when a deal closes. Inspirus market research found that 86 percent of companies believe their organization should adopt new programs and practices to improve employee engagement.

Yet it’s too often viewed from the perspective of outmoded, narrowly defined technology, models and programs.

Four Examples of Why Employee Engagement Requires a New Approach

1. Many legacy rewards and recognition companies are unable to embrace the new realities of employee engagement.

   The result: Older systems fail to provide more of what matters to employees. Their rewards and recognition tools are less likely to address financial well-being, for example, or enhance your organization’s learning initiatives.

2. Many health and wellness platforms come from the world of insurance carriers or other vendors that don’t live in the world of rewards and recognition.

   The result: Engagement systems that are created to serve the business goals of health insurance carriers or other industries may focus too narrowly on their company’s own business goals. They may not be able to adequately serve or adapt to your broader initiatives, such as well-being, learning programs, etc.

3. Most systems have failed to provide the necessary measurements for ROI or budget controls.

   The result: Leaders have been unable to obtain analytics to make credible arguments to the C-suite for spending money on engagement initiatives. Also, rewards and awards for accomplishments are often applied inconsistently and subjectively across the company, which can cause employee morale to suffer.

4. HR and people leaders have to manage systems built from various vendors.

   The result: You may not get total integration of your engagement initiatives or have complete transparency into your engagement strategy. At the very least, this makes administration of engagement programs and vendor management incredibly burdensome and time-consuming.

   At the worst, a system composed of solutions from multiple vendors makes it incredibly difficult to get meaningful analytics about the impact of engagement programs.