The Modern Leaders Way To Employee Engagement

February 2, 2021

The science behind employee engagement has evolved.

Gone are the days of annual and quarterly surveys. It used to be that a manager had to guess at the level of employee engagement. However, times have changed. Organisations who are pioneering in employee experience do so by taking the proverbial pulse of their teams by what’s now known as pulsing.

If you’ve not heard, pulsing is the practice of using short, frequent surveys, or check-ins, to get valuable feedback. Pulsing employees removes the guesswork from employee engagement by procuring vital information in real-time. This form of surveying has proven to help employee engagement and boost retention. It gives leadership the insights they need to make data-driven decisions, improving company culture and ensuring employees thrive.

Welcome To The Era of Hyper-Communication

Today’s leaders’ are challenged to actively engage their team in a meaningful way has challenges and opportunities. Many organasations now embrace instant messaging apps such as Whatsapp and Facebook messenger to bridge the communication gap and keep remote teams connected and collaborating. This trend of instant communication has accelerated due to the pandemic; however, many companies have turned to technology tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams to keep teams productive and employees engaged. Now introduce pulsing to these direct forms of communication and modern leaders are finding they can accurately measure their teams’ health without skipping a beat.

How Pulsing Works

Managing teams in the environment that we are in now, it’s imperative that leaders show they are available to employees and proactively listen to their teams. Through a daily pulse survey, employees find their needs are being met in real-time versus at some future date that may or may not ever come.

Pulse surveys, such as the employee engagement software HappyTeams has perfected, works through an organisations preferred communication channel (email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams). It sends daily questions that have been curated by a team of Organisational Psychologists. Employees can answer these questions with the click of an Emoji response that captures employee sentiment in mere seconds.

The use of pulse surveys yields incredible employee responses for the following reasons:

1. Asking short, to-the-point questions, makes answering easy, leading to higher response rates.

2. Employees can offer feedback in emoji format without feeling judged.

3. Short pulses collect specific defined data, making it easier for managers to digest information and take quick action.

5. Employees feel more comfortable submitting a emoji – therefore the accuracy of responses over time is hugely powerful.

An Emoji Is Worth A Thousand Words

When HappyTeams strategized on ways of capturing accurate real-time insights in the most succinct method as possible, the use of the Emoji stole the show.

As reported in a 2019 Adobe Survey12, by 2019, 92% of the connected population used emoji in personal communication, with 61% utilizing emoji at work, specifically emoji’s power to communicate across language barriers instantly sharing thoughts and ideas.

Emoji use is everywhere and is, in essence, the birth of a new language. It is ever-evolving to cultural changes. In short, there is no other tool in the world that can capture and convey emotional nuances in such a quick, clear, and concise manner.

As outlined by Matt Mahon, the author of The Impact of Emoji in Workplace Communication- Legal & Compliance Considerations, Case Law, and Discovery Challenges, Emojis are strong indicators of intent – even a person’s thought process – and can represent compelling documentary evidence. This is not something that can be overlooked.

HappyTeams Methodology

HappyTeams approach to pulse surveys is grounded in Science and is designed to optimise maximum data value for an organization. The pairing of curated questions by top Organisational Psychologists with the powerful Emoji has removed the guesswork from leading and managing employees. It is allowing employees to anonymously share feedback that directly influences direction from the top down.

What’s more, the HappyTeams technology only gets smarter the more a team uses the application—making it truly the next generation of employee engagement software. That’s the magic of pulsing. Through daily use and the dynamically evolving question bank, HappyTeams Organisational Psychologists can get deeper insights into employee engagement and job satisfaction, among other key indicators such as employee well-being and experience of management, among different vital categories.

As mentioned earlier, gone are the days of issuing corporate surveys that are often nothing more than a collection of missed opportunities as it’s often given too little too late. However, we are living in the days of the enlightened leader—one who desires to be the leader they never had, the one who knows their company’s best asset is the people it’s made up of!