How to choose the right technology to create award winning employee engagement
There has been, and continues to be, a huge amount of discussion around the use of technology in the workplace to enable better levels of engagement and productivity. But how do you know what technology you need to best support the development of your business? We have some guidelines for you to help clarify your technological needs and find solutions.
Know your problem
There is zero point in deploying technology in your business if you can't pinpoint the problem. You must step away from the head office and spend time with your employees on the front line. From here you can recognise challenges that your staff face day-to-day which you would never think of at your desk. The problem could be anything from staff having to remember too much product information or information not being easily available, to your training methods being ignored or your staff feeling neglected or confused. It is vital that you map out your employee journey alongside your customer journey to find out where these problems lie.
Speak to staff
Digital solutions which are used by staff should be designed to address their problems. Ask staff what they are having difficulties with and what changes they think would be useful or would make their life easier. Collect all of the ideas together and highlight key themes. You can then work out the biggest barriers your staff face that are hindering success and performance.
Envisage your future
You may not know which tools you need, but you know the kind of working environment you want. Do you want to create a continual learning environment. Would you like an efficient working environment? Do you need more detail and refinement to ensure quality and consistency, or are you hoping for an environment where everyone takes responsibility and not just those in management? Whatever work environment you want to have, it is easiest to imagine your ideal first then work your way backwards to understand which technology will help you achieve it.
Understand your goal
Now that you know what your ideal working environment looks like, you need to define exactly what it is that you require from a technology solution. This could include:
Needs to be fun
Needs to work on all devices
Needs to reduce queuing time
Needs to improve NPS
Needs to decrease queries
Needs to improve knowledge
Needs to boost confidence
Needs to make teams compliant
Needs to improve teamwork
Develop it with your staff
By now you should have spoken to a few suppliers and got an idea of what kind of solutions are available. Take these to your staff and ask them which ones they think would be most useful, which ones they like the look of and which ones they think they would be most inclined to work on. A great example of this is our development of Albert games for Virgin Media. We would attended company workshops and hold live demos of different games such as penalty shootout, whack a mole and catapult castle. Staff would then vote on which game they would be most likely to play, and we designed the final games based on this feedback. This process has sent engagement levels through the roof, with survey results finding that 65% of employees play on their own time and 97.5% like or love playing Albert.
Improve and refine
Once you have your product, this shouldn't be the end of your quest for technology to improve your business but the beginning. You should constantly be making notes of what could be added or could work better, and discuss these with your supplier. Just because you've paid for a whole product, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to alter it to best fit your business. Ask staff and head office what they like and don't like to get the full picture. Oplift will keep working with you to make sure you're getting what you want from your technology and Oplift Extend enables us to build bespoke solutions for your business if the other products aren't quite enough.
To summarise
Know your problems, your goal and how you imagine your company to be once you have the technology. But most important of all, work from the bottom up and ensure your staff are involved every step of the way for maximum engagement.
