9 Features Your Employee Engagement Platform Needs

The 25th Annual Global CEO Survey by PwC found almost two-thirds of business leaders believe that employee engagement metrics are vital to measuring long-term business success. It’s critical to find the right balance of tools and technologies to ensure your employees have what they need to succeed and engage with your internal platform.

Benefits of employee engagement software

There are many reasons investing in employee engagement software will benefit your business, including:

Improved communications

The right employee engagement software promotes and encourages better communication within your organization. Internal communications can flow more easily from management to employees and vice versa. Communications can be organized more effectively to promote both top-down and horizontal transparency. Organizations can centralize company-wide communications through newscenters and similar feeds while leadership communication can be streamlined via CEO blogs and similar content forms.

Higher productivity

The right employee engagement platform centralizes and streamlines workplace communications and activities. Tasks take less time and are managed across departments with a centralized platform to work from. 

In addition, employees have a knowledge base where all tools and answers are held. An effective employee engagement platform maximizes the potential of asynchronous communications. Employees can respond and reply to messages in-line with their schedule instead of being bombarded by notifications that can impact productivity.

Better onboarding

Employee engagement platforms can improve all stages of the employee journey. This includes onboarding as new employees are quickly immersed in the organization’s way of working and given access to the necessary tools to succeed. Well-designed onboarding experiences give recruits a clear picture of their new work environment and help them settle in.

Improved retention rates

Zenefits research found that 63.3% of companies find retaining employees harder than hiring them. This makes an effective employee engagement platform critical for retention as it will improve the overall employee experience through enhanced communications, clearer messaging and direction and a strong sense of belonging and adding value to the company.

9 top features of an employee engagement platform

When an organization is looking to invest in employee engagement software, there are several key features to look out for, including:

1. News center

Employee engagement platforms usually incorporate a news center or newsfeed. This feature is fully personalized to the individual employee and delivers a feed of relevant information to their job role and department. 

The feed is usually a combination of company updates and news announcements mixed with more informal internal news such as anniversaries, retirements, wedding announcements and even some external, yet relevant, industry news. In addition, the news center gives employees a place to stay up to date with the latest company news and check company-related social media.

Additionally, company-wide stories in the news center are a great source of discussion and connection for employees from different departments. It helps bridges the gap between in-office and remote employees and the growing number of hybrid workers who may only be on-site one or two days a week.

2. Advanced CMS

A good employee engagement platform will combine both written text and more dynamic and visual content. To keep employees engaged and interested, you want their newsfeed to be full of valuable and relevant content in different formats. This helps encourage the engagement the platform was built for. The best content management platforms (CMS) help users create, manage, and modify content effectively. It makes it easy for even less tech-savvy employees to create feature-rich content from blog posts to video. 

3. Mobile-readiness

IDC reports that mobile workers will make up 60% of the total American workforce by 2024, so all solutions offered by your organization need to be mobile-ready, if not mobile-first. 

Mobile-first employee engagement platforms use an intuitive and optimized mobile app to ensure workers can easily access the employee intranet and be as connected and up to date as office-based workers.

4. Scalability

The modern business has to adapt quickly to change. Growth and even decline shouldn’t mean you can’t access the software you need. The most reliable employee engagement platforms are fully scalable and can grow, or shrink, as your business requires. Different price points should allow your organization to seamlessly move from one cost scale to another, with an increase in the features available as you scale up. The ability to customize your employee engagement platform is built-into its scalability as businesses can select the features they need as part of their chosen package. 

5. Chat and instant messaging integration

Chat features are vital in breaking down silos and barriers between leadership and employees and between departments. Team members can quickly post messages and questions about project work, and others can add their thoughts and input. Effective employee engagement platforms integrate easily with popular chat platforms to allow for real-time chat and communications between 

A chat feature is particularly valuable for companies that operate across different time zones or allow employees to set their own hours. Messages can always be picked up, while a phone call may be missed.

6. Onboarding features

The onboarding center within your employee engagement platform is the perfect hub for new hires. It provides them with all the information they need to start their new role. 

A well-designed onboarding center will help introduce new employees to workflow processes, as well as relevant team members and employees they’ll engage with across the business, while ensuring they carry out all necessary induction training and documentation. Research by Gallup found 70% of employees who had an exceptional onboarding experience say they have ‘the best job’ and are more likely to stay as a result. 

7. Employee feedback tools

Achievers Workforce Institute found that 58% of employees want more regular employee engagement surveys, which can be easily delivered through effective employee engagement software. 

Surveys and gathering employee feedback shows you value the opinions and input of your employees, and managers can act on any findings accordingly. Feedback tools can be traditional surveys but can also include easy access, quick tools such as voting posts and polls. This makes it even easier for employees to engage. Without considering employee feedback, you can’t progress and develop as a business or avoid repeat issues in the future.

8. Analytics

One of the most powerful features of any employee engagement platform is the ability to analyze the extensive volumes of data it generates. Success metric tracking can include analyzing a wide range of actions and activities, including: logins, session time, popular pages, most visited content and more. 

Analyzing your employees’ activity on the platform allows you to better understand what features work. It enables you to streamline your offering to suit the needs of your workforce and immediately pinpoint problems too. Once you know which types of content your employees engage with and enjoy most, you can tailor your strategy accordingly.

Improved employee engagement delivers improved employee experience

Improving your employees’ experience through the right employee engagement platform is bound to reap rewards. The most sophisticated platforms allow for high levels of personalization and are designed with employees’ needs in mind.