5 Ways to Boost Employee Engagement and Productivity on a Budget

As well as quality products and exemplary service, today’s customers expect the businesses they interact with to share their values. In fact, 66% of customers have stopped buying from a company whose values didn’t align with theirs. 

Similarly, your employees want to work at organisations that share their values. In one study of Australian workers, 37% of employees would quit their job if their employer’s values didn’t align with theirs — a 6% rise from previous years. For millennials, who make up the largest cohort of the workforce, this number was 41%. 

Equally, employees also want insights into how the business is run and opportunities to learn and grow within the business. Finally, they expect their employers to be responsive to their needs.

Improving employee experience makes sound economic sense, too — 85% of decision-makers agree there is a direct link between employee experience and customer experience. And 85% of customers say their purchase decisions are swayed by how companies treat employees. Bottom line — if you want to deliver a great customer experience, look first to the experience of your employees.

But how do you improve employee experience without spending a fortune? The solution lies in treating employees more like customers. You can use technology to make every interaction as slick, intuitive and rewarding as possible. Here are a few tips on how to deliver a top-quality employee experience:

1. Focus on digital collaboration to drive employee productivity

Successful digital collaboration has myriad payoffs, including: 

• strong team relationships that don’t rely on an office space to flourish
• faster innovation
• increased responsiveness to customer needs. 

Workplace productivity tools like Slack make collaboration in hybrid environments much easier. Users can streamline workflows, automate mundane processes, share files, and collaborate on projects. Tools like Slack will empower your team to keep track of information and reduce clutter in their inboxes. Task automation reduces the potential for error and AI-driven prompts and alerts stop important tasks from falling through the cracks.

2. Use workflow automation to reduce busywork and streamline processes

Automation can help boost employee engagement by eliminating repetitive tasks, allowing your employees to focus on more meaningful work. Automating manual operations like data entry can reduce not just tedium and frustration, but also the risk of human error.

Automated systems can also speed up and streamline review and approval processes, onboarding and training, and other HR and administrative tasks. This helps employees work efficiently and effectively — no matter where they are.

3. Rethink your approach to employee wellbeing

Employee wellbeing and employee engagement are closely connected and can have a measurable impact on ROI — including reductions in turnover, absenteeism, and recruitment and training costs.

The challenge for businesses is how to make meaningful improvements to employee wellbeing. Beware free snacks and yoga classes as a quick fix. Instead, consider: 

• involving employees in the company’s vision
• listening to and acting on their input
• recognising and celebrating performance
• creating opportunities for meaningful work
• providing training and guidance to support career growth

4. Make culture count

Like customers, employees want to be part of a culture they can be proud of, so look to your customers for insights into your employees. Recent Salesforce research shows that nearly nine in 10 customers expect companies to clearly state their values, but only 50% say they think this actually happens. By clearly stating your company values, and living up to them, you’ll not only attract the best talent, but more customers too.

Just as customers increasingly value authenticity, so too do employees looking for clear and consistent communication and leaders who really connect.

5. Boost employee engagement with gamification

Gamification can be a powerful way to make onboarding, training, and learning more dynamic and engaging for employees. This is especially true for remote and distributed teams.

Gamification can have a dramatic impact on employee productivity and engagement. In a recent survey, 54% of new hires said they are more productive due to gamified onboarding.

With Trailhead — Salesforce’s continuous learning platform — companies can create a customised environment with their own content and branding to help employees with everything from onboarding to company-specific enablement skills and career progression. Here are some nifty ways to level up your onboarding and development programs:

• Tap into the Trailhead community and see what other Trailmixes people in your industry are using.
• Leverage Trailmaker to develop custom and private learning content.
• Use Trailhead Profiles to aid internal recruitment.
• Motivate employees with records of their own achievements in Trail Tracker and use the gamified leaderboards to create some healthy competition.
• Assess employee skills with interactive challenges in Trail Checker.

Boosting employee productivity starts with employee engagement

A limited budget doesn’t mean employee engagement initiatives should be pushed to the bottom of the list. And given employee engagement is inextricably linked with business success, it should remain a priority. By leveraging free online learning platforms such as Trailhead or harnessing automation through your CRM or workplace collaboration tools, budget-conscious businesses have access to a whole suite of tools with which to engage employees and ultimately boost productivity and improve the customer experience.

Read more

• Great customer experience starts with employee experience
• 9 tips from Nine to help you collaborate anywhere 
• 5 ways to acquire and retain the best talent

Note: this piece was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated.