Employee engagement is crucial for business resilience and growth, but to develop the technology needed to support employee engagement, IT needs to get out of the office to discover what tools users need.
This emerged during a webinar hosted by Freshworks, in partnership with ITWeb, on technology’s role in employee engagement.
Noting that a happy employee means a happy customer and ultimately a happy shareholder, Vishal Chopra, head of field marketing MEA at Freshworks, said technology was key to employee engagement.
He cited research carried out by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services and Freshworks, entitled Technology’s Make or Break Role in Employee Engagement, which found that 92% of respondents identify employee engagement as being critical to their organisation’s success, and that the majority of employees’ happiness in the workplace is dependent on having the right tools and technology to do their jobs.
“The research also found that 77% were willing to look for a new job if they weren’t happy with the technology and tools they had in order to do the job, so technology is certainly an enabler in employee engagement,” he said.
Sello Lehong, head of IT strategy and enterprise architecture at Barloworld Automotive and Logistics, said employee engagement is critical for business, and that his company was actively deploying a number of digital platforms to enable this. “Barloworld is now undergoing a major transformation, and one of the principles we pursue includes respect for employees. We can’t claim to respect them if we don’t solicit their input. Therefore, we get their input in three main ways – we observe their work, get input on problems technology can address, then we experiment to assess whether the solutions are solving the problems,” he said.
Lehong’s advice for delivering the right solutions to support an engaged workforce was: “Get out of the office. This is the only way IT people will meet potential customers or users. If you need to develop a product that people really want, you need to get out there and speak to the people who will be using it.”
Sanjay Moothiram, executive technology consultant, Information Technology Consultancy, echoed this view: “Without employee inputs – what problem are you trying to solve? You could be addressing something that isn’t a problem for them and thus creating more problems.”
However, he noted that one of the most frustrating things for an employee was giving input and having it ignored. “It is a demotivating and demoralising thing to do to an employee who has company’s interests at heart and wants to add value. If you don’t have a means to record the input and give feedback on employee input, don’t even ask. However, when the idea is taken forward, and the employee is recognised at board level for their input, what it does to the rest of the organisation is that other people see this and also want to contribute ideas,” he said.
Freshworks provides customer and employee engagement software to over 40 000 customers worldwide.
Share