Contrary to popular belief, remote work itself does not hurt employee engagement. Several recent studies have concluded that employees have increased their productivity by 77% and raised their performance by 13% in the last two years, all while working from home. These same studies show that remote employees can reach higher levels of job satisfaction.
However, because remote employees are not relying on in-person benefits like a beautiful office or a corporate campus, their engagement depends on your workplace’s digital environment and its ability to set employees up for success. Fortunately, digital HR tools for employee engagement can play a key role in keeping employees emotionally invested in your organization.
These tools strive to streamline communication between HR and their surrounding workforce to create more effective hiring, management and workplace initiatives. The result? Improved employee engagement, retention and performance and even larger-scale benefits like increased revenue and operational efficiency.
4 HR tools for remote employee engagement
To help you achieve these goals, we’ve curated a list of the top four types of HR tools to enhance employee engagement and streamline remote work for effective business operations.
1. People analytics
The job market is growing drastically and becoming more competitive over time. The only way to move forward is to focus on the employee experience to achieve business continuity and normal retention rates among the rising competition. To do this, HR and business leaders must create a remote work environment that engages their top talent.
Although challenging, doing this becomes possible with a sophisticated and data-informed people analytics strategy.
According to Gartner's human resources glossary, people analytics refers to “collecting and applying data collected to enhance critical company talent and outcomes." Traditionally, companies collected such data from recruitment, exit interviews, employee pulse surveys, and 360-degree feedback.
This process was often too slow to be effective; it only shows the results you need after the quarter is over, or after the employee has already left your organization. With a modern people analytics platform, you can collect real-time data from digital tools to get an accurate view of the end-to-end work processes within your company.
Many HR managers trust Pattyrn to stay in tune with their company's remote workplace and offer timely process improvements to keep teams thriving. Pattyrn syncs with the following applications to give you complete insight into your organization’s remote work and employee engagement levels:
- Microsoft
- Workfront
- Wrike
- Zoom
- Google
- Slack
- HubSpot
Furthermore, managers can combine traditional and innovative methods to unlock their workforce's critical insights, then integrate them into various work processes. The insights you get from these analytics enable companies to determine the root causes of challenges they face, like:
- Missed business and revenue goals
- Inefficient operations
- Poor employee retention
2. Recruitment software
Although recruitment and employee engagement are often viewed as different functions, they shouldn’t be. Employee engagement begins with hiring the right people.
Hiring the right person for the job and respective team suggests that the new hire will be more likely to:
- Connect with their coworkers
- Be passionate about the work they’re doing
- Excel in their role and go the extra mile
- Push your organization’s mission forward
- And develop into a long-term, engaged employee
Just think: if you’re short-staffed and settle for a job candidate who doesn’t quite fit the advertised role or your organization’s culture, it often leads to long-term issues with their engagement, performance or retention. This low-quality recruitment process also costs more money and time in the long run.
Fortunately, recruitment software allows HR managers to organize various hiring procedures so they can optimize the process and choose better job candidates. For instance, software eliminates paper trails by storing all applicant resumes, cover letters and job applications in one system. This makes managing applicant data easier and enables HR to categorize them based on their fit for the role and their skills.
HR can also shorten the hiring funnel with technology to prevent strong applicants from dropping out of the running. Features that enable this include:
- Candidate profiles that track the applicants' stages in the hiring process, with attached notes for context if you are working within a larger hiring team
- Automated job posting capabilities on all your chosen job-board sites
- And a centralized calendar to simplify interview scheduling
As you choose among different recruitment software solutions, consider the size of your remote organization. Small- to medium-sized businesses may choose a platform like JazzHR or BambooHR for easy system integrations. At the same time, enterprises may be better suited to choose a solution that can integrate with an extensive ERP system, like Workday.
3. Employee performance management software
Performance management software enables HR and managers to understand their employees' productivity and overall performance, indicating employee engagement. These tools support essential activities within the workplace, such as:
- Goal setting
- Employee assessments
- Continuous feedback
- Training programs
Reliable performance management software helps you standardize formal employee reviewal processes and communicate them with employees ahead of time, which is essential to preventing workplace conflicts and driving productive reviewal periods.
A work culture of continuous feedback empowers employees to improve their performance in real-time while rewarding them for what they accomplish well. This solidifies motivation, retention and morale across all company departments.
As an HR manager, you may even find that HR tools that engage employees offer multiple functions at once. For instance, BambooHR holds both recruitment and employee performance assessment modules.
Alternatively, to define more in-depth employee review cycles that both managers and employees appreciate, a tool like Lattice streamlines goal setting, goal completion and feedback by time period or project.
4. A culture analytics platform
Company culture is essential for business success. Not only does it determine how employees view and talk about your company to fellow employees (and everybody else), it directly influences employee engagement. Company culture should be top of mind for HR managers who wish to boost people analytics metrics like:
- Job satisfaction
- Employee tenure
- Revenue per employee
- Quality of work
Think of company culture as your company’s personality. You can use this kind of platform to shine a light on what differentiates your organization and ensure employees find their workplace uniquely fulfilling to work at.
Using company culture platforms effectively will enable you to:
- Gain insight into core values held by teams, divisions and the workforce at large
- View work motivators, current work behaviors, and ideal work environments by employee
- See if employees prefer to work with people or solo, and place them within the workforce accordingly
- Compare culture results across teams, to view what factors are driving high-performing, engaged teams so you can mimic these conditions across all teams
With Humantelligence’s culture analytics and recruiting platform, you can offer employees tools like a self-assessment to get invaluable feedback and insights for better employee communication, engagement and performance. You can even automate this assessment within the job application process to eliminate bias and hire for culture.
Explore Pattyrn: The new HR tool for employee engagement
You can use these HR tools for remote employee engagement to ensure your company's productivity. Pattyrn’s people analytics platform offers dedicated support and services to help your workforce achieve their professional, personal, and business goals faster. Ready to see it in action? Request a demo today.