3 Ways to Increase Employee Engagement Online

Only one third of the American workforce is engaged with their work. The whole issue concerning which strategies motivate people to participate with full awareness is now a hot topic.

One way in which employees engage with their work is online, either through company Facebook pages, or in-house surveys, through Intranet, and through online learning and human resource programs that promote health and wellness.

How can you get your employees engaged online?

Here are 3 tips to try in a few different areas:

Use gamification to promote health and wellness through online program participation.

People engage when they see a purpose in what they are doing. It doesn’t have to be a grand purpose, but it does have to give them a sense of satisfaction or accomplishment or even well-being. Just ask Nike. Before Fitbits we sold, Nike+ came out, a simple gaming program that allowed runners to measure their runs with a chip in their sneaker connected to a mobile phone app. Within weeks, 16 million people were using it everyday.

The concept of helping people keep track or measure their own performance in some way is wrapped up in the technique of gamification. If you can turn a serious program like health and wellness into a game, where employees compete with themselves or with others, it suddenly becomes more interesting and engagement is increased.

If you decide to try gamification, spend some time clarifying precisely what it is that you want to achieve. What will motivate the employees to play the game, and what will your company achieve by their participation? What will the employees gain from it in the long term? Once you are clear on that, create programs that match their skillsets.

Get your managers to buy in first to employee surveys.

A useful way to gain insight into what your employees are thinking is to offer online surveys. But it can be an exercise in frustration if they don’t engage online with you. If your human resources department offers a survey, you can expect an industry standard response rate to be about 50 to 60 percent. Impediments to getting people to respond include their feeling that it is useless because nothing will be done with it, their fear of being identified, and lack of buy-in by managers.

It will take time before you can illustrate that the feedback is being listened to. But you can tell them how anonymity is safe-guarded by assuring them that no response will be discussed individually, only as a group, and that no comment will be typed verbatim to give clues to the identity of the writer.

But the best way to get their engagement in this online exercise is to get buy-in from the managers who can then persuade the employee of its validity.

Set up a system to allow employees to praise each other online.

Employees will engage with your company Intranet if they think there will be something interesting there. One way to generate interest is to set up a system of employee “high-fives” where people who work in different departments can recognize some assistance or extraordinary work from fellow employees.

If management can be convinced to chip in with the praise and great feedback, it will be even more effective.

Roz Bahrami is a blogger for SkyPrep, an online training software for companies to train employees and measure results. Roz is a regular contributor to blog posts related to corporate training, L&D and mobile technology. Visit her personal blog at Blog.Boosthq.io!