How technology can help engage the remaining two-thirds of employees

In previous blogs we have advocated a continuous feedback approach to communicating with and reviewing your people, as opposed to an ‘annual review process’.

There are three lots of stats that stand out when we look at the relationship between employee engagement and performance reviews:

• According to Gallup (and most other recognised engagement surveys), the number of ‘disengaged’ employees in Australia is around two-thirds.
• Two-thirds of employees say that they don’t get enough feedback from their manager.
• In a recent LinkedIn poll, two-thirds of employees had a negative view of their annual performance reviews.

It is not hard to draw the conclusion that there is a direct link between providing continuous feedback and increasing employee engagement, but often employers find it to difficult to establish a system that is effective, adds value and easy to implement.

Understandably most clients think it might be more time consuming and costly than an ‘annual’ review process, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

Companies like Small Improvements provide clever, inexpensive, cloud based systems to help eliminate the administration and time associated with managing a performance review and continuous feedback framework.

In a world where more than 80% of companies say their adoption of HR Technology is not strong, it is those that use these enabling tools to increase their efficiency and communication with employees that will really stand-out and close the two-thirds ‘gap’.

Of course, as with any technology, you only get out what you put in – but the software available now is very user friendly (for both you and your employees) and engaging in it’s own right.

In fact, we predict that within 3 years those companies that are not using these modern tools will be viewed by (potential) employees as ‘out of touch’ compared to other workplaces. It’s something to think seriously about.