The connection between technology, employee engagement and ROI

From first introductions via AI-assisted screening, to personalised onboarding with gamification and self-service learning, technology sets the tone for an ROI-driven employee experience.

Many communication tools have evolved in good time to help ease the transition from office-based to home-based or hybrid work. Can you imagine work-from-home life without video calls, instant messaging and collaboration apps? Perhaps fewer video calls would improve your productivity, but on balance, we’d be lost without the tech that makes all that communication possible

The need to engage

Remote work rapidly transitioned from a trend to a mainstream option in many industries, changing how employees need to be engaged and motivated. And now, more than ever, you need engaged employees. Your delivery methods might need to change, which may take a little getting used to, but the ROI benefits of employee engagement are clear:

• Companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 147% in earnings per share
• A 5% increase in employee engagement correlate to a 0.7% increase in operating margin
• Highly engaged employees have less absence days – on average 3.5 days – compared to disengaged employees
• Highly engaged business units achieve a 20% increase in salesCompanies with high engagement show 9% higher shareholder returns.

The challenges of remote engagement

Popular collaboration software tools like Trello and Slack, or Microsoft’s Loop make it easy to keep your remote team on top of the work at hand. Technology has taken care of that. It’s the softer side of working at a distance that’s a bigger management challenge.

Remote work is a comfortable fit for some employees, providing an important sense of autonomy and control over their time and efforts. Yet, it can also lead to a decrease in the meaningfulness of work and an individual’s sense of security due to changes in job structure and social isolation. And for employees who enjoyed the camaraderie of working beside colleagues and managers in the office environment, the physical distance of remote work could create a psychological distance from the company. This is a sure prelude to dis-engagement.

The challenge for managers is to find the most effective ways to keep the entire team both productive and engaged.

A digital rewards solution

Recognising and rewarding employee efforts and achievements is an important cornerstone of engagement. And rewards don’t need to be high-priced to be effective, they need to be personally meaningful. It’s the broader rewards experience – the delivery, the timing, the message – that makes people feel truly rewarded. This is where digital gift card rewards are an ideal solution.

Digital gift cards or vouchers offer everything you want and need to reward your remote employees personally, meaningfully and effectively.

• Personal. There was a time when gift cards felt impersonal – a generic fallback when you didn’t have the time or inclination to put too much thought into the reward. These days, you’ve got nothing but choice and scope for personal preference.
• Accessible. They’re as quick and easy to order and deliver as they are to redeem. Select the gift card you want, choose a value and zip it straight to your recipient’s cell phone via SMS or direct to their email inbox. Redemption is as simple as a quick scan at the retailer’s till.
• Economical. Because the entire gift card reward selection, purchase, redemption process is digital, there are no despatch or delivery costs involved.

As remote work has become a mainstream reality, we’ve had an opportunity to rethink our traditional ideas about how employee recognition and rewards are most effectively delivered. And while the core principles of these programs are timeless, technology is driving the development of exciting new tools to engage, motivate and reward employees.