According to Gallup, organizations that successfully engage customers and employees experience a 240% boost in performance. How can you harness that kind of power? Can technology help? We’re going to try and answer those questions for you.

Although the “rules” of customer and employee engagement are very similar, this article is going to focus on the employee. After all, if you can’t engage and retain your own employees, odds are that you’re probably struggling to retain your customers, too. Let’s take a look at some tried-and-true tactics and strategies as well as some new ones.

Driving Employee Engagement and Adoption

You may think that in order to engage and retain employees, you have to adopt the tactics used by social media giants like Google and Facebook. The breakfast buffet. Catered lunches. Pinball machines and pool tables. In other words, lots and lots of perks. The more the merrier? Maybe not.

Why not? Because the #1 rule of engagement is that you have to know your employees.

Maybe your employees would rather see that money in their paychecks. Have you asked them? Do you know them? If you’re not communicating with your employees, odds are that you’re going about it all wrong. You’re making decisions for them instead of with them.

Measuring Employee Engagement and Adoption

PayScale is a company that tracks turnover rates in Fortune 500 companies. Even if your company is a small or midsize business, the analysis provides some interesting and actionable insights. Among the companies with the 10 highest turnover rates, the median employee age was 39 or under. And looking at the companies with the lowest employee turnover rates, the median age was 39 or well above that.

So let’s take age as a given factor, although certainly not the only factor. Where does that lead us? It leads us right back to knowing your employees and communicating with them. A fair and competitive wage is surely another factor, as is a work environment, corporate culture, room for advancement, and finding ways to work together better (which by the way is the C5 Insight tagline)

Managing Employee Engagement and Adoption

To be honest, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for driving employee engagement and adoption. Obviously, different people respond differently to different tactics. But let’s go back to one of the first questions we asked:

Can technology help? The answer is yes. That’s because everyone responds well to having the right tools to do their jobs well. It’s how you set up your employees to succeed. Moreover, employees want a small set of good tools – not every possible tool. Our research has shown a direct inverse-correlation here: the more systems an employee has to use, the lower their job satisfaction scores.

You wouldn’t dream of giving your employees a hammer to drive a screw, and you wouldn’t invest in a master electrician toolkit to replace a light bulb. So don’t give lip service to the importance of teamwork and collaboration without equipping them with the tools to do so. They’ll see right through you.

Microsoft SharePoint Drives Engagement and Adoption

Microsoft SharePoint improves communication and collaboration among businesses, colleagues, and customers. By using SharePoint, you and your team can set up websites to share materials with others, manage projects from start to finish, and publish comprehensive reports anytime and anywhere.

With Microsoft SharePoint, you can measure compliance ”behind the scenes”—with features like document types, retention polices, and automatic content sorting—and then let people work naturally in Microsoft Office.

Microsoft SharePoint delivers great collaboration tools—and a single platform to manage them. SharePoint makes it easy for people to share ideas and work together with the way they want to in a modern workplace.

SharePoint, particularly when combined with other Office 365 tools like PowerApps, Flow and Power BI, can also replace multiple other systems.  With simple to setup databases, dashboards, workflows and alerts, SharePoint can result in fewer places where employees have to go to find the tools they need for their jobs.

Work. Together. Better.

These are words we live by at C5 Insight. Contact us for a customized demo. Give us a ring at 704-895-2500 or use our contact form to reach out. Your employees will be glad you did.