7 Programs that Increase Employee Engagement

You want employees that are fully committed to the success of your business, but how do you cut through all of the distractions to get your team excited about and engaged in your company? Most businesses use incentives or competitions to get their employees more involved in campaigns or new products. But those are usually short-term solutions that don’t result in employees that are truly invested in your organization.

Before you start reviewing different software programs there is an important step you need to take; you need to hear from your employees.  This can be as simple as sending an anonymous survey or conducting focus groups with your staff in small groups. You cannot solve low employee engagement without asking first why they don’t feel connected to your business and your mission.

Once you know what factors are affecting your staff, you can start to look for solutions that address the concerns of your team. A few of the most common reasons that your employees aren’t fully engaged in your mission include:

• Micromanagement: Trust is an important part of the employer-employee When your management team acts in an over-aggressive manner, your employees will check out. You want to lead with encouragement; your employees want to know that you that you trust their decision-making skills and are there to support them. When you become overbearing, they will become disengaged and apathetic.
• Job Security: No one wants to feel like they could be fired at any moment. When your managers, or your company, has a punitive environment that results in your employees living in a constant state of worry about their job they won’t engage with you. A work environment built on fear is not the right way to manage your team.
• Lack of Communication: Your employees rely on you, and if you aren’t communicating with them regularly rumors start to fly. When your staff has to try and hunt down their manager to get approval on a project, it slows down productivity and leaves your employees feeling unimportant.
• Not Being Empowered: Your employees often know more about your customers than you do, which is why they can become frustrated when they aren’t empowered to fully resolve customer concerns. Giving your team the ability to resolve more complex customers issues will result in you having happier customers and employees. One of the things that your employees are looking for is trust when you don’t give them a chance to show you they are trustworthy you may end up with an unhappy staff.

So how can you build a team that feels valued and that exhibits the engagement and care that your business needs to thrive? Here are some of our favorite project management programs that help you connect with your employees and increase their level of commitment and engagement.

Bambu: This social media platform is designed to turn your employees into advocates for your brand. Your employees can leverage social media to promote your organization. When you empower your employees they will feel respected and appreciated, which not only creates a positive environment, it also turns them into ambassadors for your company.

By creating a way for employees to share on social media they can feel more a part of your company, so happy employees that advocate for your business? What more could you ask for?

Bloomfire: Finding a project managment program that your employees will like, and more importantly use can be challenging.  Bloomfire is designed for your business, it creates a centralized place for training, onboarding, social learning and sharing knowledge with the goal of unifying your employees. It starts with organizing all of your knowledge and expertise in the cloud and making it shareable to all employees to make collaboration easier than ever.

This allows employees to work together more effectively from anywhere in the world. Seamless communication and immediate access to knowledge can make your employees feel more connected and engaged, which is a win for your company.

Unily: If you are looking for an intranet that is packed with features and that integrates with Office 365, this is one of the best solutions for global organizations. Some of the features of Unily include personalized internal communications that can be sent to any device in any language; you can also improve your document management, the Unily Hub takes the best of Microsoft’s document management and adds features that make it quicker, easier and smarter with intelligent tagging.

From sites that are made for collaboration to social networking using Yammer feeds, this program can bring your company together no matter where in the world they are.

onehub: Need higher production levels? onehub is designed to simplify your project and document management in one convienent location. It offers a one-stop shop that can store, sync and share your documents peer to peer for better communication and increased collaboration. It also allows your team to create workflows for better task management while providing a space to share comments and feedback with team members.

With a dashboard that allows everyone to create and share posts online about assigned projects, you will know how each team is doing and what they need. You can also customize your dashboard with your company branded and choose what your employees will have access to. So if communication has been a struggle in the past, onehub may be the solution that boosts production and makes it easier for your team to work together.

Wimi: Wimi is designed to unify your workplace. You can create workspaces for every project which allows you to centralize your communications, data, and activities. On average Wimi users realize a 28% increase in productivity by consolidating your projects into one convenient workspace.

You can also sync documents from any location, even when you are offline. It also allows you to sync with Google Apps or Microsoft; you can also link your existing apps like Dropbox and Outlook into the workspace to allow you to integrate everything into one central location.

dapulse: Don’t have enough time in your day to get everything you want to be done? dapulse feels you, and it wants to make it better. Designed to take away some of the biggest pain points from your projects its goal is to organize and manage your teams and data to create a happier workplace. They like to think of the platform as the offspring of Facebook and Excel. So kind of like a social nerd.

It promises to be addictive and easy to use, by making communication simpler and reducing the use of email. It also makes searching for things you need less stressful by providing a “crazy powerful search.” With so many people attached to social media, integrating it into the workplace was only a matter of time.

Asana: Used by many large corporations, like Uber, Asana is a solid contender in the project management arena. It allows you to set tasks by the employee and it’s chat feature makes it easy for everyone one on the project to get updates and to report progress or issues in real time.  You can define groups by creating teams and include only people who are assigned to that project.

You can check the status without scheduling a meeting or using email. By having real-time conversations, you can make adjustments and solve problems as they happen and eliminate long email threads that we all hate. It also allows you to attach documents using Dropbox, Box or Google Drive to a conversation or task.

Finding the Right Solution for your Business

No one knows your team like you do, so while we can provide suggestions and programs that may work for your business, it is ultimately up to you and what you think will work best for your company. If you have a company of professionals that have been in the industry years, you may want to look for a more traditional project management solution.

If your workplace is more casual and has a younger vibe you adding a more “social” component may be able to keep your staff engaged and on task. Keeping younger less experienced employees on track can be a challenge at times, as you have to compete with social media for their attention, so by integrating programs that mirror Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram you can give them ways to communicate that keep the workplace fun.

Project management is a critical part of your business, if you aren’t sure about which program is the best for your team, most of the programs we discussed will allow you to use them on a trial basis. This will give you a better understanding of how each program works and hopefully help you find the best one for your company.

Streamlining your project management is a great way to know where each project and person is. When you create a process that allows instant feedback and support and gets the projects done on time you will make you, your staff and your clients happy.

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