Clearly, one of the consequences of the pandemic has been to accelerate the digitalization of some business processes, with a special impact in how companies engage with their employees, due to the massive and “sometimes forced” deployment of teleworking.

In most organizations, the digital workplace has become a key tool for daily work. A trend that increases even more today with the hybrid working model which enables the mix of office and teleworking to maximize productivity and employee wellness.

Our digital environment must then support the needs in several different scenarios of our workers. The rise of collaboration platforms such as Office 365 and Teams have covered some of the new requirements, but is it enough with these tools? And given the current context, can we take advantage of this opportunity to improve the overall satisfaction of our employees?

Our experience tells us that it is possible, and we suggest some recommendations:

1. Know better your employees

The first step to improve is to know where we are. Knowing how the users behave in the digital environment can provide us with valuable information to understand what improvement actions need to be applied. Try to answer questions such as:  “Which area or communities have the most visits?”, “what is the trending topic this week?”,  “which device they use to access?” , or  “what content has generated the most interactions?” to help and take decisions that raise the employee satisfaction.

Starting from single simple indicators we can create and track more complex ones such as the "engagement level", or how many employees are taking real advantage of the digital workplace. We can build these complex indicators by combining KPIs such as interest in content, the number of social interactions, navigation between pages, the volume of content shared or the frequency of access to the environment. These metrics can give us very useful figures and data to follow-up and see if we are improving.

TŌGŌ Analytics screen with complex indicators dashboard

 2. Ask for direct feedback

Simple methods are usually the most efficient ones. Asking an open question is one of the best ways to know about the satisfaction of our users with our digital workplace.

Although there are many indicators that we can get about employee satisfaction, the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) stands out for its current relevance and value. This indicator is an analogy of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is used to know the satisfaction of our customers, but in this case it is applied to employees.

The main question to ask our customers/ buyers in NPS is  “Would you recommend our services or products?”.  In the case of our employees (eNPS) it becomes “Would you recommend a colleague or a relative come to work in the company?”.

These two indicators are not only related by how they are formulated, but they also have a direct relationship in how they improve. Some studies show that an increase of 1 point in our employee satisfaction has a multiplier effect up to 5 points in the satisfaction of our customers. It is worthwhile, therefore, to have this data clear and updated in any organization.

Getting this indicator is something that can be achieved on a regular basis with a question that can be answered with a scale from 1 to 10:

Once we get this indicator, we can apply this formula to know how many of our employees are ambassadors of our company and what percentage are not satisfied enough with their workplace or have found some concerning aspects:

We can embed this small survey in our digital workplace homepage so it can be answered in just one click. It can help us to significantly improve the percentage of employees who give us their opinion, and therefore, the quality of the data obtained.

3. Give voice to your employees

Creating a two-way communication channel between company and employee should be a primary goal of our digital workplace. With this action we not only get direct feedback from our collaborators but we can also generate real value conversations around corporate content. When solving this need, we must give relevance to:

- Having a work environment with social features, where corporate communications can generate reactions or be commented on to generate discussions that can resolve doubts or clarify aspects. These interactions, in addition, will allow us to obtain a very clear pulse of what content is a hot topic or is generating more expectations. In many cases it is the users themselves who generate conversations that help the rest.

- Employee 2 employee communication tools: where the users can organize themselves to create groups of knowledge areas to share knowledge, report news or solve common doubts. One of the most widespread applications are the communities of experts or employee blogs, which give direct visibility to talent in our organizations  (Employee branding) or report first-hand by reference people on topics with more interest.

4. Target your communications

Not everything should be communicated to everyone. One of the great challenges of a digital environment is to inform the right people at the right time with the right information.  There are two features of our digital environment that can help us:

- User Profiling according to several criteria: type of work they perform, their roles, geographical location, department or area, ... Any profiled data can help when we want our communications reach a specific audience. The goal of a digital environment shouldn’t be “everyone gets everything”, but key communications should be read by almost 100% of the target audience

- As a complement to profiling, another interesting feature is to allow the users to pick the topics, people, or sections they want to be updated on. It’s about offering a feature in the same way the "follow" works for social networks, but in this case applied to content or corporate profiles. Thanks to the “follow” feature, our users will be better updated about content they want to be aware of.

5. Optimize communication channels

The channel through which we communicate is decisive to offer the right information at the right time. While choosing the channel, criteria such as the criticality level of the communication, the audience, the user review frequency or even if a response is expected from our audience, can influence the chosen channel.

A work environment with functional deficits in communication channels implies a massive usage of email as the main channel for all types of communications. A good digital work environment must offer alternative channels to email and appropriate to the type of message we want to send: publish a news item on the intranet for global issues or that critically affects a group, a TEAMS chat to share a specific topic to a group on which we expect a response or share in a community or a TEAMS a new client that we have partnered with.

Creating a map of communication channels helps us to choose the best channel suitable for each message. In most organizations, this process needs to be accompanied with a proper change management plan where actions are encouraged to move some conversations from email to more effective channels. For example: we can use the email to notify of one or more communications targeted to a global audience and point them to an article or area in our intranet. One there, the users can generate social activity indicating they like it, share or comment to solve doubts.

Example of communication channel map

Discover TŌGŌ, our social Digital Workplace

These recommendations have been gathered based on our experience implementing projects with TŌGŌ, our digital and social work environment.

TŌGŌ offers capabilities to improve communication and collaboration in Office 365 environments while providing tools to improve and analyze the engagement of your employees. The Analytics module allows content admins to get single and complex indicators based on activity or obtain direct feedback from our employees.

If you want to know more about this environment, we encourage you to contact us!