SharePoint for Employee Engagement – A Perfect Match

The Human Resources of a company are the building blocks of its success and achieving the desired business strategy and goals. What makes it one of the company’s most essential functions deals with its topmost asset – Employees. According to a report on Global Human Capital Trends presented by Bersin Deloitte, the need to create a strategy for employee engagement has been the HR’s critical focus areas. It’s a response to the growing worries of employee retention, owing to diversity challenges in culture.

Collaboration is the Key

SharePoint opens the door to collaboration and social interaction and is a useful tool for connecting disconnected workers.

Imagine if your managers had everything they needed to manage their team in one place.

What if doctors had a way of consulting each other on the fly through hand-held devices to help them make faster and more accurate diagnoses?

If your employees have to travel, what difference would it make to have an online data bank of travel tips, recommended hotels, and restaurants? Not only could it save them time, but also help keep their expenses down.

Therefore, an intranet containing information in one location that can be accessed from anywhere would not only help the engagement of your employees; it would also have a positive effect on your productivity.

Keeps Communications Flowing

Another key ingredient to employee engagement is communication.

All too often, companies communicate from on high – where senior management merely broadcast one-way messages to their workforce, which is not good because news is an excellent tool for engagement.

Adding a social element to your intranet allows employees to comment and share ideas. In this way, collaboration makes them feel part of your organization rather than just a faceless employee.

Learning from Each Other as a Knowledge Management Tool

It’s this social element that drives employee engagement.

The ability to contribute ideas can drive innovation and inclusivity. An intranet that enables instant messaging, video conferencing, online meetings, and online document storage gives your employees the freedom to manage their own time and opens up the possibility of remote working.

Employees also need to provide feedback and voice their opinions beyond the formal review sessions with managers. Introducing a social element will enable this and make it easy to conduct polls and provide a useful forum for online discussions.

Listening to Your Employees with Polls in SharePoint

According to a Dale Carnegie Training study, 71 percent of employees are not fully engaged with their work. And, without a positive, meaningful environment, employees will disengage and look elsewhere.

One of the big distinguishers of Millennials is the need to have their voices heard. Using polls is a good tactic to use with this demographic because it creates a culture that makes them feel safe to speak up. Besides, it allows a company to cross-reference from month to month to see an increase or decrease in employee engagement. The ultimate goal, of course, would see a steady increase in employee happiness levels.

SharePoint Can Help Make Jobs Easier

SharePoint has the potential to make work a lot less dull. It removes the need to do endless filing, it makes it much easier to find company information, and makes it much simpler to get documents signed off (and many more things besides). SharePoint can reduce your employees’ pain points, and with a little development, can cut out many of their most hated tasks.

So, how are your competitors using SharePoint to reduce employee pain points? The most apparent method here is regular, practical training. We’ve all been to generic training sessions and struggled to keep our eyes open. However, if training is targeted at your users’ specific needs and shows them how they can save time and effort, they’ll be wide awake.

All of this adds up to the greater engagement.

SharePoint’s powerful platform can easily be manipulated and molded by skilled designers, architects, and developers to create tools to help you achieve your business goals.

By empowering your staff through greater collaboration, on-demand learning, and more precise communication channels, you’ll see greater engagement levels that will have a positive impact on your ROI.