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Engaged employees are high performers. Take employee engagement to new heights by choosing the right platform that suits your needs, but also fits your budget.
7
min read
As the focus on employee experience and satisfaction increases, your organization must also be contemplating the adoption and implementation of an employee engagement software. However, if you have started the process of selecting the right one, you would understand that it requires a lot of thought and research before you choose one. To make your journey of adopting the best employee engagement software, we have a comprehensive resource right here.
This blog will help you answer all your questions around employee engagement software including the what, the why, and the how.
Put simply, employee engagement software is a set of programs or a platform that is designed to help growing organizations like yours to augment their employee engagement. Focusing on different aspects of engagement including satisfaction, happiness, belongingness, etc. the right employee engagement software can help gauge employee pulse, monitor key organizational parameters or employee wellbeing index, share insights and best practices and monitor progress to bridge gaps.
Employee engagement software can help you adopt a technology lens as well as a scientific approach for:
If employee engagement has been a priority for you, you may be relying on spreadsheets and documents to capture employee feedback and associated actions. However, the right employee engagement software has the potential to relieve you from the administrative nightmare of handling large spreadsheets, vulnerability to human error and promote greater insights.
Here are some of the top benefits you can leverage:
Employee engagement software can help you make sense of the data that you collect and capture through various surveys. It can enable you to gauge trends and perform analytics on the data to derive meaningful insights. The bottom line here is that you can use the software to adopt a data driven approach to foster a culture of engagement.
Accessing employee feedback at the end of the year may not be the wisest approach. Employee engagement tools can help you access employee data in real time to ensure that any challenge or concern is addressed instantaneously, before it becomes too difficult to handle.
Manually sending out surveys, collecting responses, organizing them and then translating them into insights can be very time consuming, especially if you are using pulse surveys. Employee engagement tools here can take care of all these activities in a process driven manner to help you focus on acting upon the insights to drive change rather than just preparing for it.
Some of the top employee engagement software leverage technological drivers like artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide intelligent insights based on wide spread research. It can offer you guided templates by leveraging AI to create a high performance culture and drive continuous performance improvement.
Finally, the right employee engagement software can help you understand employee sentiment and pulse in a continuous manner. It can enable you to constantly monitor diverse organizational health parameters based on employee pulse.
If you are wondering how to start your journey with the right employee engagement software, ask yourself these six questions and follow the steps thereafter:
Start by understanding if you simply want to know how many employees are engaged and how many are not or do you want a deeper understanding. While the former will give you a quantitative view with strong data points, the latter can help you identify strengths and weaknesses to take the next steps.
Next, ask yourself, whether you are only concerned with engagement or do you want to get insights on disengagement as well? The right employee engagement software can help you get a comprehensive understanding about which employees are disengaged, why and how to navigate the same.
Increasingly, mapping employee engagement is becoming a continuous approach. You need to decide whether or not you wish to keep monitoring the different factors impacting employee engagement with tools like pulse survey or do you want it to be a once-a-year activity.
While some software might give you regular updates, others might provide you with real time insights. You have to take a call whether or not a real time focus on employee engagement is an organizational priority.
Your software choice will also depend on the size of your team. Depending on whether or not you wish to scale, your options will differ. As a fast growing company, your team size is likely to increase, hence choosing a software that supports flexible scale up and down makes sense.
Finally, you need to gauge whether or not you wish to integrate the employee engagement software with other platforms you are already using. Integrations can be a powerful way to eliminate the friction of toggling between different platforms and increase participation in surveys and other activities.
If you have an answer to the above mentioned questions, follow this detailed guide to evaluate to evaluate and select the right platform:
Be clear on what you need and what are the main challenges or requirements that you seek to fulfil with the employee engagement software.
Start by listing down the features you need. These can include the ability to conduct surveys, perform analytics, get guided templates for conversations and much more. These features will help you narrow down your list and eliminate the ones that are not able to offer the basic functionalities you require.
In addition to the features, you need to understand how many people will be using the platform. The idea is not only to have a figure for right now, but also for a few years down the line in accordance with your scale up plan. You cannot choose one employee engagement software now and then change it once you add more members to the team. That would lead to unnecessary complication and resource wastage. Go for a platform that allows easy scale up and down.
Compare the various employee engagement tools based on what they are offering and how it can add value to your organization.
Make a list of all the basic facilities or features you will get access to in the base version without any add on. Compare it to your needed features list and identify gaps if any.
In addition to the features, gauge the user experience the employee engagement software is able to offer. Unless the experience is enriching, it will be very difficult for you to encourage your team members to use the same. Try to understand if the software is intuitive and user friendly or not, by hands-on testing.
Next, check whether or not the platform leverages technological advances to create meaningful impact. You may want to go in for a platform that leverages data analytics to help create meaningful insights and AI driven recommendations. Take the case of SuperBeings. Powered by AI, this employee engagement platform provides AI driven 1:1 recommendations and templates for managers at all levels, amongst other offerings.
Finally, you need to check whether or not the employee engagement tool captures the right parameters and has a solid foundation. Check whether it maps all parameters for organizational health index, if it has insights to improve managerial skills, whether it provides guided templates for powerful conversations, etc.
For instance, to promote employee engagement, SuperBeings captures data on 40+ organizational parameters, and helps build 20 key leadership competencies for managers. The right employee engagement software will be backed by science and based on evidence of practices that drive change.
After a macro view, dive deep to get a detailed understanding of which employee engagement software best suits your needs.
Understand the type of integrations that the employee engagement software offers. In the absence of integrations, your team members will be forced to switch from the work tools to the software you have chosen for any activity/initiative. This inertia of toggling will reduce participation and give you an incomplete picture.
For instance, SuperBeings offers integrations for Slack, Gchat, Email and MS Teams which will allow your team members to participate in daily pulse surveys from their preferred collaboration tool itself.
It is equally important to understand what insights and people analytics will you be able to gauge from your employee engagement software. The right software can help you get insights on different parameters and cultural aspects like innovation, competition etc. These insights can help you take informed actions to facilitate better experience.
SuperBeings can help you with insights on employee engagement and its drivers and deep dive to slice and dice the data with filterable heatmaps. It also provides cultural insights based on Competing Values Framework for leaders to build the right culture for their business needs.
Finally, from a product standpoint, you need to understand the support available. This refers to the resources you might get access to as a user including e-books and other material that can help you understand different employee engagement practices.
Furthermore, comprehensive customer success support is also important to address any technical challenge you may face. Therefore, ensure that the platform is able to provide assistance along the length and breadth.
Based on your research and analysis, you will be able to shortlist the top 2-3 options for the best employee engagement software. You can make the final call using these three steps.
Check if the employee engagement platform can give you a free trial. Even if it is not free, request for a trial period before you make a long term commitment for a test ride with your employees.
Go through the online reviews of different fast growing organizations using the software and see what they have to say. While not all reviews will help you, some genuine and authentic ones can help make the final choice.
Finally, choose that platform that suits your needs, but also fits your budget. You wouldn’t want to go above and beyond just on the software.
Fall back on this guide to choose the best employee engagement software in 2022. SuperBeings can be your partner to create an enriching and high performance culture by connecting OKRs, employee engagement, continuous performance management, and manager development in one unified solution.
How to use custom pulse surveys
How to use employee pulse survey results
Take your employee experience to new heights with our customizable employee engagement module. Book a free demo today!"
If you are trying to design a continuous and comprehensive performance management system, you would know the importance of conducting a 360 degree feedback. However, to make this exercise most effective, you need to go beyond simply involving everyone in the process to getting the process right — most importantly asking the right feedback questions to each stakeholder. This article will focus on how to write 360 feedback questions that create maximum organizational impact.
Let us quickly start by understanding what you must include in your 360 feedback questions to make it more effective.
Read: How and when to conduct 360 degree feedback
Without wasting any time, let’s dive into the 10 tips that can help you in writing excellent and effective 360 feedback questions.
Keep the language easy to understand and avoid using technical jargon. Make sure everyone is able to gauge the same meaning of the question and the focus is not lost in translation.
Keep adding the questions list for your next 360 degree feedback to your records throughout the year.
Since 360 feedback should focus on all aspects of an employee, if you add questions at different times, they will be more relevant
Ensure that the questions don’t have an inherent bias or don’t push or influence the respondent to answer in a specific manner. Make sure that the questions can have varied options as answers and not a singular focus because that’s what you want as a result. Furthermore, the questions should not create a bias in the mind of the reader of any kind.
Focus on one specific attribute or competency for each question. Don’t try to include everything in a single question to keep the number of 360 feedback questions low. You will end up receiving responses for only a part of the question and it will confuse the respondent too. For instance, if you want to talk about collaboration, do not couple it with factors like leadership skills or problem solving.
Before you start framing the questions, identify the key competencies that are most important for your organization as well as the role. Competencies could include communication, innovation, strategic thinking, etc.
Make sure that as a whole, all the questions cover all aspects you want to gauge the employee on from an organizational and functional role perspective. However, don’t overstuff too many competencies, keep them relevant to the employee in question. For instance, a person in sales may not need a question on technology knowledge as a part of 360 feedback questions.
In addition to being specific, be clear on what you wish to gauge or understand with every question you ask. For instance, a question on whether or not the employee pays heed to the opinion of others can help understand the level of active listening and a spirit of inclusion.
You need to have a fair balance between open ended and close ended questions.
A very long or complicated process is likely to reduce participation and defeat the purpose. Therefore, keep the count of 360 feedback questions to a maximum of 30-40 and make it very easy to participate and complete the same. Preferably, disseminate it through your existing communication/ collaboration tools.
Finally, make sure that the questions are framed in a way that is simple to evaluate. Too complex evaluations might take too much time and delay the action and execution, leading to reduced faith and impact on 360 degree feedback.
To ensure that your questions are relevant and specific, you can start with writing 360 feedback questions for different situations and contexts. Put simply, in this section, we will focus on what you should be asking and when. It will also help you in picking the right questions for the right employees, instead of bombarding everyone with the same questions.
These questions will help you understand what your team members think about the overall management at your organization and the effectiveness of specific team leadership.
These questions can help you understand the level of communication efficiency in your organization to ensure there is no gap between intention and execution.
Use these questions to identify and nurture employees that show leadership potential to build an effective succession pipeline.
These questions can help you understand how committed your employees are towards the organization, which will impact their level of engagement and quality of work.
You can leverage these questions when you wish to understand which employees are quick to think on their feet and will be able to address problems/ challenges that might come their way.
These questions can help you gauge the level of alignment between what your organization stands for and the core values/ beliefs of your employees.
Read: Strategic goal alignment: How to align team and organizational goals
Focus on these questions when you want to understand how well your employees are able to connect with their peers and other stakeholders.
These final set of questions can help you gauge how efficiently the employees are able to get work done. This points to the presence of the right skills to utilize resources in the best way possible.
To keep the entire survey with 360 degree feedback questions interesting and engaging, you can experiment with different question formats and templates. While some of your questions can have simple Yes/No answers, some can have multiple choices along with room for providing open ended answers as well. Here is an easy to follow template you can leverage.
Key competency: Strategic decision making
Top line: The employee/ subject name is able to
Attributes:
Spectrum
Open ended questions
Once you roll out the survey with your 360 feedback questions and receive the answers, you need to analyze the responses to come up with a final report and plan of action. However, any response analysis is subject to biases and other factors which might put the validity and reliability of the report into question. Fortunately, you can leverage these following practices to eliminate such instances:
Before concluding this article, we would like to discuss the top 8 questions that most managers have when it comes to 360 degree feedback, highlighting concerns they may be having.
Highlight how the performance and feedback on the performance of others is likely to have an impact on their performance too. Make them believe they can be an integral part of the growth journey for their team members.
Make the feedback anonymous to prevent sugar coating. At the same time, do not rely upon a single review as the ultimate feedback for any employee. Analyze at least 2-3 feedback responses for each employee to get the real picture.
3. How to make the process time effective?
Leverage technology platforms to roll out the surveys and collect responses. Furthermore, you can rely on the NLP sentiment analysis to gauge insights from open ended questions in addition to trend generation based on quantitative questions.
Check out how SuperBeings can help you conduct seamless 360 degree feedback. Book a free demo today
Highlight the positive impact of participation as a whole. Make it an interesting part of the employee lifecycle. Provide employees designated time within their work schedule to provide feedback. Do not make it an added burden. Additionally, keep the process simple with not a lot of questions at once.
Depending on the nature of the organization you can decide on the level of anonymity. Facilitate anonymity will help you fetch greater and more authentic responses. However, sometimes, you might struggle with context in this case. Therefore, you should adopt an approach of flexible/ partial anonymity.
Create a business case for 360 degree feedback. Illustrate how it can lead to a better employee experience, strategic learning and development, greater employee retention and other aspects which can lead to better performance and productivity.
Ensure that your questions are neutral and don’t lead to a specific sentiment or response. For instance, if you want to gauge punctuality for an employee, don’t use statements like do you think the employee is always late to work, rather focus on how would you rate the punctuality and sense of time for the employee?
Try to conduct 360 feedback on a regular basis and not wait for the end of the year to ask all the questions. Maintain a cadence to gauge responses.
As we end this discussion, it is clear that if you want to write 360 feedback questions in an effective way — you need to adopt an all encompassing approach, taking into account the different aspects of employee attributes, performance, personality and behavior.
It is, therefore, ideal to leverage platforms like SuperBeings to help you roll out, gather and analyze the responses using NLP and automation for best results. You can leverage our best practices to not only get the questions right but to also enable your managers to facilitate employee development at the end of the process.
If interested, feel free to book a demo today. No initial commitment required.
How and when to conduct 360 degree feedback
In the recent years, there has been a lot of attention that is being given to employee feedback, performance reviews and evaluation as a part of the whole performance management system.
While a major focus has been to prepare managers to give feedback in a constructive and effective manner, paying attention to employee self evaluation is equally important. Knowing what self appraisal comments to use can play a major role in helping employees to effectively reflect and evaluate their performance and convey it effectively to the rest of the team.
The purposes of employee evaluation and performance review in general have been talked about time and again. However, self appraisal takes the process of evaluation at a very personal and individual level, leading to a more pronounced understanding of an employee’s performance. Some of the top benefits of employee self assessment include:
Read: Employee self assessment: How to write a great one
In the section above, we have talked about the purpose or the need of self evaluation mostly from the perspective of the employee. However, self appraisal, when done correctly, has equally compelling benefits for the team as well as managers. A quick snapshot is captured below:
With self appraisal, employees become active participants in their review and appraisal process, rather than simply being passive recipients. Consequently, they feel valued, motivated and the level of engagement increases. Furthermore, with greater engagement, levels of commitment, retention and productivity go up.
When employees take a step back to reflect on their performance with self appraisal, they become more receptive to diverse ideas. Put simply, in the absence of self reflection, they will have a hard time gauging where they need to improve. Consequently, they will be defensive when a manager or the team gives them feedback on the same. However, self evaluation will help them accept the gaps and be open to learning and growing.
When employees reflect on their performance and identify the development areas, they will don a problem solving hat on to accelerate their professional journey. Through the course of time, this problem solving attribute will become a part of their skill set which will benefit the team and the manager greatly.
As a result of greater alignment due to self reflection on the strengths and areas of development, teams will see a greater sense of accountability to bridge the gaps identified. Under conventional circumstances, performance improvement might be seen as just a tick in the box by employees. However, after self appraisal, employees truly acknowledge and accept the need to bridge those gaps and take greater ownership and accountability.
Now that you have an understanding of why self appraisal matters, let’s quickly look at how to make it most effective. If you are experimenting with self evaluation for the first time, it can be an overwhelming activity for your employees. It is human nature to feel uneasy when you’re expected to evaluate your own performance. However, if you provide your employees with some comments they can use for self evaluation as a starting point, you can make the journey easier for them.
Put simply, self appraisal comments are common statements that can be customized by your employees during the self evaluation process, especially, if they find themselves at a loss of words to describe their performance
These phrases are available for both strengths and areas of development to help employees paint a realistic picture of their performance. Here are the top 100 self appraisal phrases that you can use for different performance parameters.
Use these self phrases to reflect on your clarity of communication, willingness to listen to others, etc.
These self evaluation phrases reflect how reliable or dependable you are for your team members, especially under special circumstances.
Using these self appraisal phrases can help indicate how invested or engaged you are in taking ownership of work without being asked to at times.
Similar Read: 150+ performance review phrases for managers
The following self appraisal comments are important to help review your performance on the basis of how punctual and attentive you are.
Use these self evaluation phrases when you want to highlight your strengths/ areas of improvement of working with the team, your collaboration skills, etc.
Creativity self appraisal comments can help you in reflecting on how effectively you are able to come up with novel and innovative solutions to challenges and new ideas to augment the impact and value created.
The following phrase can create a picture of your quality of work and how much attention you pay while undertaking a particular task during your self reflection process.
You can use these self appraisal comments to illustrate how well you understand what is expected out of you and how well you are able to deliver on the same.
Customer satisfaction self evaluation performance phrases help gauge how effectively you are able to address customer requests or complaints that leads to a higher Net Promoter Score, brand credibility, etc.
Finally, these self-appraisal comments can help you highlight your growth plans towards your professional development and impact on the organization.
With a broad understanding of the more than 100+ self appraisal comments that you can use as a part of your self evaluation process, let’s move to this concluding section. Here, we will focus on sharing a few templates that employees can use to articulate their performance in an effective manner.
The self evaluation phrases mentioned above can be added at the right places in these templates to give a holistic picture of one’s performance. A few things to focus on include:
In the last <performance period>, I have successfully <activity/ initiative undertaken> which led to <tangible impact (metrics)> for the organization.
My focus was on <a detailed view of everything that was done> which resulted in <accomplishments>.
Overall, I believe that I have been able to create an impact by achieving <top 3 achievements> and seek to amplify the same in the future.
I believe that the last <performance period> has been full of learning and development for me.
While I was able to <quick snapshot of achievements>, I acknowledge that I need to pay attention to <areas of improvement>.
I believe that this focus will help me <intended outcome for improvement>.
Towards this, I will ensure that I consistently work towards <improvement plan (courses, behavioral changes)> to achieve <SMART goal>.
That said, self appraisal is an extremely crucial step of performance review. As a manager you must encourage your team members to provide honest reflection on their performance without being afraid of any negative consequences. Apart from providing the self appraisal comments mentioned above, you can also use assessment tools to make self appraisal a common practice within the organization.
Custom Pulse Surveys by SuperBeings can help you with understanding their needs and help you support them better. If interested, book a free demo today.
Employee Self Assessment: How to write a great one
150+ performance review phrases for managers
How to use custom pulse surveys to enhance employee experience
Holistic performance reviews are integral for any organization that seeks to create a high performance culture. However, the nature of performance appraisals has undergone significant transformation with a focus on 360 feedback and review.
One of the key pillars for the same is employee self assessment and self appraisal. Through the course of this article, we will share with you why self assessment is important and how you, as a manager, can help your employees get it right to facilitate maximum impact.
As the name suggests, employee self assessment or self reflection is the practice or process where employees reflect on and assess their performance over a period of time to identify accomplishments, development areas and other performance aspects
The aim of self assessment is to get the employees’ view of their performance and add the information and data to manager and peer feedback. This can enable organizations to get a holistic understanding of the employee performance and gauge the overall contribution, some of which might be invisible from a macro view. Here are a few reasons why employee self assessment as a tool for performance review makes sense for growing organization:
With the rise of continuous performance management and regular review and appraisal, your self assessment process should follow a similar approach.
Instead of pushing employees to assess and reflect on their performance at the end of the year, you should encourage them to conduct regular self assessment
On one hand, regular and continuous performance linked self appraisal by employees will ensure that no part of their performance goes unnoticed. On the other hand, it will constantly give them a chance to reflect on their performance and improve on the development areas on the go, instead of waiting for the year end. Invariably, they will embark on the path of development and improvement at an accelerated pace.
Here, if you leverage employee pulse surveys which are short and frequent in nature, you can ensure consistent and continuous self reflection from employees. With as frequent as one question a day, you can encourage your employees to build a culture of performance-oriented self assessment.
With self assessment and reflection being a fairly new practice to performance management, many organizations and employees struggle with getting it right.
While some believe that employees might see it as a chance to explain their bad performance, others believe that it might end up biasing the manager’s perspective.
However, when done right, employee self assessment can be an extremely powerful tool to facilitate a high performance culture. Here are a few tips to get your employees conduct performance self assessment the right way:
Encourage your employees to be open and honest. Employees must not see self assessment as a place for self aggrandizing in the hope of a better rating, rather an honest assessment of one’s performance.
For self evaluation to be effective, your employees need to reflect on their performance without the worry of being penalized for identifying areas of development and improvement
It is important to not see self assessment as the sole foundation for promotions and appraisals, but rather as a journey towards growth.
Next, persuade your employees to reflect on their OKR performance. The idea is not only to assess what has been achieved with OKR grading. It should also include reflections from OKRs about the possible enablers and blockers to further refine them for the next performance period. The employee must be guided to reflect on what helped achieve the OKRs and what other support is required as well as what he or she would personally like to work towards.
Download: Free OKR grading template
Third, when self assessing for performance review, employees must incorporate feedback from their conversations with managers and peers. If your organization has a culture of regular 1:1s, this will be very easy for your workforce. The idea here is to motivate your employees to reflect on what feedback they have been able to gauge and whether or not according to them their performance is a reflection of the same. 360 degree feedback can also be a helpful tool for employees to understand all aspects of their performance.
Factors like what did the manager praise about their performance or what did a coworker thank them for are very important for self assessment.
Read: Top 50 1:1 meeting questions for great managers
Finally, as a part of performance review self assessment, employees need to reflect on the challenges and opportunities, both internal and external. Internally, they need to assess their attributes, skill sets and aspirations and align them with the expectations to gauge their level of performance. Similarly, external factors like resources, team support and their impact on performance needs to be documented.
When you share these above mentioned tips with your team members, they are bound to ask questions about the best practices for writing or filling up self assessment surveys in the most effective way. We have you covered for that as well. Here are a few quick tips to help your employees write effective self assessment:
Read: How to go from performance management to employee development
If you look at these best practices closely, you will realize that the key to writing effective self assessment also lies in the questions that you ask.
Simply asking an open ended question like reflecting on your performance will seldom yield any substantial responses, mainly because your team members will struggle with starting their answers
Therefore, we have compiled a list of questions and potential answer prompts/ templates to help you make self assessment a part of your performance review process effectively.
Also read: 150+ useful performance review phrases to start using today
Ensuring impact with self assessment is not only dependent on your team members. There are several ways in which managers of an organization can help build a culture of effective self evaluation.
Create an open culture where employee self reflection does not become the sole tool to penalize or promote employees, see it as an extended glimpse of performance
As we come to an end, it is clear that employee self assessments are an integral part of performance reviews and if conducted in the right manner have the potential to drive a high performing culture. However, we understand that administering and facilitating participation for self assessment can be daunting, especially for a growing organization.
Fortunately, custom pulse surveys by SuperBeings with automated sending and reminders, along with NLP based sentiment analysis can take care of the same for you. If interested, book a free demo today to learn more.
How to use custom pulse surveys to enhance employee experience