Employee Engagement Should Start From the Bottom-Up

Here’s an important truth: insights must lead to action. Let’s say the results of your employee engagement survey have come in and you’ve drawn some conclusions.

Employees don’t feel their contribution is meaningful, managers aren’t always aware of the invisible work their team is doing, and if they are, they don’t have the means to reward them quickly.

One conclusion of your employee engagement survey analysis should be a commitment to bridge these insights into meaningful action – even if your overall scores are stable. Effective recognition ensures engagement remains high, but you need a system that connects your insights to realistic steps.

Mo is a culture and engagement platform that uses data insights to drive real improvement in engagement scores while reducing staff turnover. We strategically help people teams create great places to work through continuous, positive action.

Insights to Action: Change is Pivotal to Growth

But what does a new and better system look like? Your platform needs to be used by as many employees as possible – and that means they need to want to keep coming back to it, because it’s intuitive, impactful and built with them in mind. As we like to say, it’s built from the bottom up rather than the top down.

You can’t single-handedly solve employee engagement as an HR department. But with enough leadership buy-in, you can give your people the means to improve it for you.

HR tools Shouldn’t Just Exist to Make Admin and Analytics Easier

Picture a family car that’s designed with only the driver in mind. There’s no expense spared on the experience behind the wheel – heated massage seats, state-of-the-art 3D sound system, and steering wheel dressed in the finest leather. But to keep the price affordable, all of those luxuries mean the passengers have to make do with just a seatbelt and some uncushioned polyester.

Can you imagine any passenger wanting to take a ride in that?

Often employee recognition platforms can be a bit like that car, with HR teams taking the place of the well-catered driver. They’re pitched to HR managers as a tool for simplifying the admin behind tracking employee impact KPIs and issuing rewards, as well as for gathering data insights on employee engagement to help shape future campaigns.

Insights Are Limited Without Action

While that’s great for the HR department, it doesn’t always lead to the most user-friendly software for everyone else. If they’re built as an HR tool first and foremost, the employee UX can easily become a sidenote. That’s particularly noticeable when the priority is to gather as many data insights as possible for your leadership team – making the employee side of the platform feel overly complex.

Whatever the case, an employee recognition platform that isn’t built with an easy employee experience at the forefront is always going to struggle to keep those users on board. That in turn makes it less useful for HR teams, and the less useful it is for them the less they will make use of it too.

And if no one is using the platform, it may as well not be there.

What Does “Built From the Bottom Up” Action Look Like?

Simple: action looks like an effective and bespoke employee recognition. But for employee recognition software to work from the bottom up, it needs to do several things.

The first is giving employees themselves more power to spotlight their peers. All too often, employees become disengaged because their contributions end up becoming invisible work – they might be making a huge impact on their team’s performance or the efficiency of a certain process, but because that impact isn’t captured in a KPI it’s not seen by the managers who put people forward for rewards.

The second is extending more autonomy to managers to give out rewards when they are aware of an employee’s contribution, without having to chase authorisation from someone higher up. Not only does that empower the managers themselves, but it also means employees get more immediate recognition because they’re not waiting for paperwork to clear before they see their reward.

Mo Bridges Insights to Action

If you’ll allow us a moment to plug our software: Mo gives employees and their managers the power to do all the above. Everyone can share wins and achievements in the platform’s social feed, making sure that no contribution goes unnoticed. Managers can create custom rewards and issue them directly without any admin headache, while allocated budgets mean HR and finance leaders still have visibility of what’s being spent.

This kind of straightforward peer-to-peer recognition is what vehicle financing company Go Car Credit was looking for when we started working together. “We wanted our people to be able to reward their colleagues with real cash to spend how they wish,” said Hannah Giles-Rumming, Go Car Credit’s HR manager.

“Other platforms that offer points can create confusion and potential disengagement which is what we wanted to avoid.”

Now the vast majority of Go Car Credit’s company uses Mo on a regular monthly basis – 92% of managers and 89% of other employees.

Tackle Turnover, Retention and Remote Team Engagement in Six Months

When employee recognition software is designed from the bottom up, everybody benefits from it. Managers have far more visibility over employee impact because so many employees are using the software to shout each other out, and employees feel more valued because their contributions are no longer going unseen.

Not only that but the organisation as a whole wins as well. More recognised and valued employees means more engaged employees – that in turn means better employee retention, stronger bonds between remote and hybrid teams, and more employee advocacy for your organisation.

At Mo, we’re proud to see these effects firsthand with our clients. For example, we’ve helped Atlas Hotels reduce their employee turnover rate by 17% since introducing Mo in 2018, and Axol Biometric to increase their eNPS by 57%. And with digital publishing leader Quark, we’ve been deployed to help create a more collaborative, cohesive culture between their teams in the US, UK and India.

We’re yet to see a Mo integration that doesn’t improve engagement, retention, connecting and employee belonging within the first six months – we’ve even put a guarantee in place. Book a demo to see how Mo can help you.

We turn your disconnected employees into engaged teams.

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Mo is the Answer to Improving Employee Engagement

Mo is a culture and engagement platform that uses data insights to drive real improvement in engagement scores while reducing staff turnover. We strategically help people teams create great places to work through continuous, positive action.

If you’re looking for ways to take action on measuring employee engagement, learn more about how to shift the dial at the manager level and transform insights into action. To find out if you’re eligible for our money-back guarantee, book a demo with our team.