It has never been more critical to have a solid employee engagement rate, especially after two years of the pandemic. Yet, only 36% of workers feel engaged in their workplace, and 38% feel exhausted after so many virtual meetings. Ensuring wellbeing, mental health and communications among your workers are crucial for companies, and it shows that they care and are taking action on their people’s needs.
Focusing on employee engagement equals an enhanced performance for clients and higher talent retention rates in your business.
An engaged employee understands and supports the company’s goals and purpose and contributes to making it happen. They genuinely care about seeing the organisation succeed and feel that they are part of it.
The power of employee engagement is that it benefits the business from inside and outside. For example, a highly engaged workforce increases business profitability by 21%and revenue by 4x!
Luckily, organisations can count on different tools that can facilitate the process of improving their employee engagement. One of these tools is chatbots! Chatbots not only have endless benefits from business to clients, but they have a lot to offer to the workforce as well.
This article will investigate how companies can use chatbots to drive employee engagement and why they should start now.
Employee Engagement and Why You Should Care
So what does employee engagement really mean?
Specialists say that employee engagement is not only about employee happiness or satisfaction. The reason is that someone might be happy at work or even satisfied with the company, but that does not mean that they will engage with your business, be genuinely aligned with your goals or even be productive at work.
According to Forbes, employee engagement is the emotional commitment an employee has to an organisation and its goals. This concept embraces the importance of employees’ happiness and satisfaction while also acknowledging why they are happy and should work towards goals. In addition, workers should feel valued and know that their performance in work makes a difference to businesses’ results. In other words, employees should feel engaged.
There are several different ways engaged employees contribute to building a more solid business. Here are some:
- Employees make better decisions when engaged. They know the organisation’s purpose and can take actions more aligned with the business’ goals.
- They are more productive because they feel committed to the organisation and know that their contribution makes a difference.
- Engaged employees are more likely to bring out of the box ideas and proactive thinking about innovative ways of doing things, as they genuinely want the organisation to succeed.
HR Chatbots
Communication is becoming increasingly digital, both in our personal and professional lives, impacting how we communicate with employees. Still, this context brings new opportunities for the interfaces we use to interact.
A chatbot is the most remarkable example of this evolution. Conversational bots are transforming how businesses interact with customers and among employees. Bots provide a digital and intuitive interface that simulates a human conversation, provides information, and it helps to enhance productivity and satisfaction rates.
Today, more HR professionals are implementing HR chatbots in their daily operations to automate many different processes in the sector and boost employee engagement. Powered by artificial intelligence, the HR chatbot simulates conversations with candidates and employees and supports some activities such as hiring, onboarding, handling queries, providing information, and more.
The use of chatbots in HR can optimise a wide range of functions and areas of human resources. If you want to know more about HR chatbots, make sure to contact a chatbot builder that can offer the solutions for your department, such as Flow XO!
Using HR Chatbots to Improve Employee Engagement
With that in mind, let’s discuss what makes HR chatbots your number one ally to enhance your employee engagement.
Welcome New Hires
One of the best ways to keep your employees engaged is to stimulate them from the beginning. Using HR chatbots to welcome new hires and encourage conversations is a great way to motivate employees from the start, especially if they are remote workers.
The HR bot can send welcome messages, connect them with other employees, share information packs or specific resources they should know about, and offer a fun and entertaining interaction. HR bots can be a great and authentic way to introduce new employees to the company culture and keep them motivated.
Stimulate Conversations
Artificial intelligence allows chatbots to simulate human conversations, and there is a growing preference for chatbot communication. HR chatbots can encourage employees to communicate with the company, and, by building the proper flows and triggers, companies can set the bot up to ask the right questions at the right time. Moreover, these conversations can be personalised, giving extra motivation for employees to interact with your bot.
By building bots with the proper flow and the right triggers, HR chatbots can be set up to ask the right questions at the right time. For example, if you need an answer from your employee, you can set up your bot to start the interaction at the time that best suits your workers, so they are way more likely to engage.
The conversations could also be purely for entertainment and fun reasons, which also boosts engagement. Another great example is to set up your HR chatbot to send personalised happy birthday messages to your employees, and your staff will feel valued and cared for.
Measure and Provide Data Insights
One of the most outstanding features of chatbots is their ability to turn interactions into data. Further, if you want to explore a particular topic, you can use your chatbot to send surveys to collect responses, making the process more dynamic than traditional surveys. You can also make the surveys anonymous, making the environment more comfortable for employees to share their genuine opinions.
The greatest thing about this ability is that you can measure your employee engagement as you turn this reliable data into actionable insights and guide decision-making. You can measure employee satisfaction, alignment with the company strategy, well-being and work-life balance, and relationship with colleagues and team leaders.
By relying on data, your organisations can make more informed and accurate decisions about your employee engagement. According to PwC, data-driven companies can outperform competitors by 5% in productivity.
24/7 Support and Availability
By using chatbots, businesses can stay available for their employees 24/7, enhancing employee access and convenience. It offers the staff the opportunity to interact with the company or ask for information at any time, and the bot can solve the query almost instantly.
Of course, some people still prefer to speak to humans, and chatbots can quickly transfer the management of the interaction to a human agent. It gives the employee a choice to talk in a more comfortable way for them.
The 24/7 support offered by chatbots can also help improve employee wellbeing and mental health. Many people prefer to talk with chatbots when it comes to more sensitive and personal issues at work. A global survey found that 64% of employees trust chatbots more than their managers.
There is an opportunity for HR to use chatbots to measure the mental health of their team and use those insights to prioritise employee wellbeing in the company’s culture. Thus, employees will develop a relationship of trust with the business, be more willing to engage and participate, and feel more valued.
Improve Employee Retention
Chatbot’s features drive employee retention in organisations, and the keyword is engagement. Chatbots can give employees a voice and provide a consistent engagement interface. It allows employees to communicate with the organisation constantly. This way, you are always on top of what your employees need or what they are feeling.
This constant communication becomes even more critical if you manage a remote workforce. By taking proactive action, you are more likely to retain your staff.
Personalisation also makes a huge difference to employee engagement. Your conversations can be highly personalised with chatbots, so your business can offer customised benefits and individual learning and development programs.
Employee Engagement: Taking Action
HR chatbots can be great allies in reinforcing company culture and driving employee engagement by delivering a more consistent, personalised and valuable interaction between business and their teams.
It also allows businesses to look at their employees with analytical eyes and use data generated from chatbots to take proactive steps towards a more productive and pleasing work environment.
Flow XO supports organisations in building HR chatbots that will consistently and effectively drive engagement. Flow XO offers a superior user experience that makes chatbot interaction more intuitive, available in desktops and mobile devices, and it provides businesses with an analytical approach to employee engagement.
Plus, you can integrate your Flow XO bot with various apps and platforms that are already familiar to your employees, such as Trello, Microsoft Office and more!
Engage now. Start for free.