Keeping your team in the (virtual) loop

Happy employees equate to a happy company, but with an increasing number of employees working remotely, keeping them engaged with the company’s mission and connected with their managers can be challenging. Karandeep Anand, VP, Workplace from Facebook, explains how the platform’s technology enables collaboration, giving deskless employees a voice.

Employee engagement can be measured in many ways, but the bottom line is that it doesn’t just create a happy workforce – it’s great for business, too. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, organisations with more engaged staff are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable. Those are significant results.

On the flipside, the impact of a disengaged workforce can be serious. Employee attrition goes up, it becomes difficult to get employees on board with the organisation’s mission and productivity often stagnates. While fluctuations in engagement can happen for many reasons, a disconnect between managers and employees can have a significant role to play.

For employees who work on the ‘front line’ – delivering services and products directly to customers, away from company headquarters or even entirely remotely from organisation – this can prove a continual challenge. In fact, our Deskless Not Voiceless research found that although 83% of managers confidently claim that they give all employees a voice within their business, 54% of these front-line employees say they feel voiceless. The disconnect is clear.

The modern workforce

A significant portion of employees work on the front line, yet connecting and engaging with them clearly still remains a challenge for many businesses. Improvements must be made to tackle today’s dispersed workforce.

Our Deskless Not Voiceless research identified three key areas of disconnect between front-line workers and their managers, and the first is a communication breakdown. While 86% of employees feel connected to their direct co-workers, just 14% feel connected to their business HQ. What’s more, 30% of the workforce don’t recognise their part to play in their organisation’s business.

The second is that ideas are being roadblocked or lost altogether. More than 50% of managers believe that new ideas are the main topic of conversation when they speak with their front-line employees. Yet just 22% of those on the front line say that their ideas make up a substantial portion of conversation with their bosses. Even more worryingly, a fifth of employees have had an idea on how to improve business performance that they haven’t shared, while 38% of those who did share their ideas felt ignored.

Finally, many employees don’t feel valued. Only 48% of employees think their head office understands the role they perform and the value they bring to the organisation. Paired with the fact that over a fifth of workers on the front line say they would consider quitting if they are not listened to, it’s crucial that employers find a way to bridge this disconnect.

Overcoming barriers to engagement

Technological innovation has enabled more flexible ways of working which must be harnessed by businesses to reap the benefits of a dispersed workforce, instead of suffering its challenges. Collaboration tools enable organisations to address these barriers and allow their employees to feel engaged and connected to HQ, no matter if they’re in a different department or even time zone.

Take AstraZeneca, for example. With a 64,000-strong workforce, it’s been a priority to create connections across all departments and levels of seniority of the organisation. Using Workplace, our dedicated and secure working space for organisations to connect, communicate and collaborate, has enabled AstraZeneca to connect its CEO with the entire company to share its quarterly results first hand. By broadcasting via Live video, the CEO is able to engage with the whole organisation and ensure that everyone is on the same page. And that’s not all – in three months, AstraZeneca saw over 600 Live video streams, including companywide town hall meetings and weekly ‘coffee morning’ broadcasts from senior leaders which has helped to create connections from the top to the bottom of the organisation.

Yet with so many organisations today spread across the globe, connecting people is just one piece of the puzzle. Often, organisations need to bridge language barriers, too. Workplace enables companies to translate written content, opening up communication on an international scale. For AirAsia, this technology is crucial to connecting its 22,000 employees that span 16 different nationalities and operations in five countries. Via Groups, pilots are now able to get accurate information about changes to flights, enabling them to receive important updates from their phones and solve problems in real time.

Through collaboration technology and the power of auto-translation, every employee can be part of the conversation. At the click of a button, employees can understand exactly what’s happening across the organisation, empowering people to break down silos, share ideas and collaborate wherever they are.

The future of engagement

Effective collaboration tools can help drive employee engagement by giving people greater input into how the business works and the ability to collaborate seamlessly.

It’s imperative that these tools are mobile-friendly, easy to use and create the opportunity for two-way conversations, not just top-down mandates. This way, everyone within the organisation has a voice. And once everyone is connected, businesses see real benefits – employee engagement goes up, customer satisfaction increases, and impactful ideas bubble up from the front line. Those that are able to harness these benefits today will have competitive advantage in the long run.

The Luminous view

An online tool that fosters connection among employees – especially ‘deskless ones’ – and helps give them a voice can only be a good thing. The fact that it can also make lives easier and enhance productivity makes it a sure-fire hit. Technology has also been a game-changer for our clients and us. At Luminous, we have worked with some of the UK’s and Europe’s largest companies to develop tools such as intranets, online portals and brand hubs and apps, all to make employee engagement limitless – and it’s thanks to online editing and project management tools such as LuminousLive and Wrike that we were able to deliver these projects seamlessly.

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