I've watched this play out more times than I can count.
A company chooses a new employee engagement platform. The implementation goes smoothly. Every status report is green, start to finish. Launch day arrives, everyone celebrates, and maybe someone orders a sheet cake.
And then only 20% of employees use it.
The project worked. The technology worked. But you've spent time and money on a solution that isn't actually solving your employee engagement problem.
At Peoplyst, we often help companies choose and implement HR technology. And after years of successful implementations, the lesson I keep coming back to is simple: technology is a tool. If you have great technology and poor practices around it, the technology won't save you.
Employee engagement starts before anyone gets to work
Let's take a step back and talk about employee engagement and why it's necessary. First, here's how I define employee engagement: It's how your employee feels when they wake up and put their feet on the floor each morning?
Are they anxious? Energized? Ready to go? Do they have friends there? Is work a place they actually want to be?
That's where engagement shows up. While engagement and productivity are related, engagement is all about how the employee feels. And when people are engaged and satisfied with their environment and their managers, they'll work a lot harder for you.
I believe this has always been true. Even as technology continues to weave its way into every aspect of our lives, the importance of people and true employee engagement hasn't changed.
What technology can (and can't) do
There are lots of platforms out there to improve engagement, but many companies forget the "technology is just a tool" part. It's the add-on that gets you over the hump, not the full solution.
Technology's real job is to keep track of the things you can't keep track of on your own. I remember the days of running employee reviews in Excel spreadsheets. Keeping up with everything was just about impossible. Good technology moves things forward faster, without anyone having to remember every detail.
The hardest part is injecting technology into how people already work and giving them a reason to use it. Integrating technology into a company's culture takes more effort than just putting a tool out there, but that effort is necessary, and worth it.
It not only simplifies use for the end users, it also makes it easy for managers to enforce adoption. When a process is cumbersome, and everyone knows it, managers often feel guilty asking their teams to do it, and they don't push. When it's been implemented thoughtfully, a manager can say, "Hey, this is really easy. I need you to do it." No guilt required.
Listen, then do something with it
The best way to affect employee engagement is to listen to your people and then act on what you hear.
Listening doesn't mean doing everything employees ask. You're listening for their thoughts and feelings, so you can work with them to build a better environment and find new ideas. If there's a clear consensus around something you can't do, explain why. People can accept a no when they understand the reason.
Two common employee listening mistakes
One quick way to affect engagement in the wrong direction: Run the survey, hold a town hall to share the results, then put them in a desk drawer until next year. Employees will feel ignored, and they'll be less likely to share their opinions again.
The other common mistake is generalizing, or falling victim to confirmation bias. Too often, companies get their results back and shape the data to fit their preconceived ideas about what they should be working on. In many cases, companies fall back on the same two takeaways: communication and transparency.
Leaders walk into their next town hall with their plan in mind, but they didn't really listen. They say, "We heard you. You want us to communicate more and be more transparent." Ironically, that doesn't happen after the meeting either.
Recognition that actually lands
Another key factor of employee engagement is recognition and appreciation. I often say employees need three things to stay engaged and feel like they belong: a way to grow, a way to show, and a place to go. Growth comes from learning, new experiences, and stretch assignments.
But the middle piece matters too. Once people learn something new, they need a way to show it, and showing it should naturally lead to recognition. Whatever behavior you recognize is the behavior you get more of.
Of course, there are pitfalls here too. What separates the type of recognition that changes behavior from recognition that feels like an afterthought? How it makes the employee feel.
If recognition isn't timely or specific, if it just feels like someone is checking a box, it won't be meaningful to the recipient. A generic "proud to have Jane on the team" email doesn't do much. Neither does a points program where people recognize each other just to rack up enough for a new grill.
Meaningful recognition is timely, specific, and explains why it matters. "Yesterday, Jane saved a client for us by hunting down an invoice error. That matters because it kept a very preventable issue from impacting our revenue and our reputation, which keeps our team strong." That's the kind of recognition people remember. It changes how they feel when their feet hit the floor the next morning.
And the place to go is a career path that excites the employee and makes them want to grow and show. If you don't give them a place to go inside your company, they'll find their own place to go, and you probably won't like it.
I see many companies that offer one or two of the three, but the best companies make a way to grow, a chance to show, and a place to go part of their overall strategy.
What employee engagement looks like in practice
Peoplyst worked with a construction company struggling with new hire turnover. People were leaving almost immediately, most within their first 45 days.
We started by asking new hires what would make them stay. But the more we listened, the clearer it became that we needed to hear from more than just the new hires. They wanted to be there. That's why they said yes to the job. They just weren't feeling welcome once they arrived.
So we expanded our listening to their coworkers and managers. Two problems surfaced. New hires felt excluded from day one, because established employees already had tight peer groups with years of shared history and inside jokes. And managers were stretched so thin that onboarding someone new well was nearly impossible.
We made three changes:
- Trained managers in a new approach to welcoming new hires.
- Moved part of onboarding to a dedicated team, so managers could be a welcoming presence instead of owning the whole process.
- Paired each new hire with a teammate to bring them into those peer groups.
Within 90 days, that work contributed to a 38% reduction in turnover during new hires' first 45 days. All of it came from listening, then changing how we engaged people when they walked in the front door.
Circling back to the technology
For years, Peoplyst has prided itself on being system agnostic. We help companies select HR technology, like an HRIS, and then implement it. We never cared which vendor a client chose. We just wanted the right fit for them.
Terryberry changed that.
I've worked with nearly every employee listening platform out there, and I've implemented many of them. When we saw everything Terryberry brings together, we did a bit of an about-face. Be Heard for listening, Be Recognized for recognition, Be Well for well-being, all working as one within Be Engaged.
Beyond the solution's diversity, we also loved Terryberry's ethos. They don't just offer a software platform. They provide a program built to engage employees and help them reach their full potential, which is exactly why Peoplyst exists.
Be Engaged also reflects what makes a culture work. Don't just listen to your employees. Make sure they're recognized and have the wellness support they need to thrive. Terryberry covers all of it, so the technology supports the practices instead of standing in for them.
We chose Terryberry as a partner as much as Terryberry chose us. And for listening, recognition, and well-being, Terryberry is the only platform we recommend.
