What is an Employee Engagement Platform and which Key Features to Look for?

Are you embarking on work with your employee engagement? Then you need the right employee engagement platform that can make the process easier for you. But what key features should an EX platform have? What are the benefits of such a platform? And how do you decide which platform partner to cooperate with? We give you the answers here. 

What is an Employee Engagement Platform?

An employee engagement platform is a human resource management tool that helps the organization structure and track feedback from the employees – a super helpful tool for many organizations.

Most commonly, an employee engagement platform is administered by the HR department in the organization. Many employee engagement platforms are sold with a subscription and are described as “Software as a Service.”

At Ennova, we prefer the term “Software with a Service,” because we recognize that software itself never can be the solution and that software with a human touch is a perfect match to make the right improvements in your employee engagement.

The main purpose of using an employee engagement platform is to improve employee engagement and overall employee satisfaction. By structuring the employee feedback in a simple and concise way in the platform, HR and management get a quick and dynamic overview of employee feedback.

That makes an employee engagement platform a huge asset for the organization when trying to better connect with the employees.

Why have an Employee Engagement Platform?

An employee engagement platform is a huge help for HR, management, and teams in an organization. An employee engagement platform uncovers business potential and opportunities to drive business growth by focusing on employee commitment and productivity.

Depending on the platform you use, it can also help the organization define new initiatives and prioritize actions that have the biggest impact on your employee engagement based on data from, e.g., an employee engagement survey.

Five Key Features of an Employee Engagement Platform

These are the most important key features to be aware of when deciding which employee engagement platform to use in your organization:

1. Defining recommendations and prioritizing actions

Data itself does not make any change in your organization. Therefore, you should look for a platform that can do the analysis for you and provide recommendations for your EX work, as well as prioritize the actions to take based on the data.

An employee engagement platform that – besides providing you with data – also gives you great recommendations for your follow-up actions will ease your work on improving your employee engagement. 

The purpose of defining recommendations and prioritizing the follow-up actions is to give the teams somewhere to begin their work with the results, so they don’t have to figure out which areas need their attention or in what order to begin the work. This can be very difficult to do by yourself.

2. Platform accessibility (WCAG)

Choose an employee engagement platform that is inclusive and accessible for ALL your users – regardless of any disabilities that your employees may have. You will thank yourself for that later. 

An estimated 16% of the world (or 1 in 6), has a disability or functional impairment. Globally, for instance, at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distant vision impairment, and nearly 20% of the global population live with hearing loss (WHO).

Therefore, you should consider choosing an employee engagement platform that supports the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which allows your employees with permanent or temporary disabilities to achieve a good platform experience.

If the platform you use does not support the WCAG rules, you risk not including all your employees and thereby not getting the full picture of your employee engagement level. Because a high level of inclusiveness and sense of belonging among the employees results in a higher survey response rate.

3. Simple dashboards and reports

The purpose of any employee engagement platform is to help HR and team leaders structure and track feedback from the employee and thereby give the top management an indication of the overall employee engagement and satisfaction in the organization. 

Therefore, it is important to get a concise and simple report of the results. Be aware that your employee engagement platform can provide you with useful dashboard information and easy-to-understand reports that enable the leaders to easily identify general patterns in the organization.

There are many different types of reports depending on the employee engagement platform that you use. An example can be an engagement report with the purpose of giving the leaders in your organization relevant insight and guidance to turn survey results into a sustained change in the team and the organization.

4. System integrations

Overall, the demand for integration solutions in the context of an employee engagement platform is driven by the desire to make the survey process more efficient, effective, and insightful for all users.

Integration solutions enable seamless data integration, automation, and collaboration, contributing to a more comprehensive and data-driven approach to employee feedback and engagement. With the right solutions, all users can access the platform from anywhere, anytime.

How sophisticated the integration solution is or needs to be depends on your needs.

How often do you need updated data (one-off or real-time)? Do you need the data for stand-alone use, or do you need to link data to other data sources? What is the size and quality of the data system(s) and do you have IT experts to support you?

These are some of the points you need to consider to choose the right integration setup.

5. Rules of confidentiality

The confidentiality of the survey participants is crucial for obtaining accurate and honest feedback from employees. It also protects employee privacy and builds trust between employees and the organization.

Therefore, you should be aware of whether your principles of confidentiality and the platform provider’s rules of confidentiality are a match or not. Does the platform live up to your wants and needs when it comes to confidentiality?

We highly recommend that you choose a platform provider with clear rules of confidentiality when it comes to employee feedback. Most likely, it will be very easy and helpful for you if your provider has very clear guidelines and recommendations in this area; if not, the consequence may be that you experience a lack of certainty and clarity when it comes to employee anonymity, which you should try to avoid at all times.

The level of confidentiality is different for each platform provider, and it is therefore important for you to check this before choosing a provider for your employee engagement platform. Again – it is best to choose a provider with a clear confidentiality rule set because it will make it much easier for you as a customer during the process.

Benefits of Having an Employee Engagement Platform

1. Increased employee engagement

With an employee engagement platform, you get consistent feedback from your employees, which makes them feel valued and important in the organization. With the insights generated and presented to you in the employee engagement platform, the organization will know what affects and drives the engagement and get recommendations on what exactly to do to enhance the employee experience further.

These eight main drivers will help you improve your employee engagement.  

2. Discover conclusions you cannot define yourself

Depending on the specific employee engagement platform that you choose, you can draw valuable conclusions and findings that you may not have been able to draw by looking into the huge amount of employee feedback.

This is a huge advantage for your employee engagement work because these conclusions and findings can lead to the best development in employee engagement.

3. Help you act on the employee feedback

As mentioned above in the article, data alone will not lead to improvements. The improvements occur when you start discussing and acting on the data. Therefore, a platform with this feature can help you design the best process for your team on how to follow up on the survey results and work with the data.

Having an employee engagement platform will therefore make it much easier for HR or leaders to start a team dialogue based on the result overview in the platform.

Download our Quick Guide to Satisfied Employees 

With this guide, you will learn how to create employee experiences that will make you stand out from your competitors. The guide will help you break down this huge EX field into 8 steps that you can start practicing today if that is what you want.