Measuring the digital pulse of employee engagement

By Erinne Ong

While the blurring of work-life boundaries due to COVID-19 is a cause for concern, remote work also brought increased flexibility and access to more career opportunities. According to Microsoft’s global 2021 Work Trends Index, employees felt more engaged in authentic interactions despite being separated by geographical distance and digital screens.

On local shores, 90 percent of 9,000 survey respondents wanted to continue remote or hybrid work even after the pandemic. This came as people learned to adapt and companies shifted strategies to be more accommodating in these unprecedented times. Such insights were uncovered by human resources (HR) tech company EngageRocket, in a joint project with the Institute for Human Resource Professionals and the Singapore Human Resource Institute.

Beyond COVID-19, this recently amplified focus on engagement sets the stage for transformative HR initiatives that can elevate both employee welfare and performance. As an emerging innovator in this space, EngageRocket offers an artificial intelligence platform that gathers and extracts relevant insights from employee feedback and data. Armed with unparalleled insights into the working experience, companies may soon see meaningful gains in both employee engagement and business productivity.

Ensuring employees are heard

The business world is no stranger to using analytics, which has now become part and parcel of market research. Prior to launching EngageRocket in 2016, co-founders Ms Dorothy Yiu and Mr CheeTung Leong were themselves already familiar with organisational analytics, having held leadership positions at a global consulting firm specialising in talent management.

However, traditional HR surveys were often too rigid and not extensive enough to capture the nuances of the employee experience—rendering any analyses futile. Accordingly, engagement activities were also often initiated too late to address immediate problems.

Given the need for a disruptive new approach to HR, EngageRocket’s platform was built to leverage the power of data analytics, collecting timely and relevant people data. Just as how market analytics get a feel for customer sentiment, EngageRocket directs this strategy internally and turns employee feedback into actionable insights for improving engagement.

Staying agile throughout change

Besides serving diverse company needs, EngageRocket’s platform is attuned to various stages of the employee life cycle, from recruitment to retirement. Rather than the infrequent, insubstantial surveys of the past, businesses can initiate multiple touchpoints to gauge the pulse of employees and respond to concerns in real-time.

This engages teams in continuous listening via the Belong tool, which carries a pool of scientifically-backed survey questions to encourage employee participation. As an automated warning system for low engagement, the platform can recommend follow-up initiatives and crucially reduce turnover rates. Moreover, with its rich Asian dataset and multi-language capabilities, EngageRocket provides deeper insights contextualised to corporate culture across the region.

Meanwhile, the Grow module focuses on talent development through comprehensive performance reviews and progress tracking.

With these features, the platform equips businesses with a data-driven roadmap to adapt to managerial changes, complex projects and even crises like COVID-19.

For example, EngageRocket previously helped a company improve their overall productivity by creating a more supportive environment for employees amidst pandemic uncertainty, shared Mr Leong. Through data analysed by the platform, the enterprise saw the benefits of having more frequent one-on-one meetings between managers and staff, specifically to discuss career development.

Highlighting fluidity and growth

Recognition is a driver of employee engagement, and true to its role as an innovator in the HR sphere, EngageRocket recently launched the Workplace Transformation Awards 2021. By spotlighting businesses who adopted meaningful changes to their ways of working during the pandemic, the awards hope to inspire other enterprises to similarly put their people at the centre and set themselves up for success.

As a portfolio company under IMDA’s SG:D Spark, which aims to uplift the growth of promising infocomm startups, EngageRocket envisions its digital solutions to accelerate HR transformation beyond Singapore. At a crucial time in our post-pandemic world, the company is changing the future of work by supporting employees to excel and companies to thrive in tandem.