Accountability and Employee Engagement: Transparency is Important.
The third part of our monday.com Impact Series focuses on employee accountability and employee engagement, both instrumental for employee management and a productive workplace.
Employee engagement is a way of measuring an employee's dedication and sense of commitment toward their assigned job. Accountability in the workplace, on the other hand, is characterized by employees willingly taking up the responsibility for their individual tasks and their role in the organization.
While organizations are actively working to improve employee engagement and accountability, statistics show that the percentage of disengaged employees in the U.S. is on the rise, from 14% in 2020 to 17% in mid-2022, negatively impacting business growth.
In this post, we will walk you through the reasons that lead to low accountability and employee engagement, and how monday.com can help improve your workplace culture.
Mistakes and Challenges in Fostering Employee Engagement and Driving Workplace Accountability
Dedication to high-quality work and a willingness to adapt and improve over time describes an engaged employee. These workforce traits are essential for the growth of your business, yet there are a number of challenges that interfere with employee engagement and accountability in the workplace:
- Fear of Failure. One of the primary reasons for employee dissatisfaction and disengagement is fear of failure. While apprehension may be related to inexperience, a disrespectful or hostile work environment leads to passive employee behavior. This causes employees to hesitate in taking up responsibility and eventual accountability for a task. In the long run, the fear of failure contributes to teamwork inefficiency and lack of productivity.
- Dysfunctional Teams. Dividing the workforce into smaller teams is an excellent strategy for quicker task completion and more efficient results. It brings together all the people having multiple skill sets that are relevant to the project, which is why the promotion of teamwork is an HR priority in organizations. However, various unhealthy leadership behaviors like lack of trust and communication among the team members, prejudiced leadership, unclear goals, or distribution of tasks without taking individual strengths and weaknesses into account, result in a dysfunctional team and low productivity.
- Lack of Rewards and Recognition. One of the factors that drive engagement and instill motivation is rewards and recognition. Research shows that offering incentives for a task can boost employee performance by 15%. Not providing practical and meaningful incentives can often lead to employee dissatisfaction.
- Unclear Objectives. Conveying the objective of a task is imperative to foster employee responsibility and motivation. According to a 2019 report, only 40% of employees working in an organization are actually aware of the company's primary goals. Failure to communicate the objective of a task can occur at both the employee and management levels.
- Ineffective Execution. Failure to adequately frame, plan and supervise tasks results in ineffective project and process execution. This contributes to demoralization, further affecting employee performance.
- Communication Gaps. A lack of healthy and effective communication between management and employees is another factor responsible for employee disengagement and high turnover in an organization.
How Does monday.com Help Improve Employee Engagement and Workplace Accountability?
Streamlining employee management and helping create a healthy workplace environment is one of the core goals of monday.com. Here's how the monday.com Work OS can help you achieve improved engagement and accountability:
Employee Engagement Template
Monday.com features an intuitive and customizable employee engagement template that you can use to gauge employee performance and satisfaction. The template design can be customized to center on the four primary needs of HR: recruitment, onboarding, employee wellbeing, and training.
Recruitment and Hiring
Employee engagement is also closely related to team building. Selecting candidates who are not just good at their job but can also connect and enjoy working within your team is vital for business growth.
The monday.com platform allows management to supervise the recruitment process. By integrating Gmail or Outlook, employers can easily communicate with potential candidates and update them on the interviews and where they stand.
You can tailor the base template to categorize candidates based on their interview performance and prior experience. By customizing the recruitment plan according to your needs, you can ensure hiring the best fit for the job.
When the recruitment workflow helps ensure the people hired are capable of performing well in a team and will contribute to positive workplace culture, it eventually boosts productivity overall.
Employee Onboarding
Once you hire the right candidates, it's important to give them a positive onboarding experience. Monday.com can be used to create well-structured, trackable onboarding processes.
A flexible Work OS can also be leveraged as your company intranet, providing a centralized place to share operating procedures, HR policies and other important information all new employees need to know.
Employee Wellbeing
Within the Work OS platform, you can also communicate with each employee confidentially. This way, monday.com helps forge better employee-employer relationships and clearer communication.
Employee Development and Training
Monday.com also streamlines the employee training process. It can be customized to monitor training progress to help an employer better assess each training plan and make necessary changes before they become urgent.
Employee Engagement Surveys
Monday.com enables employers to send out survey forms to employees and automatically generate the results. You can pick a provided survey template to start and fully customize it for your company's structure or for each department.
These surveys give your employees an avenue for feedback. What's more is that monday.com simplifies the entire procedure by allowing you to collect, analyze, share and discuss the data all in one place.
The survey results can also be analyzed to uncover departmental sentiments. By looking at various chart widgets, you can identify lower engaged employee populations and address problems early.
With clear and candid survey results, you can then develop a practical and effective program to improve accountability and employee engagement.
Dashboard Chart Widgets
For better results and comparative data analysis, you can quickly build a dashboard. Monday.com dashboards are a great way to compare different data sets. They feature various chart widgets, each of which can give you a real time view of employee performance from different angles.
Team Communication
Monday.com helps improve communication both within the team as well as with the entire company. Effective communication enables prompt feedback, which helps establish workplace accountability.
In addition, you can display appreciation for the employees who show improvement and can also offer them incentives. This builds employee engagement and reinforces a healthy workplace culture. There are even gamification apps in the monday.com Apps Marketplace to make communicating about work just a bit more fun for everyone.
Deadline Setting
Monday.com allows you to allocate tasks and set clear visual deadlines. It automatically notifies the teams and employees about assignments. This feature is particularly great for team leads as it provides a single-page view of all assigned tasks and their progress.
Monday.com also helps manage your workload within teams and across multiple projects, ensuring that no employee is overburdened. By enabling you to take care of a healthy work balance for your employees, monday.com helps improve engagement.
Marketplace Apps
Monday.com features various apps that enable businesses to visualize better and assess their data. On the monday.com Apps Marketplace, you find vetted and approved apps to personalize your monday.com workspace to fit your company's operational structure.
You can browse the apps according to your desired features and filter out the ones that offer a view, widget, or template suitable for your business. By clicking on an app, you get a detailed description of the features that it adds to your account.
Once you have selected a particular app, the software leads you through a set of easy installation steps. Afterward, you can use the app on your profile and dashboard.
The marketplace also helps you connect with the original app developers should you run into any problems or bugs.
These integrated apps allow you to collaborate and communicate within the organization. With easier and more effective communication, you should see a corresponding improvement in employee engagement and accountability.
Remote Working
Employee engagement is one of the biggest challenges that organizations face with remote operations. According to a pre-pandemic 2018 survey, employees working remotely showed less long-term commitment compared with on-site workers. Yet the world has changed dramatically in a few short years since that survey.
Now, WFH and hybrid work are a vital part of employee satisfaction and engagement, with 32% of employees now saying that they would consider quitting their job if they were not permitted to work remotely.
Monday.com is ideally suited for remote work, helping organize work across timezones, and facilitating employers to better track employee performance and work progress no matter their location.
For example, the Updates section is a fantastic feature on monday.com that makes managing remote work a breeze. Employees can update on the status of their respective tasks, exchange feedback and ideas, and arrange meetings, all on one dedicated page for each task or project. By actively engaging your employees in a team discussion, you can drive better productivity and more efficient collaboration.
Monday.com Reinforces and Supports a Healthy Work Environment.
A Work OS like monday.com streamlines company operations, project allocations, and thus accountability. Built-in features like survey forms enable prompt employee feedback to help managers easily assess employee engagement and job satisfaction on a regular basis.
The previous two posts in this series discussed how monday.com helps manage human and material resources as well as boosts employee productivity. The next and final part of our monday.com Impact Series will talk about collaboration and communication within various functions.
To know more about how you can use monday.com to optimize your company's performance, contact Polished Geek for an expert Q&A session and a free extended trial of the Work OS platform.
In our special monday.com Impact Series, we dig deep into four fundamental ways that the monday Work OS positively impacts organizations of all shapes and sizes.
- Part One: Resource Management
- Part Two: Team Productivity
- Part Three (this post): Accountability & Employee Engagement
- Part Four: Team Collaboration & Communication