Struggling with Employee Engagement? Here’s How Workday Peakon Can Help

06.12.2023 | Staffing Services

How are U.S. workers really feeling about their jobs? The answer depends on who you ask. The Conference Board says job satisfaction is at an all-time high, with respondents expressing increased contentment across 26 key measurements. Yet the Aflac WorkForces Report for 2022 to 2023 shows exhaustion is on the rise, with 59% of all American workers feeling moderate levels of burnout or higher.

Who is right? Who is wrong? That’s hard to say—and it might ultimately be irrelevant. Rather than turning to outside sources for approximate answers or rough generalizations, you’ll get the best answers about your workforce by going straight to the source.

Organizations have become more attuned to how their people feel, what they prioritize, and how to help them feel engaged. Yet with the right tools, organizations can uncover the insight necessary for increasing employee engagement faster and more efficiently than ever before. That level of clarity and actionability is available with Workday Peakon Employee Voice. If you haven’t reviewed the tool, here’s where it shines in the employee engagement process.

Customizing Engagement

On-the-job engagement is very personal because no two people are inspired the same way. Different roles, experiences, backgrounds, and personalities all contribute to the ways in which people find motivation and sustain enthusiasm for their work. That’s why modern engagement needs to take a personalized approach, tailoring everything from the questions asked to the resources provided to fit specific employees.

Survey questions need to be seamless, incisive, and issued at the right time. Workday Peakon satisfies all three requirements using sophisticated algorithms and automation.

The intelligent surveys sent by Peakon find what resonates with your employees, pulling questions from research-backed libraries to find the right one for the right moment. Questions can be asked in more than 60 languages, capturing real-time employee sentiment using the language each person is most fluent in. Best of all, the simplicity of sending out surveys and analyzing the results makes it so you can run surveys consistently.

Even the next steps of employee engagement can be personalized. Do employees want learning or development opportunities? Workday Peakon can supply workers with existing training materials, notify them about continued education opportunities, or prompt leaders to schedule coaching sessions.

Are employees feeling overloaded? Workday Peakon can facilitate easier and confidential communication, allowing workers to vent their frustrations without fear of reprisal. Whatever the issue, Peakon has steps in place it can execute quickly and efficiently.

Retaining High-Value Employees

Employee turnover is frustrating, especially departures are likely preventable. In fact, the 2022 Retention Report found up to 70% of respondents’ reasons for leaving a company fell into avoidable categories:

Career: Missing growth opportunities, no road to promotion, limited job security, few learning opportunities
Job: High stress, limited availability of resources, scant training, restricted empowerment
Work-Life Balance: Extensive travel, prolonged commutes, overall inflexibility
Total Rewards: Stagnant base pay, little or no benefits or bonuses
Management: Lacking professional etiquette, nonexistent support, insufficient knowledge and skills
Environment: Disorganized culture, unclear mission and values, lax safety standards, limited diversity

Though common enough, decision makers might not recognize engagement detractors until they have already done their damage. Reviewing employee engagement surveys with a critical eye or defined criteria can help to pinpoint the sources of excess employee turnover and act to remedy them.

In this challenge, Workday can help. The Peakon Employee Voice platform takes the results from regular surveys and communications, analyzing them using natural language processing (NLP) tools to identify common attrition causes. Their Attrition Prediction model uses over 20,000 data points to get to the bottom of the problem, identifying risk by department, location, age, and other key factors.

Once the issue has been recognized, Peakon provides managers with recommendations for increasing employee engagement amongst at-risk members of the team. Those best practices are compiled from widespread Peakon customer data as well as strategies from across the organization, empowering your leaders to take action that mitigates unnecessary turnover. And, if you play your cards right, you can increase your employees’ effectiveness and lower hiring expenses along the way.

Empowering Your Leaders

Leadership might recognize problems with worker engagement but may not have the knowledge or bandwidth to identify problems and present solutions on their own. Tools like Workday Peakon can grant managers the capacity to engage their team while juggling the other elements of their jobs.

The frequency of measuring the pulse of an organization is a great starting point. In the past, companies might have only had time to send out engagement or NPS surveys once or twice a year. Now this type of censusing can be conducted on an ongoing and illuminating cadence, harnessing the automated scheduling features of Workday Peakon. Not only sending out survey questions at the right intervals, Peakon can increase participation by sending out reminders during the length of the employee sentiment survey.

The personalized dashboard offers another layer of proactive communication. On the engagement main menu, Peakon users can see the greatest opportunities for improvement (i.e., Suggested Priorities) and the relevant actions that can increase their overall score. For example, if employees are feeling as if their weekly workload is too much, leaders can schedule time to touch base, identifying competing priorities and helping employees prioritize their workload. Or if the problem has to do with the perception they cannot share their opinions, leaders can create anonymous surveys as a starting point, responding to them publicly in a straightforward and unperturbed manner.

Whatever element of engagement you’re looking to improve, Peakon gives leaders best practices to meet goals and hit industry benchmarks.

Bringing It All Together

There is a world of employee engagement tools out there that can get to the bottom of how your people are feeling. That said, the best tools require careful implementation to ensure your insights and actions fit individuals’ needs, challenges, and preferences.

Working with the right Workday implementation partner can help to maximize the results of your overall employee engagement strategy. Though you still need committed leaders and hardworking people to turn recommendations into action, it’s a whole lot easier when people’s feelings are easy to discern and attainable with prescribed actions.

If increasing employee engagement is on your list of priorities, now is the perfect time to act. Let’s make time to talk about Workday Peakon and how we can help you hire experts to enhance your performance and profitability.

Let’s talk about Peakon

Related Articles

5 Challenges Hiring Workday Talent That Can Sabotage Your Candidate Search Before It Starts

3 Ways to Support a Workday Launch After You Go Live

The Most Common Workday Implementation Failures Increasing Costs & Lowering Performance