EmpoweringEmployee EngagementCreating an Engaged Workforce through Affordable Innovation

The ROI of Employee Engagement

Companies with over 50% employee engagement retain over 80% of their customers (Demand Metric)

Increasing employee engagement investment by 10% can increase profits $2,400 per employee per year(Workplace Research Foundation)

Companies with engaged employees outperform others by 202% (Gallup)

The Engagement Gap

But only 24% said the employees in their organization are highly engaged.

71% of executives say employee engagement is very important to their business’s success.

A recent poll from the Harvard Business Review found:

71% 24%

What do Employees Need to Be Engaged?Employee disengagement can come from uncertainty that their work is meaningful. An effective leader can engage employees by helping them answer questions about five key aspects of their work:

Clarity: How do I do this job? What should I do next?

Efficiency: Is my time valued? Or am I just stuck doing busy work?

Empowerment: Do I have the authority to be effective? Do I have the resources I need?

Recognition: Am I doing a good job? Does anyone care if I go the extra mile?

Clarity Efficiency Empowerment Recognition

Thorough training provides a clarity of purpose that equips employees for success. Tablet PCs make training more engaging, consistent, and trackable.

The Habit Burger Grill struggled with inefficient training procedures as their restaurant chain expanded to over 80 locations.

The process took hours of in-person instruction, and the paper documentation process led to inconsistencies between different stores.

The new training process on tablet PCs is self-directed, freeing managers from having to do the onboarding.

Documentation is automatic, with progress bars that show how each employee is progressing. All the training results are stored in a central database for a paper-free process.

Training with tablet PCs gives the Habit’s employees the clarity they need to provide a unified, consistent experience across the organization.

Clarity

Clarity Efficiency Empowerment Recognition

Inefficient work procedures can make employees wonder if management values their efforts. Eliminating waste makes employees more engaged and can cut operating costs as well.

Every Delta Airlines pilot boards their plane with a flight kit. These kits used to be a 40-pound collection of paper charts and manuals.

In addition to their sheer weight, the flight kits became obsolete soon after they were printed, requiring frequent costly reprints.

Delta replaced their flight kits with tablet PCs, shedding almost all of the weight and giving pilots access to instantly-updated documents and real-time risk management.

Delta’s innovation made the flight kit far more easy-to-use and relevant for pilots. As an added bonus, losing those 40 pounds per flight saves Delta 1.2 million gallons of fuel per year.

Efficiency

Clarity Efficiency Empowerment Recognition

Management expects employees to deliver exceptional customer service. To meet these expectations, it’s important that employees are empowered with the authority and resources they need.

Rooms to Go used to rely on kiosks for Point of Sale and customer service. Whenever a customer had a question, the sales associate had to go to a kiosk--and frequently wait for one to be free--leaving the customer alone and waiting.

Now each sales associate has a tablet PC, with everything they need for customer service at their fingertips. They can provide a seamless experience for their customers without waiting in line at a kiosk.

Rooms to Go empowered their employees to improve sales efficiency and enhance the sales experience, boosting morale and revenue at the same time.

Empowerment

Clarity Efficiency Communication Empowerment Recognition

The best employee incentives show that management appreciates the challenges employees face, while rewarding exceptional service. Here’s how one company used affordable innovation to give its employees the recognition they needed.

The crew members on Royal Caribbean International’s ships spend months at sea, disconnected from friends and family.

Royal Caribbean gave every crewmember on its new high-tech ship Quantum of the Seas a Wi-Fi enabled tablet to help them stay in touch. Crew members were encouraged to Skype with loved ones and share photos of their adventures.

The recognition program raised crew morale so much that Royal Caribbean is now giving branded tablet PCs to all 40,000+ crew members in their fleet.

Recognition

The Wrap-up

You can engage your employees by providing clarity of purpose, making processes efficient, enabling communication, empowering excellence, and recognizing them for a job well done.

Affordable innovations like low-cost, high-value tablet PCs can foster employee engagement without breaking your budget.

Engaged employees are better equipped to deliver the exceptional customer experiences that drive affinity to your brand.

Download our eBook, the Modern Manual to Brand Affinity, to learn more.

© 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. This document is provided “as-is.” Information and views expressed in this document, including URL and other Internet website references, may change without notice.

This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product. You may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes.

microsoft.com