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Employees are the lifeline of an organization. Their efforts and approach towards the company make it possible for an organization to operate successfully. It is, therefore, important to keep your employees engaged for increasing the overall productivity of your organization and reaching the desired targets. 

The importance of employee engagement has been steadily increasing over time. While employees in the past were happy with a decent salary and appraisals, employees in 2021 have an array of different needs that should be taken care of by the management to ensure engagement. 

Let us have a look at some of the latest employee needs to be fulfilled for keeping your employees engaged. 

Employee Needs To Be Fulfilled For Higher Engagement In 2021

Personalized Support 

One of the important employee needs in 2021 is that of obtaining personalized support. Over time, employees across the board have found themselves lost and confused when it comes to approaching the right person for queries and obtaining a personalized resolution. 

Instead of having to wait for a support executive to provide a more or less generic answer to their questions, employees today need support that is tailored specifically for them. 

Moving Away From Stringent Work Hours 

If you are willing to increase employee engagement within your organization, it is always advisable not to impose stringent work hours on them. Gone are the days when employees were happy working 9-to-5 glued to their desks. Today, employees need flexible work hours to have a certain level of comfort while working, which in turn makes them work better. 

However, providing flexible work hours does not mean compromising on the work to be done. Make sure that your employees get this freedom as long as the work is done on time. 

Working Remotely 

Although the pandemic situation has made this more or less compulsory for professionals around the world, employees have been willing to work on their own for quite some time. Especially in industries like IT, e-commerce, and digital marketing where employees need not be physically present at the workspace, the culture of working from home has already been thriving. 

Seamless Collaboration While Working Remotely 

It is never healthy for an employee to keep working all by themselves out of a single room for too long. Despite feeling comfortable working alone, they need to interact with their colleagues and the management to get the feel of an actual workplace. 

This is why organizations have started shifting their teams to online collaborative platforms like Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. These virtual workspaces allow all your employees to be on the same page and fulfill their need for interacting with each other while working remotely. 

Why Is Employee Engagement Important?

The term “employee engagement” is often understood in different ways by different organizations. Broadly speaking, employee engagement is an indication of the level of motivation your employees have while working within your organization and a confirmation of the fact that your employees are genuinely driven to work for you. 

Even if your organization has been doing well and your employees are getting all the work done as intended, if they are not driven enough to work and are not happy with the work environment, the employee engagement in your organization will be considered to be low. 

Here are some of the key reasons why employee engagement is important for an organization: 

Better Employee Productivity 

When your employees feel a strong mental and emotional connection with your organizations and are satisfied with the work they do for you, they tend to work harder to achieve the common organizational goals. 

This improves the productivity of your employees and the overall productivity of your organization. Also, engaged employees are always curious to know more about their jobs, ask the right questions, and give in productive ideas that help their teams and senior management work better. 

Higher Employee Retention 

As much as it is important for an organization to recruit new talent and have a fresh perspective on a regular basis, it is equally important to retain valuable employees who are the best performers within the organization. 

When an employee is thoroughly engaged while working with you, they will never want to leave the organization and look for a better opportunity. However, if they are not able to motivate themselves to work for you and have issues connecting with the organization, you may end up losing some of your key players. 

This is the reason why “stay interviews” are as important as exit interviews. They allow you to assess the experience your employees are having while working with you and fix all the issues they have that may lead to them switching companies. 

More Satisfied Customers 

Especially in the case of a customer-facing job, engaged employees tend to serve your customer better and develop a better relationship with them. If your employees are more dedicated to their job, they will naturally take customer satisfaction more seriously and make sure that they are offered the best products/services by the organization. 

Enhanced Company Culture

When an organization actively works towards improving overall employee engagement, it enhances the company culture to a great extent. A company’s work culture essentially depends on the ethics of the team and the approach towards operating as an organization. An engagement-centric approach will improve the ethics of your company and spread positive word about your organization in the industry. This will, in turn, attract more suitable employees to work for your company. 

Holistic Success Of The Company 

You cannot exactly call consider your company to be successful if you have been making profits with employees who are not engaged. Such success is fickle and often short-lived. If you are willing to attain wholesome success for your organization, it is important to take complete employee engagement into consideration. 

Also, entities like investors, partners, suppliers, and shareholders take employee engagement into consideration before collaborating with your company. 

Reduced Absenteeism 

Finally, employee engagement is important because it reduces employee absenteeism in the company. If your employees show genuine interest in working and look forward to coming to work every day, they would hardly miss a workday and maintain good attendance. 

Elevating Employee Engagement Via IT Service Desk

Personalized and streamlined employee support is directly connected to employee engagement. If your employees are not provided with suitable solutions to their problems and satisfactory answers to their questions, they are bound to lose interest in working with you and may think of switching to a different company. 

Organizations have been using IT service desks for employee support for many years. However, the traditional service desks have proven to be little effective when it comes to providing holistic support to the employees. 

The traditional IT service desk provided scattered employee support instead of an integrated one. While the IT help desk was dedicated to the IT team, the HR help desk handled HR queries, and the intranet was used for internal communication for the employees. This often resulted in an unorganized approach to employee support, making employees confused as to whom to approach and how to get their issues resolved. 

Further, the manual ticketing system in traditional IT service desk was often too difficult to understand and use for all employees within an organization. This made the employees prefer sending emails and making calls instead of using the IT service desk. 

This issue can be resolved and employee engagement can be leveraged by implementing an AI-based IT service desk within your organization. 

The Importance Of An AI-based IT Service Desk

By adding AI technology to your IT service desk, you can overcome all the issues faced by your employees while using the traditional service desks. The modern IT service desk allows all employees working in all departments to obtain personalized help from a single integrated platform. 

An AI service desk doesn’t just work as an IT desk, but also as an HR help desk, Finance help desk, and automated project management. It allows your employees to obtain quick and effective solutions to their problems within a few seconds. Ultimately, when your employees get holistic support and personalized attention, you can definitely expect an increase in employee engagement. 

Let us have a look at how an AI-based service desk can help your employees get more engaged with your organization. 

Conversational AI (Use Of AI Chatbots) 

Effective communication has always been a major issue with employees seeking support from an organization. The traditional service desks routed all employee cases to the support agents, leading to an increase in backlog and a lack of personalized solutions. 

The modern IT service desk makes use of conversational AI to ensure quick and personalized communication with your employees. It involves using AI chatbots for the first level of support which is common to all your employees. All they need to do is log in to the service desk and they will be assisted by a virtual assistant who would handle all their queries. 

AI chatbots provide answers to all the basic questions an employee may have almost immediately. Further, they would route their cases to a dedicated support agent if they are not happy with the help. Although most cases are resolved in the first level itself, the chatbots act as a link between your employees and the agents for effective communication. 

This way, the use of conversational AI makes sure that your employees do not have to look anywhere else for solutions and obtain support that is tailored just for them. 

Automated Ticketing System 

The modern AI completely eliminates the complexities arising out of manual ticketing by automating the entire process. Right from creating support tickets to managing them and closing them once the issue is resolved, the AI chatbots handle the entire process, making it invisible to your employees. All an employee needs to do is give a command and the virtual assistant will handle it all. 

A support ticket is created whenever an employee needs to get their case routed to an agent. The service desk keeps track of all the tickets created and manages them until the case is successfully handled by an agent. 

Understanding The Questions Asked 

One of the biggest advantages of artificial intelligence has always been the fact that it allows your system to learn patterns, analyze data, and understand the context of a situation just like a human would. In the case of an AI-based IT service desk, the chatbots understand the context of the question asked and provide your employees with a solution that is unique to their situation. 

The modern service desk keeps a track of all the interactions an employee has with the virtual assistants. This helps the system understand the issues commonly faced by the concerned employee and provide them with recommendations that work best for them. Such an approach makes your employees feel as if they are constantly accompanied by an expert having all the answers to their questions. 

Integrating AI Service Desk With Collaborative Platforms 

Since 2020, organizations across the world have switched to using online collaborative platforms for creating virtual workspaces for their teams. If you are willing to provide seamless support to your employees while they work remotely, you can integrate an AI service desk within the collaborative platform used by your organization. 

This allows your team to carry on with their work and obtain solutions to their problems whenever they are stuck on the same platform. Moreover, the AI service desk can use the enterprise knowledge base from your virtual workspace understanding your employees better and providing them with holistic support.

The Final Word 

Employee engagement is an issue not many organizations focus on as it is not as objective and measurable as other important business metrics. However, the level of employee engagement in your company determines its longevity and successful run in the industry. 

If you have any more suggestions or tips for using an AI-based IT service desk for higher employee engagement, let us discuss the same in the comments below.