Employees are seeing new sanitation protocols, occupancy counting, social-distancing signage, mask requirements, item limits, and a whole list of tasks to be done, but communication can be one of the greatest hurdles to execution.
There’s no time to send down PDFs from the top of the organization, and binders of data are outdated almost as soon as the pages come off the printer.
Personal situations are also changing at record speeds. Although many grocers are aggressively hiring more than firing, employees’ spouses or family members may have lost their jobs or become sick, making associates’ paychecks that much more crucial.
Employee engagement is the answer to making associates feel safe coming into work, and ready to adapt while on the job in a timely and complete manner.
WorkJam’s technology works with a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model, something that Will Eadie, the company’s global VP of sales and alliances, says has currently become more of the norm.
“Now [a shared device] is one more thing to clean, one more place where you have a risk of contamination,” he adds. “You have to have a way to communicate, and it’s not in the back office of your store anymore, or on a shared device in a distribution center, or in a manufacturing plant. You have to be able to allow people options.”
WorkJam’s platform has combined the functionality of a number of disparate systems often seen in retail to handle communications, tasks, learning and time-off requests all in one place, making all of these features more straightforward for the employee.
“Tasks have always existed, whether they’re on a checklist or a store walk or an audit,” Eadie notes. “What’s really important now is that they can’t be separate from communications. We typically see adoption around 87% weekly active users. Traditional intranets, just by the way, generally have a below 20% weekly average user rate.”
Read the full article here: https://progressivegrocer.com/upgrading-employee-engagement
