Employee Engagement Begins at Top of Shift

Here’s the questions you should be asking your workforce right at shift start.

Employee engagement is a challenge in any industry, but especially those with distributed workforces. With turnover in essential service industries already so high, it’s important to leverage every tactic in your toolkit to foster employee engagement (and ultimately, improve experience and retention.)

As an implementation specialist at TEAM Software, I’ve seen companies use our employee engagement software to better engage, manage and motivate their workforce. A primary example is engaging with your workforce right at the beginning of their shift. By asking engaging questions at the top of shift in a quick, easily digestible format, you can help transition employees to a work mindset, reinforce your commitment to their wellbeing and safety, and identify any issues before they become a larger problem.

Here’s a list of the top four employee engagement questions you should be asking your distributed workforce at top of shift.

1. What do you need in order to deliver your best work while on shift? This question aims to gather actionable feedback your company can review to help make your field-based workers more successful at their jobs. It could be that your distributed workforce sees the benefits of more personal protective equipment, for example. By cultivating this conversation, you create open communication between your field and back office on what’s needed to ensure their success (and the success of your contracts).
2. How can we help ensure your success as a member of the company? Not to be confused with Question #1, this question is more around providing opportunities for your employees themselves. Based on how you tweak the question for your own specific use cases, you could receive feedback related to training, certifications, or potential desires to work certain types of jobs or pursue advancement opportunities. This is a great tactic to help recognise interest and talent within your workforce, decrease churn and support employees through their career growth. This doesn’t have to be a question you ask every day, but regular check-ins are recommended.
3. Remember to take your meal and rest breaks. While this isn’t really a question…it’s still really important. By including this in your top-of-shift communications, you’re reinforcing the importance of periodic breaks and rest for your employees, and setting the expectation that they prioritise their wellbeing as much as you do. Although regulations vary by state (and country), this often has direct correlations with compliance issues, so it also serves as a reminder for your managers and supervisors to relieve their employees of duties while observing these periods.
4. Do you have any questions for your manager or company leadership? This type of question is a great way to establish an open forum within your company at large. It can also help make your leadership feel more approachable by distributed workforces who often aren’t able to gain a lot of face-time within a large organisational structure. By making sure every employee’s voice is heard, you can take big steps towards keeping your workforce engaged.

Read our guide to engaging distributed workforces with market-leading technology solutions. 

Additional information to share at the top of shift.

Aside from employee engagement questionnaires, you can also leverage the start of shift as a time to gather other information, depending on your company’s needs.

During the peak of the pandemic, we saw a lot of activity at top of shift using mobile forms to collect health-related questions as a safety initiative to reduce the chances of virus spread.

Otherwise, it’s always a good idea to use this time to share work assignments, location details, the results of audits or inspections from their previous time working the location, or reminding them to access their self-service portals for newly released company information.

How to support employee engagement in the field.

These types of questions, suggestions and reminders can be handled if you have the right workforce management solution implemented within your organisation. With features like mobile forms, which can be customised to collect any type of Q&A responses you need, to real time messaging services, TEAM Software has the right solution for whatever your business needs the most.

Are you interested in improving your employee engagement? Click here to schedule a personalised discovery call, and we can chat over your specific business needs.