Megan Wiseman
If you’re like any of our 2,500 clients, chances are you log into your SmartHub® — Reward Gateway’s bespoke employee engagement platform to centralize perks, communications and reward and recognition — nearly every day.
But if we were to test you on how you’re really using your hub, how well would you do? The truth is, there are so many features that can help you be better, faster and more creative at work.
Here are just a few ways you can be just a bit smarter about how you use your SmartHub®:
1. Invite, encourage, and communicate to employees to access their hub from their smartphones.
It’s a fact: 8 out of 10 people now have a smartphone. Admittedly it feels more like 9.9 out of 10 when you take a glance around whatever mode of transport you commute on, which does require looking up from your smartphone.
It’s a staggering rise over the last 4 years of 60%. We hear facts on how super technological we’ve become so quickly all the time, but it’s a fact that no one is truly offline anymore! With 1 in 3 of us checking our email and/or social media within five minutes of waking up, it’s exactly where your employees are absorbing information - up to 27 times a day, according to Deloitte.
That’s why it’s important to encourage your workforce (and remind them!) that their employee engagement hub is 100% responsive, meaning it works on desktop, tablets, mobile phone and your personal computers, too. Take advantage of this by using email or social media communications to promote the hub and further engage your employees with your perks offering.
Need more convincing? The JCB Group are comprised mostly of salespeople selling on-site, so they’re rarely at their computers. So the fact that only six months after launching their new perks platform they achieved 100% engagement is a very revealing story, because it’s all down to mobile access fundamentally.
2. Reach everyone, with the right message.
The secret of continuous engagement is relevant, interesting and helpful content on your benefits platform. So having ability for certain employees to see different content to that of another set of employees is very nice to have. You could not display that information, or you could present it and say to “email Mandy in HR for more information.” But let me tell you, Mandy’s not going to love that. Another option, which I’ve seen HR teams use, is to invest and maintain two separate platforms for each sub-group. Ouch. Instead, use the segmentation feature on your SmartHub®, and save the headache and extra administrative work.
3. Making your content magically appear when you're not even there
On the subject of making things easier, imagine a tool that can make content appear on your benefits hub when you’re not even there. Maybe a benefit has a change that needs to go live when you’re in all day meetings (or even better on vacation). Our scheduling tool lets you make the changes such as new copy, imagery, call to action or even a whole new tile, however will only set the changes live on the scheduled date and time. The more organized amongst us would probably use this tool to map out the windows of each of the benefits a year in advance, leaving them to concentrate on other pressing matters the rest of the year. Or pre-prepare seasonal changes to the homepage imagery, all in advance!
4. Say goodbye to password paralysis
When you tally up just how many online systems your employees use – intranet, annual leave, learning & development, perks portal, it’s little wonder why people get password fatigue causing ‘’I’ve forgotten my password” to be biggest barrier to engagement. We’ve helped tackle this with our single-sign-on technology. One password to remember and one system to maintain and communicate. Now you can link all the other systems your employees need to use to their SmartHub to allow your employees to seamlessly navigate from one to the other, not needing to input any additional passwords at all. They only need one password and thats for the Hub. If they forget that password, they can even log on via their social media accounts, too.
There are many things that makes us think our SmartHub® is worthy of its name, and countless ways you can be smarter about your own hub. If you boost your own SmartHub IQ, you’ll be on your way to even better employee engagement.