The Future of Employee Engagement: Real-Time Monitoring and Digital Tools for Engaging a Workforce

At no other time have organizations had so much opportunity to measure and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of their workforce. While not all companies have yet to embrace the tools and technology available to them, leading companies have been able to capitalize on new technologies that track productivity, sales, customer satisfaction, work flows, quality, and workplace interactions on a frequent, sometimes real time basis. Additionally, the tools to synthesize and analyze this data has also rapidly advanced in the last few years with the more mainstream availability of statistical modeling, machine learning technology, and artificial intelligence applications. Yet, when it comes to measuring and tracking employee engagement, most companies still evaluate engagement on an annual, or longer, basis using traditional survey techniques. While these practices have provided a wealth of insight into the dimensions and impact of engagement, it is time to rethink how we are measuring engagement and, more importantly, how the same digital tools can be applied towards improving the productivity, retention, and satisfaction of the workforce. We propose a series of research topics to address this modern trend of the impact of technological advances on both the measurement of engagement and the application of human resource management (HRM) practices to improve engagement.