At Essential, we always believe in practicing what we preach and using the products we sell to our customers ‘in house’. 

So last week I started working with our latest new products called Engage 365 and Perform365, which are employee engagement and performance management solutions.

As a department focused on achieving outcomes, particularly in closing support calls satisfactorily, it can be easy to become task oriented. 

By that, I mean measuring performance against metrics such as response and resolution times, customer satisfaction ratings, and so on.

With Engage365 in particular I’m hoping to be a lot more proactive in terms of overseeing and enhancing my team’s performance and development by exploring wider areas such as:

• Between 1-10 do you feel you have access to the training resources you need?
• Are there any key challenges you’ve faced over the last quarter?
• How is your overall wellbeing? (I’ve yet to formulate the best questions to ask here)…

It also gives employees the opportunity to tell you things that they would not knock on your door to tell you.

The great thing with Engage365 is that it all happens inside Microsoft Teams. 

I’ve had experience of working with similar performance management platforms that required me to logon to a totally separate system.

In short, integrating performance management check-ins into Teams makes it more likely that I’ll get an immediate – and frank – response. 

It should also be less disruptive to people’s working day.

According to studies, it can take 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to your original task after deviating – three of these a day and you’ve lost over an hour of productivity.

I know it takes my brain longer with every year that goes by to ‘mentally switch’ between different tasks, let alone different platforms.

Which brings me onto the other benefit of Engage365: I’ll be able to manage the review process and look at all the responses using a nice Teams integrated dashboard.

Watch this space for an update on how I get on!…