Most engagement surveys in the industry focus on a broad set of factors set against the employee lifecycle, from onboarding to offboarding. They don’t provide enough insight into employees’ daily journeys — especially in terms of how various technology-related factors affect knowledge workers’ engagement. Our survey does. And for this year, we also added a way to understand which factors are most likely burning your employees out.

From Our Latest Analysis Of The Data, We Found Three Key Points:

Technology plays a critical role in employee experience (EX). More than ever, technology plays a critical role in nearly every employee’s workday. From everyday applications to intranet portals and devices, we found a strong correlation with engagement. Collaboration technologies showed the largest engagement impact of all, however.

Manage change carefully, and invest in recognition tools. The top factors predicting burnout are lack of recognition for hard work or accomplishments, recent changes, and micromanaging bosses. Good tools from companies such as O.C. Tanner exist to help organizations do a better job of recognizing people for their unique efforts, so that’s a relatively easy thing to fix. Much harder is managing change in ways that create less anxiety and detachment in employees after the fact, but it’s worth the investment, as is manager coaching and training to help them be better bosses.

Engagement drives advocacy and retention. The data shows that your most engaged employees will be your biggest advocates and stay with your firm. All of the outcome metrics we track show that engagement is decisive.

What Does This Mean For You?

Improving employee experience is worth the investment, but those investments should go to places where they’ll have the most impact. Our survey results offer you a fresh look at where to find those places. Even if your organization already does a regular employee engagement survey, we can help you fine-tune it to reveal insights where other engagement surveys can’t and help you devise a strategy to improve.

As we continue to explore the forefront of EX, clients can read our latest research on Forrester’s Employee Experience Index in the full report here. Stay tuned for more research to come on EX!