What is a Performance Engagement Platform?

In our crazy new business landscape, it seems like performance management and employee engagement are opposing forces. Employee engagement floats along with its fun, happy workplace, free lunches, and loose schedules. Then performance management barges in, stern and serious, with its list of standards, rankings, and challenges. But perhaps these two fields of management are best appreciated as two sides of the same coin. Could your workplace be fun and productive concurrently? Yes. The best way to get there is a performance engagement platform, and now that’s easier than ever.

In order to understand performance engagement, let’s take a look at its estranged components.

Performance management is anything you do as a manager to make sure your company’s fiscal goals are met.

In your store, dealership, or office, are your daily practices driving your operation to meet your annual goals? Performance management can be applied at all levels, from company-wide initiatives to individuals. It is designed to strengthen weak areas of your organization and keep everyone moving the same direction.

Unfortunately, performance management can sometimes lead to overworking, negative pressure, and unrealistic expectations. In industrial or manual labor scenarios, an overemphasis on performance management can even lead to unsafe work environments.

Performance management is important, but it has its limits.

At first glance, employee engagement almost seems like the opposite. According to Custominsight.com employee engagement is “the extent to which your employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to the organization, and put discretionary effort into their work.” Where performance management focuses on the output, employee engagement focuses on the human.

This can take many forms. Special recognition, bonuses and commissions, fun office activities, and even free food. Employee engagement seeks to make your people feel at home in the company. The trouble comes when employees feel too at home. Some employee engagement strategies can actually serve as distractions from productivity. Working from the couch in the break room while sipping a free latté is fun, unless the employee is watching Netflix while he’s supposed to be working.

So how can these two opposing aspects of management work together? What if they were never meant to be apart? This is performance engagement, which focuses on building a sense of care, investment, and fun among employees while encouraging their productivity.

Until our current age, performance engagement was time-prohibitive, since it involves individually counseling each employee, setting individual goals, and developing custom-tailored incentives to boost performance. As managers, we’d love to do all of that. But we’re often saddled with too many other responsibilities to make this a reality.

But things have changed. The latest tech has opened new avenues for streamlining performance engagement, meaning you can still engage your employees just as much or more as a full schedule of meetings.

A performance engagement platform is an app-based employee motivation system designed to push and reward your workforce for completing daily tasks. With emphases on fun, goal setting, and competition, this platform will turn your operation into a game.

This covers both employee engagement and performance management.

• Workers feel engaged because they have fun pushing themselves toward their goals, earning app-based virtual points they can trade in for real rewards. Each task they perform throughout the day can be assigned via the platform to a certain number of points. Employees blitz through their days, racking up as many points as possible, and their productivity skyrockets.
• And you can manage each employee’s performance because the platform returns performance metrics directly to you in real time. This drastically reduces a manager’s required time estimate compiling things like sales numbers and accounting for things you can’t always be there to measure, such as customer conversations that are important, but don’t end in sales.

A good performance engagement platform will also incorporate a social element. According to Review42.com, the average US adult spends 38 minutes a day checking social media. But focus that on 16-24-year-olds, and that number jumps to 3 hours.

Many companies fight social media time suck by simply prohibiting it while at work. This is understandable. But what if you could harness that phone-checking, social media impulse toward productivity?

Performance engagement incorporates social media that remains store-centric. Employees can share memes, wish happy birthdays, or ask for help. Most importantly, this social network can help you establish a culture of recognition. In 2012, Deloitte found that companies with a complete, mature approach to recognition were 12 times more likely to have a strong business outcome. High fives, even digital ones, are crucial to performance engagement.

With this in mind, we developed Arcade, a complete performance engagement platform, based on smartphones and fully customizable to your business. Arcade gamifies your workplace, introducing elements of fun and competition into day-to-day tasks. Our platform provides workers with continual motivation and pipelines real performance data to you, the manager.

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