Automating Your Employee Engagement
Throughout an employee’s tenure, there are many milestones. Whether it’s a 6-month formal check-in with their supervisor or the end of a probation period, these milestones are frequently the same across your employees, and the steps you have to take for each one can become repetitive and time-consuming. Team Engine helps you define these milestones once and then automatically takes care of communication at each step moving forward, making your process more consistent while giving you time back in your day.
Getting Started
In the sidebar menu, you'll see the Automations tab.
To get started, set up your employee directory. Note: Make sure to include start dates and birthdays with your employees or you will not be able to take advantage of the automations.
Types of Actions
Team Engine provides 3 different types of actions you can automate for an employee milestone
Message
This type will send a message to the employee. You can choose either text or email. This type is useful for providing information (e.g. You have now earned an extra 3 days of PTO) or expressing appreciation (e.g. You have been here for 3 years now. Thanks for everything you do!). You can select the time this message is sent out by selecting "show advanced settings" and then changing the time.
Send Survey
A survey is a specialized type of message to the employee where you expect a response (e.g. a 30-day feedback survey). Using a survey instead of a message, in this case, is useful because all responses across all employees will be collected together on your Survey page. This way, you can draw connections between responses over time. For more information, see: Employee Surveys
Receive Notification
At certain employee milestones, you may need an office team member or supervisor to take some kind of action. Rather than keeping track of this via calendar reminders and manual steps, Team Engine can send emails and/or text alerts to the right people at the right time.
For example, maybe you have a 90-day probation period after which employees are eligible for benefits. If you have a benefits administrator who needs to put together a packet or meet with employees when they get to this milestone, you can add an alert and have Team Engine send that benefits administrator a reminder to do this when someone reaches 90 days.
You can also send an alert to the person’s supervisor. This is valuable for things like a 6-month performance check-in or to let the supervisor know that it’s a person’s work anniversary so they can express appreciation on the job site.
Send Message and Receive Notification can be sent as:
- text only
- email only
- text with fallback to email
Setting Up Your Process Automations
Team Engine includes a set of example automations after an employee starts:
These include:
A Welcome message that goes out in an employee’s first few days to let them know how to get in touch with you
An onboarding Feedback after 30 days to hear about their initial experience
A message and an alert related to benefits eligibility at the end of a 90-day probation period
An annual work anniversary message:
You can customize all of these messages if necessary. For example, maybe your probation period is 60 days instead of 90 or you want to give slightly different instructions.
Adding A New Process Automations
You can also select specific groups to send automated messages to by toggling off "All Employyes" and choosing only the selected groups. This function can help separate things like benefits automations, for example, which may have different eligibility requirements for full-time, part-time, and contract workers. Additionally, location-based groups can be used to send different first-day messages to in-office and field based employees.
Employee Automations can also be scheduled to send prior to a Start Date and Birthdate. This is useful for managers who would like to receive notification a few days before a start date or birthday, so they can prep a card, gift, or event. To set up an annual message before a date, select "Before" in the top drop-down menu, and in Advanced Settings, check the “Send Annually” box.
Copying An Existing Process Automation
You are also able to create employee automations by copying an existing one. To do this, select the three dots in the top right corner of the automation, and select "Copy." This will bring up the creation window with all of the information pre-filled. This can be extremely useful when sending automations to specific groups, so you can easily copy and make slight adjustments to tailor the automation to each recipient group.
Frequently Asked Questions
If I add an employee that started in the past, which of the automations will they get?
Employees you add will only get the automations from the point you add them forward. For example, if you add an employee with a start date 35 days ago, they would not receive the 30-day feedback survey.