A recent Gallup poll found that employee engagement is on the rise. For every disengaged worker, Gallup reports there are 2.7 engaged workers — employees who feel clear about their roles and motivated to work with their teammates toward a common purpose. That stat is a good thing for businesses, since employee engagement has a direct impact on organizational success. In fact, teams with engaged employees produce substantially better outcomes, treat customers better and are more likely to remain with their organizations than their disengaged counterparts, reports Gallup.

To get a better understanding of what’s new in the world of employee engagement, we sat down with Genesys VP of Product Management, Cameron Smith. Read on to learn what Cam sees for the future for workforce engagement management applications — and how he thinks workforce engagement can impact both the consumer and the employee.

What impact does artificial intelligence (AI) have on the employee experience?

Cameron Smith: We’re standing on the threshold of AI. AI is transformational to our business environment and to our employees. AI brings a lot of dynamic capabilities to the platform, but also a lot of change to the industry.

We approach AI with the guiding principle that technological advancement should honor the human. This principle helps us promote human culture — even with a technology as transformational as AI, we harness it to serve our people to honor the human. Today, we focus on extending the benefits of automation to the employee at work.

How can organizations focus on “honoring the human” within their teams?

Smith: One way is to increase the employee’s engagement with the organization. This doesn’t just happen on its own; businesses need to make an effort. The data shows that engaged teams drive better results, and highly engaged business units equal 21% higher profitability. Employee engagement is quickly becoming a top priority for companies.

How is Genesys approaching workforce engagement management (WEM)?

Smith: We’re doing things differently — we believe that the employees are highly experienced. And providing tools that are automated, intelligent and engaging are the keys to our success. Every employee needs those tools. Genesys CloudTM delivers those capabilities to our customers to take their workforce engagement to the next level.

What are the primary focus areas for WEM in 2020?

Smith: We’re focusing on a few core things. Platform simplicity and ease of deployment are critical for making sure you have the ability to integrate all your channels in a single solution. But it’s also about making sure you have a platform that’s capable of decisions — decisions that are operational but also personal.

On top of that, we realize the platform needs to take costs and revenue into consideration. So, making sure that you are controlling those costs through capacity planning, but also managing revenue through rewards and recognition tied to things like sales targets.

To learn more about how WEM can help your organization transform the employee experience, don’t miss Cameron’s breakout session at Virtual Xperience, a four-hour free event on May 20th. Register for Virtual Xperience now.

And read why Gartner has named Genesys as a Visionary in Workforce Engagement Management.