7 responses for championing WorkStep’s employee engagement platform within your organization

Are you ready to invest in WorkStep’s employee engagement platform for your frontline employees but need buy-in from your fellow executives? This guide covers the advantages of implementing an employee engagement platform and how to handle leadership’s resistance and common objections so you can convince them to purchase. Get the confidence to pitch WorkStep to your executives and help improve the workplace for your employees.

Helping supply chain organizations improve employee engagement and feedback

WorkStep, an employee engagement and listening platform, provides frontline employees with the tools they need to succeed and make their jobs easier. By improving communication and collaboration between frontline employees and leadership, it creates a more positive and productive work environment. Empower and engage your employees with WorkStep and you’ll boost employee morale and retention, ultimately leading to a more successful and productive organization.

How to champion WorkStep’s employee engagement platform within your organization

When championing an employee engagement platform like WorkStep and pitching it internally to leadership, it’s important to anticipate potential resistance to change, cost concerns, and skepticism regarding the benefits of the platform.

We’ve compiled a list of the most common objections and our best responses to give you a leg up.

Objection 1: We don’t have the budget.

Your response: “We will see X return on investment with WorkStep, saving our organization $X during X timeframe.

WorkStep customers have found the platform pays for itself. WorkStep can help organizations save money in the long run by reducing employee turnover, improving productivity, mitigating organizational risks, and increasing customer satisfaction, market share, and profitability.

According to the Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of WorkStep, one leading enterprise 3PL organization found that using WorkStep helped them cut turnover costs by $5M over a three-year period. The study also found several unquantified benefits including:

• Reduced business disruption
• Increased productivity
• Improved customer experience
• Transformed company culture
• Better business decisions made

WorkStep customers see an average +9% increase in employee engagement and a 24% relative decrease in turnover in just their first year with WorkStep. The ties between engagement and profitability are clear: 92% of executives believe that engaged employees offer better services, leading to 10% higher customer ratings and an impressive 23% increase in profitability.”

Our advice: To overcome the budget objection, lean into the return on investment (ROI) and cost-savings WorkStep customers have seen. We’ve included some of these metrics in your response above. Peruse WorkStep’s customer stories to find testimonials or metrics from a customer within your industry or ask our team for help sourcing these for you. We are always happy to provide you or other members of the executive team with a customer reference.

Given the budget concerns, you’ll also want to estimate the ROI and cost-savings WorkStep can help your organization achieve.

• Fill out the Employee Turnover Calculator to uncover the real cost of losing an employee at your organization.
• The Frontline Employee Toolkit offers access to a retention and turnover KPIs calculator as well as other strategies to help support ROI conversations.
• Connect with our team at WorkStep to access your organization’s safety estimate. Learn the correlation between an increase in safety incidents with disengaged employees and we’ll calculate the cost of your safety incidents, the % reduction in incidents against the engagement of your workforce, and estimate the cost savings of that reduction.

Objection 2: Employee engagement and feedback isn’t really a priority / isn’t an issue.

Your response: “I know our company’s top priority is X and, as a leader, you are focused on X. An employee engagement and feedback platform like WorkStep will help us reach our growth target. By collecting feedback and getting actionable insights, we can address underlying issues and increase employee satisfaction and efficiency.”

Our advice: When making your pitch, ensure  you’re positioning WorkStep and your continuing listening strategy toward the company’s top priorities and, even better, toward each leader’s priorities.

Let’s say, for example, that employee engagement is not important to your CEO, but safety is. Instead of positioning WorkStep as an employee engagement platform, position it as a way to utilize your employee feedback to identify and address critical safety issues in real time, helping to mitigate safety risks and lower costs associated with them.

Luckily, because of the unique nature of WorkStep’s ability to drive better decision-making in organizations, this is not difficult to do for most company priorities!

Check out our article on making the business case to buy employee engagement software for more advice and other industry-specific examples.

Objection 3: We already have an annual survey solution in place.

Your response: “While annual surveys are a good starting point, they don’t always do a great job of keeping an ongoing pulse of our workforce. Consistently practicing employee listening and conducting check-ins at regular intervals can be more effective than relying solely on an annual survey, which can be both time-consuming and costly, with little room to make incremental improvements and measure their impact.

A continuous listening approach enhances the development of a positive workplace culture. By gathering feedback consistently at pivotal moments and employee milestones, the reliance on annual surveys may diminish. We’re also able to appropriately address critical issues in real time without waiting around for our next survey to launch.”

Our advice: You may need to educate your leadership on what a modern continuous listening approach looks like and why only sending annual surveys isn’t enough to help meet your company goals.

Our guide to frontline continuous listening helps lay out what a continuous employee feedback strategy could be like within your organization. You may want to explain the cost and time burden associated with traditional annual surveys  and how WorkStep takes a more modern and easy approach to collecting consistent feedback in real time, helping you take action on issues immediately.

Paint the picture by highlighting some issues your organization has experienced in the past. For example, could you have reduced your 90-day new hire turnover if you had collected feedback from your hires instead of waiting for the annual survey to come out? Could you have addressed an imminent safety issue, saved a life, or avoided a lawsuit if you had allowed your employees to give their safety concerns feedback to you in real time?

These are real issues that customers have been able to solve with WorkStep and you can too.

Objection 4: Turnover isn’t an issue.

Your response: “As we consider our long-term strategy for maintaining high retention rates, I’d like to draw attention to the dynamic nature of the market. Over the past decade, many organizations relied on internal solutions or pieced together various tools, only to find themselves in a precarious situation when the world underwent unprecedented changes during the pandemic.

This is where WorkStep would go beyond helping us address current retention issues. It serves as a proactive measure, elevating our retention strategies over time amid growth, market changes, and unforeseen challenges. WorkStep is a technology and data-focused company with a singular mission: to stay ahead of market changes and provide intelligent solutions for workforce retention.

There are other risks of a disengaged workforce: higher absenteeism, lower productivity, higher risk of work stoppages, and lower profitability. According to Gallup, disengaged employees cost their company the equivalent of 18% of their annual salary. Engaging our workforce not only supports our overall retention strategy but supports several vital business outcomes that we are working towards.”

Our advice: While it’s fantastic that your organization isn’t currently facing significant turnover challenges, it’s crucial to emphasize the proactive benefits that WorkStep brings to the table. Position the argument around future-proofing your workforce strategy, especially in the face of evolving market dynamics. Emphasize that WorkStep isn’t just about fixing existing retention issues but serves as a strategic asset for raising the bar and maintaining engagement over time as well as helping you address other critical risks and challenges along the way.

Objection 5: We don’t have the capacity to implement and manage this.

Your response: “One of the top reasons for investing in WorkStep is to free up our capacity to do more. Gathering and analyzing feedback is a laborious process at and WorkStep will help automate and streamline it, surfacing the most important, critical feedback to the team so that we can focus on addressing, responding, and acting on employee concerns.

Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study found that WorkStep helped one organization achieve a 90% reduction in HR time spent on gathering and analyzing employee feedback. We anticipate that WorkStep can help us save X hours a week and would only require 30 minutes to 1 hour a day for managing comments. This support would mean our team could instead focus on making a meaningful impact on our top organizational priorities this year.

We’ve also fully vetted WorkStep’s customer support offerings and feel great about the level of service we will be getting for them. Their implementation is lightweight compared to other providers. Deployment won’t require much of our IT/HRIS resources and this initial effort won’t be required on an ongoing basis. Their team will also support us throughout the change management process and can even offer a phased rollout of the solution that allows us to maximize the value of the product over a timeline that makes sense for us.

Our team is fully committed to seeing the success, value, and ROI of this solution.”

Our advice: If capacity is a challenge, highlight how WorkStep helps solve that challenge. Include time-saving data points from other WorkStep customers or estimates of the amount of time you believe your team will save.

Discuss some of the things your team will do with your extra time and how that will help the organization achieve its goals. Confirm that your team is committed to making the most of the solution and maximizing the value you can glean from it.

Don’t go about this process alone. WorkStep will work with you to customize the timeline for implementation depending on the company size and scope of work and we’ll ensure you have that information to share with your team.

Objection 6: We don’t want our managers overloaded with information/we don’t want extra work.

Your response: “The great news is that WorkStep can ensure that our managers receive access to only the data that is in their scope of work. WorkStep’s predictive solutions will allow our managers to quickly prioritize incoming comments that require immediate action (called “Alerts”) and then deprioritize feedback that can wait for a response or require no action.

Plus, their advanced analytics will help save our managers time and avoid misusing resources on issues that aren’t relevant or impactful for their workforce. This will also allow us to better serve all of our managers as we’ll be able to help them look at other sites and/or managers that excel in certain areas to help them try new things with their teams.

The total time investment per week from a manager will be approximately 2-5 hours which is reasonable given that we are working to build positive manager and employee relationships and improve managerial skill sets within the organization. We’ve run WorkStep by manager X and X, and here’s what they had to say about it: X,Y,Z.”

Our advice: Enlist some of your top managers as champions for your cause. Choose some of your managers to demo WorkStep or show them a quick video of how it can help them be more effective managers, save them time, and allow their teams to thrive.

Our solutions page on closing the loop on employee feedback has helpful product screenshots to show how WorkStep supports your managers. Include some of their direct feedback into your pitch!

Objection 7: What if we collect employee feedback and don’t act on it?

Your response: “One of the challenges we’ve faced in taking action in the past has been not knowing where to start. WorkStep analyzes our feedback for us and comes up with recommended actions for our team to take based on industry best practices.

In the past, we’ve also run large annual surveys that require an astronomical amount of resources to administer and were aimed at creating global, cross-functional initiatives. With WorkStep, we’ll be gathering global and local insights that will help our managers take smaller, localized actions on a more regular basis.

WorkStep allows us to communicate confidentially with our employees. So, when feedback is shared, we can let the employees know we’ve heard their feedback and we’re working on a solution with a timeline for resolution. That’s much more than we’re able to do today.

Our team is committed to taking action on employee feedback. Here’s how we plan to do that: X, Y, Z.

We feel confident that WorkStep will inform better decision-making, help us prioritize the right actions to take to make the biggest impact, and allow our team to focus on the execution.”

Our advice: The power to act is within your control. It’s important to be prepared for this common objection and ensure that your team is indeed committed to actioning on employee feedback before getting buy-in from leadership.

Work with our team to obtain our best practices and tips for responding to and acting on employee feedback and then take those learnings to your team.

Discuss with your team ahead of time and agree on:

1. How you plan to utilize WorkStep to help you take action.
2. The ownership and SLA of responding to feedback across the different workforce segments.
3. How you will utilize the surveys and data gleaned to help you achieve those goals based on your organization’s and team’s priorities.
4. The most important metrics to track within WorkStep to help you achieve those goals.

Empower your most trusted managers to help you draft up your action planning strategy together. Be prepared to share this with leadership when they ask.

Check out our resources,  “The Importance of Taking Action on Employee Feedback” and “Take action on frontline employee feedback” for a helpful starting point

Let WorkStep help you along the way

Need more tips on making your executive pitch? Check out some curated advice from industry experts:

• Navigating change: How HR leads organizational transformation featuring Veronica Hawkins, VP Human Resources.
• From benefits to behavior: How HR decision-making impacts the bottom line featuring Daniel Berenbaum, Chief Financial Officer at NI (National Instruments
• The key to frontline employee happiness is a positive company culture featuring Jay Voncannon, the Chief Financial Officer at CoorsTek, Inc.

At WorkStep, we believe in the power of employee listening and feedback. We know that when you give your frontline workers a voice, you can create a better workplace for everyone and build a stronger, more successful business. That’s why we offer a variety of services to help you get the most out of WorkStep.

Our team of experts can help you implement WorkStep, offer training and support, and measure the impact of WorkStep on your organization. We’ll work with you to create a customized plan that meets your specific needs and goals.

With WorkStep, you can take the guesswork out of improving employee engagement and making the frontline a better place to work.