Author: Workrowd

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Employee Engagement

Laying the foundation for successful employee groups

Employee groups can be a critical tool for companies striving to build positive and inclusive cultures. In order to truly drive impact though, these communities require structure and support, and a dedicated plan to ensure their longevity. As you can imagine, we’ve done quite a bit of research on what makes for effective employee groups over the course of building Workrowd. When we first started out, it was difficult for us to find information and best practices, so we’ve compiled some of our findings here to hopefully help others in their process.

When considering starting employee groups at your company, the first step is to get input from your staff. Attempting to launch employee initiatives without direct involvement and buy-in from your team is a surefire way to stop your program before it starts. One of the primary goals of employee groups is to increase engagement; in order to achieve it, you have to genuinely engage your employees.

Asking for feedback is just the first step in the process. Whether it’s through surveys, focus groups, or other channels, you have to involve your employees from day one. Ask them what they really like about your company culture, as well as areas where you can improve. Find out what sorts of employee groups they would be interested in joining. Ensure you understand the full world of existing employee initiatives.

Once you’ve requested your employees’ input, you actually have to use what they’ve said to inform your program. You can’t decide what your groups should be in advance, then follow through with your plan regardless of what you hear from your team. This sounds intuitive, but you’d be surprised how many people have told us that this happened at their companies, so it’s critical that we highlight it here.

Once you’ve got your employee-determined roadmap, it’s time for implementation. We’ve got two big pieces of advice on this front:

  1. Support your employee leaders. Employee culture champions are the unsung heroes of your organization. They’re engagement multipliers, boosting morale and thereby productivity, and serving double-duty as they balance both their primary job responsibilities and their commitment to enriching the workplace. Provide them the resources to run better groups. Recognize all of their contributions, not just those outlined in their role description. Connect them with an executive sponsor. Consider giving them a budget if possible. There are myriad ways to support these rockstars, so choose what works for your organization, but please don’t overlook them. You’ll lose them and much of the positive momentum from their group/program, too.
  2. Require your groups to create a governing document. Employee groups that are not well supported by the company are at a high risk of falling apart if the leader(s) leave the organization. Additionally, groups without clearly defined goals can lose steam shortly after launch. Accordingly, it’s critical that you require your groups to put some structure around what they’re doing, develop a mission statement, set objectives, formulate a transition plan, etc. You can find examples of such governing documents online for reference (try looking up employee group charters), but this is a crucial step in ensuring the effectiveness and sustainability of your groups.

Perhaps most importantly, don’t get discouraged if this process takes some time. Culture change is hard, and while well worth it both interpersonally and financially, it’s not something that can just happen overnight. It may be a little while before you see results from your groups, so you have to be prepared to stay the course and continue to check in and support them while they get up to speed.

So what are you waiting for? There’s no better time than today to jumpstart engagement and productivity at your company by starting and/or formalizing some employee groups. If you want help, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at hello@workrowd.com. We’re always happy to be a resource in any way we can, and our platform is designed specifically for employee group and events management complete with analytics, so we’ve got your back. We’re looking forward to seeing what your employees can do!

Categories
Company Culture

Why we’re working to be a partner rather than a vendor

HR professionals have a lot on their plates. We know this isn’t breaking news, but as the People function continues to evolve, it seems that more responsibilities get piled on without displacing any of the existing ones. We’ve reached out to hundreds of People professionals over the past year, and we’ve truly been astounded by what we’ve learned. Just to name a few:

  1. HR professionals are awesome. The fact itself is not what surprised us, but the extent to which it’s true. This isn’t an attempt to pander; we are honestly stunned and so impressed by the number of you who have been willing to take time out of your extremely busy schedules to chat with us. Not only that, but even the most capacity-constrained HR/People leaders are constantly striving to do more for their employees. You amaze us.
  2. The People function is changing in many ways all at once. From compliance to employer branding, HR is evolving quickly with no hint of slowing down any time soon. The list of responsibilities we compiled based on our conversations with People leaders grew unwieldy within our first ten calls. For better or worse, an expansive field of tools has arisen to help cater to these new needs and expectations, but they’ve popped up in silos, and often require extensive maneuvering to get them to speak to one another.
  3. Company culture is a top issue for many HR departments, but it’s difficult to make progress without organization-wide buy-in. People leaders across the country are being tasked with improving all aspects of the employee experience from before a potential employee applies to after they’ve left the company and everything in between. This is a deeply unreasonable expectation to place on a department that is already juggling an excess of competing priorities. No HR department can effectively cater to the needs of a diverse workforce without direct help from that very workforce. Culture and employer brand need to be everyone’s responsibility in order to effect real change.

In short, HR is doing amazing work on an incredible number of workstreams, but additional organizational support could really supercharge their efforts. Accordingly, we set about thinking how we could mobilize entire companies behind the charge of building and bolstering culture. Workrowd is what we came up with, enabling employees to personalize their own experience, and create fun and useful experiences for their colleagues at the same time.

Another thing we heard repeatedly in our conversations with People teams is that they’re constantly being bombarded by vendors. Obviously, we can see both sides of the coin here. As professionals ourselves, we know how irritating it is to get spammed by random solicitations when your inbox is already overflowing. On the other hand, we really do want to get Workrowd into the hands of those who could benefit from it. What we’ve ultimately realized through our conversations with People leaders combined with our own desire to be both thoughtful and respectful, is that we shouldn’t be approaching this not as a vendor but instead as a partner. We should be building partnerships, rather than traditional sales relationships.

We truly don’t consider ourselves a vendor rather a true partner, to our users, who are so much more than just ‘clients’, or ‘customers’. HR tech has a long way to go before the industry is optimally serving those who need and have to use the tools every day. Accordingly, we know we have to work collaboratively, not as a vendor but as a partner to our users to anticipate shifts and respond with new technology when it’s needed, not after a 3-5 year lag. Just as Workrowd companies tap into the collective power of their employees to build better workplaces, we tap into the collective power of our users to build better HR tech. We’d love to have you as part of the krowd.

Categories
Employee Engagement

A new approach to employee engagement

Workrowd has a whole new look, new features on the way, and new partnerships in the works; 2020 is already shaping up to be full of excitement! For those of you just joining the Krowd, we wanted to take a moment to reintroduce ourselves as part of this rebrand. Workrowd is the employee experience platform that serves both people and profit. Our employee group and events management tools empower everyone in your organization to build company culture, driving engagement from the ground up.

Despite extensive focus in the HR community and beyond, the conversation around employee engagement hasn’t changed much over time. As one would expect, neither have the numbers. In 2019, ADP reported that only 16% of employees are ‘Fully Engaged’. This global study of nearly 20,000 people found that 84% of the working population is “just coming to work”. This should be a pretty clear signal that our current approaches aren’t working. This is also the reason we started Workrowd: to offer a new solution to our employee engagement struggles, and improve the workday for everyone.

Workrowd leverages tried and true methods of fostering deep belonging to enrich the employee experience. Across all areas of life, we form peer groups around shared needs and interests that help us feel included and fulfilled. From K-12 up through college and on into adulthood out in our communities, we organize and bond around everything from pets to politics. With the modern evolution of work manifesting in a multitude of ways, it’s time to bring in something both familiar and proven to help employees feel more invested in their workplaces.

Our user-friendly platform offers an array of tools to help cultivate an engagement strategy uniquely tailored to your employees. Some of the highlights are:

  1. A streamlined hub for internal culture to build transparency, connection, and interest across your company
  2. Events management tools for easy organizing including customizable RSVP options, automated calendar invites and reminders, comments, guest lists, and more
  3. Activity roadmaps to support employee leaders in running productive, sustainable groups that drive business outcomes
  4. Drag and drop analytics to ensure that People leaders have all the data and metrics they need at a glance

While typical engagement solutions revolve around surveying or giving shout-outs, Workrowd builds cross-team connections to boost happiness and loyalty among employees. One of the key reasons why people stay anywhere, personally or professionally, is because they feel connected to the people around them. Workrowd empowers your people to find their people, then takes it a step further, equipping them to build initiatives around topics that are critical to your employer brand. From diversity and inclusion to social impact, professional development to intrapreneurship, our platform offers resources to help your employees launch programs that generate results.

It’s time to take some of the pressure off your People team, and put power in the hands of your actual people, to help them build a workplace that makes everyone proud. By rallying your entire team around shaping your company culture, you’ll develop a winning environment that will retain your high performers and lock in those star recruits. You’ll see higher productivity and agility, as employees build cross-team connections that lead to unexpected synergies and increased output. You’ll give everyone the opportunity to be a part of something special, something that can only happen at your company, with your mission and mix of employees. You’ll play a key role in the ongoing effort to cultivate a happier, more engaged workforce.

If you’d like to learn more and officially join the krowd, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Separately, we’re always looking for feedback, and we’re truly committed to building this movement in partnership with the HR community, so if you’ve got ideas and/or comments, we’re all ears. You can reach us at hello@workrowd.com. We look forward to building a better employee engagement solution with you.