Social interactions that had brought employees together in the office aren't the same now that a lot of employees are working remotely, putting corporate identity and company culture at risk.
Michael Levy, CEO of WorkProud, a management and employee engagement company, says that the lack of company pride can be a slippery slope that devolves into lower employee engagement — and ultimately lower productivity.
“If an employee can be made to feel proud of the work they're doing and connected to their job, they're going to do their best and give their best — and they're likely to recommend the employer as a place to work,” Levy says. “As a result of that, they're hopefully going to be delivering for the business, [and generate] the positive KPIs that businesses are looking for.”
Indeed, during COVID-19, 51% of workers are "not engaged," meaning they are psychologically unattached to their work and company, according to recent
With the impact of the pandemic, it’s more important than ever that employees are acknowledged, appreciated and respected in their workplace, says Levy. To meet the emotional needs for validation, while also meeting business objectives and targeted outcomes, employers need to find new strategies for recognition and the employee experience.
“Our platform is helping create an environment that helps validate peer to peer, manager to employee, or executive to organization, to say ‘hey, it's tough out there, particularly at the moment, but I see you and I know you're contributing, working hard and doing your best,’” Levy says. “And the impact that that can have on people is significant.”
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The WorkProud platform allows employers and employees to communicate with their peers in the form of feedback, recognition or appreciation. One function is the ability to share information between a company and its employees, or between small groups of employees within a larger employee population, such as if people have got promoted or recognized, or if they're celebrating an anniversary or are new to the company and are onboarding.
The platform helps companies align its core values, culture and objectives with the individual aspirations of each employee. The technology feature set leveraged to achieve these goals include social recognition, spot awards, customizable award workflows, multi-platform integration, gamification and advanced reporting tools.
The platform also provides data to show where recognition, appreciation or feedback isnothappening in the company. Employers can then map that data to their business’ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to analyze if they’re also seeing any negative results.
“If we have employees that are not connected, engaged and appreciated, and we’re not getting positive feedback, it shouldn't surprise us that we are conversely getting poor results,” Levy says.
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If a company is seeing very poor results, HR can direct its resources to learn from the parts of the company where it's working successfully — including looking at the managers a department has, or what kind of communications are taking place — and apply that learning to the area where it's not so successful. This helps employers better optimize their resources to build more consistencies in terms of the culture and environment, and what managers they have and how they are trained, to give an understanding of how employees can better connect to their day-to-day jobs.
Levy puts particular focus on using the word “pride,” which he says is particularly important when examining a company’s culture.
“There's nothing wrong with these other words, but if we each go back to when we were a younger form of ourselves, and we did something that we were proud of — whether it be academic, sporting, physical or creative — there was a very strong, definitive emotion that we can actually still remember,” he says. “If we can answer what makes the janitor, engineer, driver or server proud, and build that at scale, then we're really tapping into our people building skills.”
