Here are seven outstanding instances of employee engagement from businesses that are doing it right.
- Supercell
Despite having only 200+ workers, Finnish mobile gaming giant Supercell generated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2016. To put that in context, that is more than $6 million in daily revenue and more than $11 million for each employee! And they achieved this by creating a company culture that promoted employee involvement from day one and by emphasizing the success of the business’s employees rather than the executive team. Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen said in a recent interview on tech. eu that “When the co-founders met, we hardly discussed the games we intended to make. Instead, we discussed the kind of business we wished to establish. We discussed attempting to manage the business like a sports team.
They accomplish this through so-called “cells,” which are compact development teams that create fresh mobile games and are in complete charge of everything they do. In the same interview, Paananen said, “My ambition is to become the CEO with the lowest authority in the world. This means that the teams are making more choices the less I make them. In a perfect world, that would imply that all decisions are made by the team. We were working on a project called Smash Land a few years back. It was well-liked throughout the business and came very close to hitting its goals, but fell short. The group then decided to stop working together after discussing a bathhouse. They didn’t care to ask me first because I was away at the time; instead, they emailed the business to inform them. That’s exactly how Supercell ought to operate.
- Youssef
The leaders of the music startup Yousician had to determine how they would manage four weeks without a workspace for their team when they learned that their office in downtown Helsinki would be renovated for one month. This is where they had to get inventive. CEO Christoph Thür reasoned that since offices in Finland are relatively costly for a month’s one-time rent, why not look outside the nation? So for a similar price, Yousician rented an entire villa in Greece and flew the whole team along with their families to southern Europe for a month. They lived together, worked together, had pool parties together and turned what many might have considered a huge problem into a memorable experience for their employees and their families.
- Drift
Drift is changing the way companies communicate with their website visitors through its chat messaging platform. The company has grown rapidly over the last 12 months and now has 60+ employees compared to 15 about one year ago. Back then when the team was small, Drift CEO David Cancel (DC) had a good idea of what was going on and how people were feeling, but fast forward 12 months and that has become a lot more difficult.
David recently launched a new project called Random Lunch with DC as a consequence (no agenda). The concept is incredibly straightforward, but it has the potential to significantly increase employee engagement at the Boston business. DC invites an odd number of employees from various departments to lunch. There isn’t a set agenda for each lunch, but the initiative’s objectives are to foster interpersonal relationships, prevent communication barriers from forming, learn about company culture and product ideas, and most importantly assist DC in locating organizational choke points that have the potential to demotivate and turn off employees. If you’re wondering why each lunch will have an odd number of people, it’s simply to prevent people from pairing up. Each lunch will feature a variety of rookies and veterans, as well as a blend of people from various roles.
- Gryphon Secure
For governmental, commercial, and military groups, Gryphon Secure offers ultra-secure fixed and mobile telecommunication lines. But when it came to choosing which areas they should prioritize and concentrate on when developing new products, they wanted to involve their entire global team. To accomplish this, they used Innoduel to involve team members in the co-creation of their product plan.
They accomplished this by utilizing Innoduel to involve staff in the co-creation of their product roadmap and by asking every member of their global team to evaluate the potential new feature candidates. As a result, they acquired unanticipated but in-depth knowledge about the features they ought to prioritize, all of which had been produced by their staff. In the end, this led to a reevaluation of the objectives for product development and led to R&D cost savings.
- L’Oréal
When a new employee starts, it’s one of your finest chances to connect with them, as L’Oréal’s Rosie McCarthy is well aware of. L’Oréal has created the world’s first employee onboarding app as part of their larger, strategic onboarding program for all newcomers globally with the solitary objective of assisting newcomers to comprehend, decipher, and master their corporate culture.
The “Fit” app, which helps new hires navigate the L’Oréal culture and perform practical “missions” to apply their learning, reaches up to 10,000 new hires annually and is offered in 11 languages.
- Virgin
Richard Branson is arguably one of the greatest leaders of our generation. And it’s not necessarily because of his wild PR adventures or cheeky selfies with napping employees, but because he built a company that champions the employee. Branson understood that building a successful business meant building an environment where people would enjoy work and a culture that treats people the way they would want to be treated. As Branson himself once stated, “Some 80% of your life is spent working. You want to have fun at home; why shouldn’t you have fun at work?”
- Glassdoor
Glassdoor did for employee involvement what TripAdvisor did for the travel industry. Glassdoor has established employee engagement as a crucial focus area that all businesses must handle by creating a platform where employees can anonymously rate and review organizations and their management. Along with the rise of millennials in the workforce, the lines between our personal and professional lives have become increasingly hazy. This has increased the importance of transparency and genuine business culture. Employee involvement is therefore absolutely crucial.