By Daniel Borup Jakobsen, VP Marketing at Plecto
We usually say that engaged employees are the lifeblood of an organisation. They possess a profound psychological commitment to their workplace that reflects in how they perform their jobs. It is these people that are fueled by a motivation to go the extra mile.
Every day, our aim is to engage your employees. It is our ambition because we are aware of the importance behind having engaged employees.
Now, I will not try to sell you our company. But I will tell you the story of how we realised the importance of employee engagement, what we unintentionally did to promote it, and how we work with it today.
When we were working in commission-based sales, we registered our sales on a whiteboard. If it was not on the whiteboard, we would not get paid. It was a fast-paced environment where everyone was busy chasing the next sale, so it was common that we on a regular basis forgot to register the sales as ours.
Now at this point, we had no significant understanding of employee engagement. But we should soon experience the empowering effect it has on people.
Overnight, we created a simple tool to keep track of our sales performance. With a few clicks, our sales became registered on a simple dashboard platform visible to the whole team. Like a digital whiteboard.
It ended up sparking friendly competition by engaging and motivating our co-workers into outperforming each other.
The result was remarkable. Such a simple tool had such an impact on engaging our co-workers by inspiring interaction and recognition between people. In terms of sales, our revenue increased 40% by using this tool.
Today, the simple tool is Plecto and ever since our days in commission-based sales, we have strived to build a dashboard software that does more than simply keeping track of KPIs. We have explored the world of gamification to utilise the engaging elements from games and entered the field of team management with performance agreements and one-on-ones inside the system.
Inspired by our first encounter with employee engagement, we work with a simple model that takes its departure in three fundamental pillars of engagement: Goals, interaction, and recognition.
Back then, our goal was to sell more. This was our KPI. Once we made a sale and achieved our goal, interaction started after registering the sale on our dashboard. Performance became our water cooler talk, and it was this that led to recognition between co-workers.
A study from SHRM/Globoforce shows that peer-to-peer recognition has a noteworthy impact on satisfaction. In fact, 90% of employees feel more satisfied with their work when receiving recognition from their peers.
It was this recognition from our co-workers that became the driver for employee engagement at our workplace. And it was all made possible by a simple dashboard tool.
