Transforming Employees Into Everyday Heroes by Nurturing Employee Engagement

About our client

Our client’s employees play a significant role in providing safe, reliable energy for more than 3.5 million customers. They value the employees and their expertise by promoting a positive workplace that is vibrant, engaging, and fulfilling. Employees make the company an amazing place to work. The company has received numerous prestigious awards such as Gallup Great Workplace Awards and Indeed’s 50 Best Places to Work for creating an engaged workplace culture.

The company’s goal is to smoothly navigate on a journey for service excellence with four service keys making it safe, caring, dependable, and efficient. Ultimately, it is our client’s employees who drive excellence. To boost this vision, the company looked to implement a new, ultramodern Rewards and Recognition platform – the key piece to support and sustain those service keys.

The challenges:

Our client is a US-based diversified energy company involved in the development and management of energy-related businesses and services US-wide. As one of Michigan’s leading corporate citizens, our client is a force for growth and prosperity in the 450 Michigan communities it serves in a variety of ways, including philanthropy, volunteerism, and economic progress.

On the journey to service excellence, the company needed more than the already existing recognition program, used very sparingly. Our client looked for a user-friendly platform that would inspire over 10,000 employees to recognize co-workers more frequently and with a reason.

Previously, recognitions and anniversaries were supported by a solution that was lacking functionality, simplicity, and transparency. User acceptance of the existing tool was generally low.

Putting these things together led to implementing JobPts, branded as Everyday Heroes, a well-known Employee Recognition and Rewards platform offered on the SAP marketplace.

How Semos Cloud and JobPts helped:

For our client as a utility company, safety is the number one priority. The challenge for senior leadership was to figure out what was number two. It was then when our client realized a recognition program is not only about driving employee engagement. A modern recognition platform also creates a feeling that employees have a place of belonging. As our client walks the journey of diversity, equity, and inclusion, Everyday Heroes helps get there, too, by supporting one of the service keys – caring.

With Everyday Heroes our client solved:

• The challenge of having the culture of recognition and making the service keys real – by seeing the leaders being able to recognize, as well as peer to peer recognition, with caring being the foundation.
• The challenge of technology – what they had earlier was being difficult to use and replaced with JobPts’ ease of use.
• The challenge of mobility – the platform they were using prior was not mobile, and this is something the employees love about JobPts.

To successfully implement the recognition, our client recommends:

• Anchor recognition program on the key objectives for the company.
• Consider integrations, i.e., make sure they are as simple as possible with the system already in place.
• Ensure senior leadership is on-board and use it, i.e., demonstrate the behavior of appreciation.
• Made sure to have a good IT and business team in place.

The results:

Less than six months from the implementation, employees are coarsely using it for recognition. One of the things that helped this happen is minor change management, limited to no training since the solution is very intuitive and easy to use. It is the best from a technology perspective when the end-users can pick it up and go. And that was the case here. Successful launching means timely communication, message people about it, and start using it.

With limited support calls and hardly any issues, the numbers prove it at getting recognitions and anniversaries like our client has never seen before:

• Leaders recognize employees from different spaces. There is recognition coming across the organization, and there is a lot of horizontal as opposed to just vertical recognitions.
• Senior leaders are engaged, and employees get recognition from senior leaders that they typically do not see, or talk to, or hear from. It increases the level of engagement exponentially, and the energy is remarkable.
• The leaderboard supports the competitive culture, and it is always an exciting conversation who is on the top; a reminder to do recognition.
• Leader reports are useful to the extent of integrating the results into the end of the year performance reviews.

Business-wise, impact requires measurement. Results answer the question: What have you achieved by implementing and using the Recognition and Rewards platform?

Our client continuously gathers metrics to determine the success of the program.

• Employee engagement with the program was measured at 60+% from its 10,000+ enrolled employees
• With more recognition in the system than ever, they hit the 20,000 recognitions in less than five months and went over the 60,000 recognitions mark in the first 12 months.
• Over 5,000 recognitions are given every month, meaning that between a 160 and a 170 recognitions are given every single day.
• Over 1,500 anniversary messages exchanged across the organization in the first 5 months.
• The positive impact on employee engagement is translated into the score of the Gallup Great Workplace Award.