In the beginning, there was only chaos
What can we tell about the involvement of employees in Merixstudio? We're not afraid to admit that there was a little bit of chaos in our business years ago. When there were 20-30 people (about half as many as now), nobody even bothered with such things as employee engagement, perks or commitment. Nobody controlled it, and nobody researched needs and problems of the team. It's a common mistake. Merixstudio also made it which in retrospect, seems obvious. When it didn't have much effect on company's conditions, we didn't put much stock in staff matters. However, in line with the development of the business, we felt that we have to take care of aspects mentioned above.
The employee comes first?
source: The global and real-time state of employee engagement
The current situation on the labour market forces every company to take care of their workers. They can’t let their employees be unhappy with their responsibilities and place where they are working. An unhappy employee is nonproductive what causing huge financial losses. Disengaged workers cost the US between $450-550 billion each year in lost productivity. Unsatisfied employees don't feel good about their workplace and easily take the opportunity to work for your competition. This kind of worker will leave us sooner or later, what costs a lot. Research shows that every time you lose an employee and replace a salaried one, it costs 6 to 9 months' salary on average. Losing a worker means you have to start a new recruitment campaign. The cost of hiring a new employee also including the advertising, interviewing, screening, and hiring. When you find a new team member, you also bear the cost of on-boarding a new person. I am sure new employees have knowledge and experience, but they have no idea about the way your business is run. They don't know how your project management, decision-making processes or team management look like. Getting know all these things will take long. And as we know, time is money. The money we lose with the employee.
Employees should be seen and not heard...?
source: 10 essential pillars of employee engagement, eBook Officevibe
So, what can you do to make your employees happy and avoid losing them? Apart from adequate remuneration which is the first thing that comes into minds, there are many others things to pay attention to. One of them is building a worker-friendly workplace. The place where your team feel comfortable so that they will be better off working. Well, that's easy to say. But what is this place? There are at least two ways that you can understand it. On the one hand, you can understand it physically way - comfortable office with many facilities organised in west-startup-style. The great example is the office of BlaBlaCar in Paris. They created the beautiful and trendy place with many facilities. There's a similar story in the case of Spotify's headquarter. They designed a workplace the team is very happy to go back to. On the other hand, worker-friendly culture and workplace are made up of people. It's a place where employees have a very real impact on the company. How to build this kind of workplace? Give a voice to your people.
Officevibe - the secret recipe of an awesome workplace
It's easy to talk with your employees when your business is pretty small. But what can you do when you're hiring over 50 people? A perfect tool to improve engagement in your company is Officevibe - the soft of a Canadian firm, which motto is "Everyone should be happy at work." This short slogan says everything about the company and its services. Officevibe is a tool which not only offers an opportunity to speak freely, praise and complain but also to get a hand back on happiness and commitment of employees.
Global giants such as Apple, HP or HubSpot are using Officevibe. It provides the simplest way to measure employee satisfaction, receive feedback and suggestions what to do to make your firm better workplace. User-friendly interface, the possibility to integrate it with Slack and email inbox, and many other features are the strength of this tool.
source: Officevibe.com
Weekly surveys based on industry standards and created by Officevibe's expert raise such important subjects as personal development, relations with managers or happiness. In total, you can analyse ten main elements of employee engagement. It's worth highlighting the fact that all ten factors consist of several smaller. Reports with all these information are decorated with charts and numbers which are very useful in later analysis.
Except for surveys, Officevibe offers an opportunity to create custom questions to better understand your employee's needs. The target of them can be the whole company or specific teams. It's available with a choice of three types of surveys: multiple-choice questions, opinion scale, and contextual feedback. What is important, and what encourage a less straightforward person to take part in the poll, the tool allows for anonymous answers. The whole feedback is sent to a person who manages Officevibe (at Merixstudio it's HR Manager), and then it is analysed together with Team Leaders and decision-makers.
Suggestion Box is also very interesting feature. Thanks to it every employee can share general feedback, suggest new features or upvote existing ones. According to the statistics, 98% Officevibe administrators found that Officevibe helps gather useful feedback from their employees and 86% of organisations implemented improvement based on feedback they're received from the tool.
source: Officevibe.com
Receiving feedback, opinions and needs of your workers is the greatest potential of Officevibe. Thanks to it you can recognise the most important and urgent issues which you have to solve urgently and these which need deeper analyses. Using Officevibe is a win-win situation. Managers know that they need to focus on some matters, what they are doing well and what has to be changed. All Officevibe's users feel that they have a real impact on their company.
What is Officevibe all about?
source: 10 essential pillars of employee engagement, eBook Officevibe
At Merixstudio we are aware how important are people and their opinions. This is the reason why we are using Officevibe. Every Monday we get a short, easy-to-fill survey. Every week we choose dedicated questions based on research done by Officevibe and research firms. Also, every Thursday we get one question about our everyday work or important stuff essential for Merixstudio. This question is directed at the whole company or specific teams, depending on the subject.
We love Offcevibe and use it very often. It's because we all feel that our feedback will be heard and analysed by both Team Leaders and the C-suite.
Thanks to that we're building even better workplace together. The feedback helps to keep the company growing and developing in the way we want to. This applies to improvements in day-to-day work, way the office looks, as well as suggestions about project management. Of course, it's impossible to put every idea into practice, therefore, the feedback from the C-suite and Team Leaders is crucial. The employee knows why their request/suggestion hasn't been implemented and feels that it hasn't been ignored even though the response is negative.
What are the effects of using Officevibe at Merixstudio? Right now, employee engagement level has increased by 1,5 points out of 10 from the first day we started to use the tool. The improvement is plain to see. In addition, we're going beyond the needs and expectations of our team on matters that are easy to miss. In our office come up things such as footstools under desks, keyboards wrist supports, or even new console games. There are minor problems whose solution makes our work even more comfortable, which is linked to happiness improvement.
I'm aware that not every company can afford to make changes (in the case of office's facilities as well as business structure) at short notice. Listening to your team would be a good place to start. The employees that feel that they have a real impact on the way the company is run is more motivated. They know that they can be part of creating the best workplace for everybody. This is the path that every company should be following.