Times of India: Employee engagement

Measuring employee engagement is no longer a once-a-year exercise.

Given the frequency of swings in employee mood, organizations are looking beyond archaic annual surveys to adopt new technological tools and short, smart employee surveys.

The objective behind this shift is to capture real-time employee engagement experience and make improvements.

On any given day, an employee may be happy about his/her salary, but may not be as content with the work environment.

The engagement level may be high with respect to camaraderie, but the food in the cafeteria may not be up to the mark.

Although an annual survey has its own merit, it comes with a lag indicator.

Technology is being increasingly used to get a sense of employee engagement on a daily basis.

 

Celpax is one such organization that helps measure the mood at the workplace through a simple device that is hung at the exit door.

It has a red and a green button.

Employees can press either of the buttons to convey the total office mood.

Celpax is a Stockholm-based firm that also has customers from various regions in India like Bengaluru and Chennai, and different sectors, but mostly from IT.

Rebecca Lundin, co-owner, Celpax, said,

“Companies verify if their improvement initiatives have an impact on their baseline.

For instance, ‘90% pressed ‘green’ as we tested leaving fresh fruit in the kitchen yesterday’, or they see the impact of an important announcement, or social activity like when you try to boost morale at work with Waffle Fridays.”

“One Swedish company got 100% ‘red’ when a popular manager announced departure”

“Another company plummeted to 40% ‘green’ the day of their staff party (which was mandatory outside of office hours).”

“It’s like Google Analytics. It doesn’t tell you what the problem is with your website. But if you try fixing something, you see if it has an impact or not on the employee engagement at your Indian company.”

 

Employee friendly IT companies in India

A Celpax console was deployed by Prowareness, a $20-million Dutch IT services.

Their story is featured in Times of India.

They are an agile consulting company with presence in Netherlands, Germany, the US and a local facility in Bengaluru, India.

“We keep the Celpax console at the reception, next to our attendance register, and while leaving people would press the green or red button depending upon how their day went.”

“This gave us an unmatched perspective on their ‘day-to-day’ mood and since it’s a close-knit community, we also had a context behind the person’s experience,” says Abhishek Johri, agile coach, Prowareness.

The company gathers feedback from people every two weeks and acts upon them at best within 10 working days.

“We found the mood ratings going down just a day before a sprint demo.”

“We realized it was due to last-minute pressure before releasing the product.”

“We immediately went back and brought improvement in our sprint planning and continuous integration, which resulted in an evenly distributed work throughout the sprint.”

“The beauty was that we were able to act upon it even before any employee could bring it up as a concern,” said Johri.

Being proactive, means it’s easier to take action and continuously keep employee engagement high.

Read the full story over at Times of India.

 

With signups from 60 countries, the Celpax device lets leaders gauge employee engagement in real time.

Our data show that (meaningful) face-to-face conversations are the fastest way to improve what needs to be fixed in your work culture. Make them happen with a Mood KPI.

Measure. Improve. Repeat!