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This Startup’s Figured Out How To Keep Millennial Employees Engaged Without Relying On $$

  • SelfDrvn Enterprise is a HR platform that uses gamification to create positive engagement that drives performance.

A report in 2016 showed that 63% of employees are not engaged at work and 24% feel actively disengaged globally.

The result of that? 75% of digital transformation projects fail and US$7 trillion in lost productivity annually.

Millennials alone make up about 40% of today’s total workforce. The persistent myth is that they’re hard to work with and disengage easily. However, what employers fail to realise is that monetary perks now motivate only 7% out of 200,000 employees—so it’s time to engage them differently.

After spending more than 2 decades as an entrepreneur, Lam Mun Choong has seen this shift.

He founded Nettium in 2010 and grew the team rapidly to more than 300 in 3 years. Nettium is one of the largest Malaysian MSC-status companies and received industry recognition as one of the 100 fastest growing SMEs in 2017.

“If we couldn’t hire and retain successfully in the tech business, we wouldn’t grow. So we thought, if companies who value customers have customer loyalty programmes, why can’t we have employee loyalty programmes?” shared Mun Choong to Vulcan Post.

What started off as a solution to help Nettium grow evolved into SelfDrvn Enterprise in 2015, to help companies engage employees, elevate people performance, and make work more human with intuitive technology.

Engaging Employees The Right Way

SelfDrvn Enterprise is a SaaS all-in-one platform that uses gamification to create positive engagement within a company.

Image Credit: SelfDrvn

Think of it as a way to make a work day fun. It’s designed to encourage talent recognition and create an effective feedback system.

How the platform creates active participation is by motivating employees using gamification and contests like:

  • Rewarding achievements with appreciation badges and redeemable reward points.

Most stages of an employee’s journey at work is an achievement worth giving a badge for (Image Credit: SelfDrvn)

Their work anniversary, getting promoted, attending incentive trips, giving feedback; these are all ways for them to earn a badge.

But these badges aren’t for show—each one carries reward points.

Image Credit: SelfDrvn

Employees get to choose what they want as a reward, such as a new iPhone, family trips, or having their daily Starbucks coffee paid for.

  • Enabling anonymous feedback with a “Message in a Bottle”.

Image Credit: SelfDrvn

“Message In A Bottle” is SelfDrvn’s way of making their surveys more engaging.

Employers can ask for suggestions for the management, and others can leave anonymous feedback. All the staff can view these messages, and upvote the ones they find relevant.

  • Encouraging healthier workplace habits by tracking steps taken.

The app’s Stepathon feature allows employees to compete with each other on the number of steps taken in a week. Nettium themselves motivate employees to stay active by offering a prize for the top rankers—they sponsored their top 15 a trip to Mount Kinabalu.

Providing A Platform For Strengths To Be Nurtured

Although recognising achievements is important, the next step is helping staff become better. Instead of just annually, employees can benefit greatly from more regular feedback.

SelfDrvn’s feedback system lets you make specific comments about behaviour during particular moments.

All the feedback is summarised in a word cloud that helps employees set goals to improve themselves. The word cloud can also be an effective tool for managers to coach their team members on how to improve their competencies.

An example of an employee’s word cloud that summarises his or her strengths and areas to improve on, based on feedback given by his or her colleagues. (Image Credit: SelfDrvn)

Besides that, there is a newsfeed feature where everyone in the company can collaborate and keep each other informed.

Image Credit: SelfDrvn

All this data is listed on a social analytics dashboard where you can see the insights from the participation, surveys, and feedback given by your employees.

Image Credit: SelfDrvn

This can help you make data-driven decisions in people management through pinpointing of employee engagement and performance areas. For example—using voluntary CSR events as a measure—you can gauge successful company engagement through participation rates or total events created by employees themselves over time.

Not A One-Size-Fits-All Approach

SelfDrvn runs on a subscription basis and the rates vary by country. They cater to companies of various sizes but they do say that the bigger the organisation, the more benefits they’ll see.

Their platform can be split into separate components based on what you want and have that integrated into your existing system.

“If the client is large and they want their own brand, we’re happy to tailor things for them,” said Mun Choong.

“What we advocate is looking at things from the eyes of the employee and imagining the journey they go to get the full experience.”

Some of their clients include Fortune 500 clients from financial services, consulting, technology industries, and startups. Their platform currently has a customer base in 6 countries and their goal by the end of this year is to grow their user base tenfold.

The New Age Of Millennials In The Office

Millennials crave more than just being paid well at work.

Mun Choong agrees, seeing the current generation as having more human needs and expecting work to be more integrated with their lives

“The situation has changed where employers are chasing good talent rather than the other way around. Millennials don’t want to come to work and be treated like another employee. Companies need to see it as a human relationship than a transactional one, and that’s a challenge that employers are facing,” said Mun Choong.

Morpheus Consulting solved this exact communication issue with their 78 employees, because they had limited tools and resources for reward initiatives.

“Using SelfDrvn has given us deep insight and understanding about the concerns of our staff and what they would like to see us implement in the company,” said Violet Tang, the HR Manager of Morpheus Consulting.

Employee engagement can be complex, so it’s important to use strategies that can drive deeper emotional commitment and build trust.

“As leaders, you need a new medium to listen and respond to your staff. That’s what we’re trying to help companies do. To be more in step with what’s happening in the world today. We want to bring enterprises up to speed with digital-savvy employees.”

  • If you’re interested to try it out for yourself, you can contact SelfDrvn Enterprise for a free consultation here.

This article was written in collaboration with SelfDrvn Enterprise.

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Feature Image Credit: SelfDrvn Enterprise

The post This Startup’s Figured Out How To Keep Millennial Employees Engaged Without Relying On $$ appeared first on Vulcan Post.