Do you want to know how you can create a safe and inspiring working environment for your employees? A place where people innovate with focus and commitment, continue to develop, surprise you and make an impact?

Read here the 3 take aways from our People Partner, Joey Onderwater and how he and his client have made great strides in one year using an employee engagement survey tool and even increased their Employee Engagement from a 6.9 to an 8.0!

By following the 3 steps below, I managed to get through a difficult period with a lot of turnover, together with my client, in a good and structured way. Now, after a year, we have a strong team that has made great strides in the further development of their innovative product.
At the same time, they are also a very nice team with a good vibe, in which cooperation and helping each other further are at the basis, and international cultural differences are celebrated. Contributing to this from a People & Culture perspective is very cool. This is of course crucial in today's tight labour market.

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Step 1 - Just do it and get started with a mood measurement tool

Get started with a mood measurement tool like Officevibe*! This will give you a quick insight into what is going on and how the engagement within the team is.  

The tool is implemented quickly, but of course communicate this with your team. Explain why you are doing this and that the input of everyone is important to make the right choices regarding people and culture in the organisation. Realise that without good input from the team, it is simply difficult to do the right thing. You may end up with solutions that do not match the needs and do not land well.

By consistently paying attention to the results and looking at what you can do better on a daily or weekly basis, you really work on strengthening engagement. It gives you focus on people & culture, because you simply cannot do everything at once.

So it starts with 'just doing'. Look at hrtech.community to see which tools you can use for this.

Step 2 - Putting your money where your mouth is

Everyone likes to score an 8.0 or 9.0, but are you also prepared to put this into practice in daily practice? That means putting your money where your mouth is and investing time in the areas you want to improve. This is the only way it will really work for you, to work with the input you get from the team. Make sure you keep the team involved in the results and what you are going to work on. Make your team part of this, too; you don't have to do everything yourself, of course.

With my clients, we zoom in on the results every month and analyse the trends we see. We pay attention to where we can do better, what we want to retain or to points that are important to us. We translate this into concrete actions that we use to improve. Sometimes, these are larger projects, such as revising the compensation & benefits strategy or a project on personal growth with concrete tools.

Step 3 - Keep it small

Sometimes the scores can also be a reason to have a discussion with the team or an individual team member. It is not always large, complex projects that make the difference. Ultimately, the difference is in the things that are expressed on a daily basis. Genuine attention and appreciation for the team and people is at the basis.

Recently we introduced a #Thumbs-up-channel . We have been doing this for a long time at VIE People and it gives insight into what everyone is doing and it is of course insanely nice to get a Thumbs-Up from your colleagues. At the client the metric 'Recognition' (the appreciation that is experienced) has therefore increased from a 6.4 to an 8.3!

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Proud?

Absolutely! I am proud of my client and the team. I am driven to keep learning about how to get the best out of people and thus achieve business results and how I can really contribute to the growth of scale-ups and give innovative interpretation to People & Culture.

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*Officevibe is a pulse survey tool that provides insight into the sentiment and engagement within your organisation or team. This makes it an HR Tech tool that we like to use with the scale-ups we work with. By being well informed about what is going on in the team and where improvements can be made, you can actively work on this and realise improvements. In this way, you tackle challenges/problems and build a stronger team/organisation, thereby preventing people from leaving the organisation.