Industry:
Manufacturing
Number of employees:
2,900+
Number of locations:
45
Platform features:
Employee recognition, employee surveys
The challenge
Before COVID-19, ORBIS Corporation did a company-wide survey and found that one of the lowest scoring categories across the business was recognition. Employees were feeling they weren’t recognised enough for their efforts and the company values weren’t as prominent across the organisation. This only became more apparent as employees were working in different locations and it was harder to see all the day-to-day work happening.
In addition to boosting employee morale, ORBIS needed a way to keep a pulse on employee feedback and sentiment, especially during unprecedented times. ORBIS was a fairly traditional organisation, but it knew it needed to digitise and upgrade its approach to reaching and recognising its people in order to amplify and continue to grow their company culture.
The approach
After listening to employee feedback about the need to shine a spotlight on employee recognition in 2018, the team worked towards enhancing its company culture. For 10 years the ORBIS LEAF culture has been working to change behaviours and increase engagement. But the survey indicated that there was still a need to enhance recognition across the organisation and creating a modernised platform to do this was the right answer.
ORBIS Corporation launched its employee engagement platform, 'The Loop,' in August of 2019. The Loop became a formal way to digitise recognition and better connect dispersed employees, and it was all driven by the LEAF target behaviours, which can be seen in the dedicated peer-to-peer recognition eCards, such as 'Target Behaviour 2: Look for good behaviour and comment on it.'
Sheri Treu, Director of Organisational Development at ORBIS Corporation says, “We had a paper process before, so our reward and recognition programs were very manual and hard to track. Our people were demonstrating the LEAF behaviours, but there wasn’t a way to publicise it before so we needed to modernise our approach to employee recognition. Through our platform, The Loop, we've been able to offer a place for people to go to.”
ORBIS’s reward and recognition journey started with values-based, peer-to-peer recognition and moved into monetary recognition with a phased approach. It’s been an ongoing effort and the organisation now offers a robust selection of eCards and awards for employees to choose from, based on what they want to strategically recognise others for. These include:
- ORBIS Observations, such as 'Safety first!' or 'A Virtual High Five.'
- LEAN in action reduces waste and makes day-to-day work easier to do.
- Greetings, such as 'Welcome to the team,' 'Happy birthday' or 'Congratulations.'
- Spanish-translated eCards, to be inclusive of all employees.
The organisation also became more strategic about highlighting and celebrating service anniversaries on The Loop. This gives employees more reward redemption options to choose from, including gift card options and a range of company-branded swag.
Alongside employee recognition and reward tools, The Loop also houses employee survey tools. The team continuously collects, measures and acts on employee feedback to make better decisions for their people and keep a pulse on recognitions to ensure they work towards building a culture of continuous appreciation.
The results
Since launching The Loop, there’s been a shift in how people feel about being recognised, which can be seen in the number of activations on the platform. When the team first launched the platform, one of their goals was to achieve 50% activation among employees. They exceeded this goal, with now 54% of employees actively using the platform every day, demonstrating a positive reaction to the modernised approach.
ORBIS realised that each person in the organisation had a different experience or perspective during the peak of the pandemic. The team paid close attention to the numbers on the platform and listened to the story that the data was telling them to make more informed decisions for the business.
For example, the team can look at recognition cross-departmentally and see which eCards are being sent to which teams. And the number of recognitions continues to increase, with 5,447 eCards sent since August 2019. Reward is also a key piece of the puzzle and in the past year, employees have sent one another over 1,000 awards and counting.
Sheri adds, “We now have a really strong peer-to-peer recognition culture. Our people feel empowered to recognise and reward others across departments and everybody – from frontline employees to our leadership team – has bought into it. People not only know that recognition makes others feel good, it’s also helping to improve our business results because our people are more connected, more valued and know that their work is making a difference. There is power in listening to and recognising your people.”
