Where Does Technology Fit in the Employee Engagement Program?

Investing in corporate social responsibility activities reflects the company’s sense of responsibility towards the community and environment. In this day and age, most businesses, big or small, have made corporate social responsibility a business practice and this practice has helped them build a reputation as a responsible business, gain competitive advantage and do good by contributing to the society. Here are some statistics that prove how important CSR has become for businesses and society:

• 66% of consumers are willing to spend more on a product if it comes from a sustainable brand – Source: 2015 Nielsen Global Corporate Sustainability Report
• Of the world’s largest 250 companies, 93 percent publish the annual corporate social responsibility reports – Source: KPMG corporate sustainability report
• Corporate giving in 2017 increased to $20.77 billion—an 8.0% increase from 2016 – Source: Giving USA 2018

And it is rightly said that “Alone we can do so little and together we can do so much.” Hence, it is best to have employees participate and contribute to the company’s goal of helping the society. This further contributes to employee retention and productivity, because CSR efforts don’t just boost profits and improve customer relations — they’re good for employee relations, too.

Recently, we had the privilege of engaging with one of the Big Four accounting firms on a unique project. This company endorses the thought of improving employee experience and wanted to take employee engagement to the next level.

The firm initiated a global responsibility program that intends to build on the tremendous corporate social responsibility efforts that the firm’s employees around the world have already undertaken to drive sustainable and inclusive growth in the society. The employees use their time, energy, experience and skills to create an impact on people’s lives forever. The idea was to help communities thrive by collectively building a better working world and to achieve “Sustainable Development Goals” defined by the United Nations.

On their journey of serving the society, the company envisioned to positively impact the future of 10 million people, creating an impact that will grow to benefit 100 million people by 2022 and 1 billion people by 2030. This is certainly an ambitious goal, and to achieve the same, the employees would have to work seamlessly and in a collaborative manner.

However, the present systems and processes were traditional in nature, thus demanding manual work and making it a time-consuming process for the employees. Each business unit and portfolio of the client had its own set of qualified CSR initiatives, but they lacked a unified view across the company that the managers and employees could make use of. From the CEO’s standpoint, he would have liked to have a single view of all the activities to track the progress.

Hence, the CEO decided to have a portal that connects all the employees and helps them work collaboratively towards realizing organizational goals and helping the society at large. This portal would also serve as a tracking system for the company to make decisions based on the progress.

This is where our seamless solution of a unified portal helped.

Hexaware carried out the complete design and development of the portal that allowed employees to nominate themselves for various activities on a global level. The team incorporated intelligent automated tooling to make the process simpler for the employees. The employees could participate in various ways, with varying levels of time, commitment and efforts. This cloud-native platform enabled them to see opportunities nearby for various CSR projects and sign up for activities based on their personal interests, skills, how much time they can commit, where they are based at and what type of a difference they want to make with their initiative.

All the manual work like pulling raw data from sources was done through automation. The automated tool helped collaboration within the client’s siloed teams and changed their behaviour and mindsets towards one another and the project. It is very focused on connecting employees with their passion to serve the community. The portal has helped drive employee engagement towards the organization’s CSR efforts. Today, the firm has 50 countries with initiatives on the platform; and more will be added throughout the year.

After the solution was rolled out globally, the employees appreciated the portal as it was fast-tracking their movement in the direction of the company’s vision by simplifying the overall process on a global level.

Our solution helped the client achieve:

Click here to read this insightful case study in detail.

Organizations are leveraging new innovative technologies to enhance employee experience and increase employee engagement at the workplace. And Hexaware can help you introduce new technologies in your employee engagement programs. Contact us to know more.