I’m a huge proponent of companies using their corporate cultures as a tool to recruit and retain employees. We all know a strong corporate culture can help an organization stand out and companies succeed by doing well for their employees. This is why I’m not surprised there are many HR vendors offering all kinds of solutions. I’d like to share how our tools are helping clients enhance the overall employee experience.
That understanding is what led us to develop the three pillars on which Kango rests. These are the foundation of what a modern HR team will use to build their successful employee engagement platform. Something that will grow with them as their needs, and means, of engaging employees grows. Any organization truly focused on the employee experience needs a strong HR program that makes employee engagement one of its central tenets.
Kango helps HR organizations provide a consistent and engaging employee experience based on authenticity, transparency, and sincere appreciation. We do this by streamlining processes, sharing insights, and freeing up HR to tackle more strategic tasks.
Having established that the three pillars of KangoGift are:
· Engagement
· Recognition
· Insights
Let me tell you what the challenges are in these three areas and how we help engaged organizations solve them,
Engagement—The concept of trust is gone in the workplace. Employees see themselves as temporary as much as executives seem to see them as interchangeable. The great gulf between the two is leading to unnecessary loss both financial and with employees. What Kango has seen through its work with the variety of organizations we serve is that real and valid engagement creates a better sense of accomplishment that makes each worker aware that they are more than the invisible cog.
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On-boarding
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Pulse surveys
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Feedback
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Service awards
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Life milestones
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Values/mission communication from leadership
It also empowers managers to become leaders by engaging on that personal level that, before Kango stepped in, was done on an ad-hoc basis. Our tools help HR hear from employees, take action, and communicate clearly. Key milestones like a birthday an employee anniversary or to recognize a role in the success of a larger project can now be acknowledged and rewarded. The on-boarding process can also become more effective because Kango is ensuring a stronger bond by allowing for easy and ongoing interaction thereby making the new employee’s life easier in an otherwise more stressful time.
Recognition—The central feature of the Kango solution is the central part of the employee engagement process; recognition. Knowing that your work is part of a greater good is all well and good but seeing some tangible recognition is what makes that cog become a piston. I do need to stress that there is more to recognition than the t-shirt now and then, or some other trade show booth left over.
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Manager tools to give recognition
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Peer recognition
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Global awards programs
For the recognition to work it has to be genuine and personal. When Marie has done a great job helping as one part of a larger project, you can recognize her directly for it rather than make her wait until everything else is done. It can be something as simple as a direct message that the manager can send since the Kango platform lets them do it both easily and sincerely.
Colleagues can add their supporting comments to recognition. The important thing is that the recognition be based on something that is the manager and give when and as needs call for it. Kango built in the flexibility into our platform because that is what is most necessary if we truly want to engage an employee.
Insights—When we’re out talking to the HR leaders we work with we have, over the years, heard about employee engagement time and time again. That lead to the solution that focuses on that and rewarding. Once that is done we’ve noticed that there is missing that third leg on the stool to help manage the success of the program and that’s a clear, definable and quantifiable insight program.
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Employee trends
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Leadership dashboards
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Retention analysis
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Smart Suggestions from our advanced data engine
By collecting the data Kango offers via its clients employee engagement programs, the ability to then conduct surveys or measure other, user defined, data trends a bounty of insights can be determined based on the customer’s needs. Want to correlate employee turnover to rewarding or some other form of engagement? Maybe you want to gain the feedback necessary to onboard more quickly? A key insight tool such as this takes you from the simple guess work to the hard, easily reachable, data results you need to thrive.
Parting Thoughts
Employee engagement is more essential and critical than ever. Leading HR professionals know this and realize that the success of the organization does depend on full employee engagement. The problem they face is with selling higher ups who don’t fully understand engagement and treat it as a cost to be controlled rather than a resource to be invested. The time is now for a top-to-bottom engagement solution very much like the one Kango offers.
