Achievers has announced a new platform at its annual conference, ACE. The new Achievers Employee Experience Platform will provide an ecosystem for its products and integrations to power employee experience strategies within organisations
The new platform brings together five solutions that bring together all of the Achievers employee experience solutions. It will enable organisations to manage all their employee experience programs in a single location.
From the very first day, Achievers helps employees feel engaged with the company through their employee network. Connect underpins the Achievers platform enabling employees Business leaders to leverage the Achievers tools Recognize and Listen. Employees can feel seen and heard and included one another with feedback and recognition.
The Achievers platform also leverages AI to “nudge” people to participate with feedback and contributions to the company culture. The platform will also surface relevant, personalised content that matters to employees. Finally, the analytics enabled by all the platform data can deliver insights and inform employee strategies within the organisation.
Jeff Cates, CEO and president at Achievers, commented, “The recognition and rewards space has evolved, and so have we. We have the broadest employee experience platform in the industry from high-frequency social recognition to continuous performance management and voice of the employee.
“Focusing on new and emerging problems, it’s about combining digital systems and workflows with behavioral science for a seamless experience. This is what our new platform is all about — it’s about making it easy to lean into the impact of recognition on inclusion and belonging.”
Why is this important
Hiring talent today is becoming increasingly difficult. Companies need to increasingly demonstrate strong supportive cultures or risk being exposed on comparison sites such as Glassdoor. The challenge is many organisations have an HR solution that merely helps to automate paperwork.
HR solutions need to assist with employee engagement in a constructive way. The Achievers Workforce Institute’s 2021 Engagement and Retention Report suggested that only 21% of employees feel engaged. One of the reasons for the low figure is that employee engagement challenges increased with remote working.
The rise of the Digital HQ means that employee engagement cannot be delivered successfully through ad hoc engagements using fragmented or non-existent HR solutions. The new platform aims to address this with a single integrated platform. It will help achieve a sense of belonging.
An HBR article looking at the value of belonging at work by Carr et al stated, “Social belonging is a fundamental human need, hardwired into our DNA. And yet, 40% of people say that they feel isolated at work, and the result has been lower organizational commitment and engagement.”
Their research surfaced substantial benefits of increasing belonging. The article noted, “If workers feel like they belong, companies reap substantial bottom-line benefits. High belonging was linked to a whopping 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days.”
Achievers highlights five areas the platform assists organisations with:
- Recognize – Activate company values and priorities with high-frequency and high-impact recognition
- Celebrate – Recognise unique contributions and career milestones without administrative time and effort
- Reward – Maximize the value of points and choice of rewards to ensure workers feel valued.
- Listen – An integrated action-driving feedback suite delivers real-time employee listening
- Connect – Build employee networks and guide inclusive interactions to build relationships
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
There is little technical information about what Achievers has done that is different from before with this announcement. However, employee engagement solutions are probably one of the most important emerging technologies from the pandemic. Where companies relied on traditional face to face engagements, these no longer exist in many cases with remote working. As flexible working is here to stay, organisations must use technology to improve employee belonging.
Dr Natalie Baumgartner, Chief Workforce Scientist at Achievers, commented, “This data-driven model of belonging provides powerful scaffolding to guide organizations through the complexities and priorities of building the employee experience in ways that activate an employee-powered culture. Success in driving each of the five belonging factors predicts increased employee engagement, job satisfaction, and mental health — while also decreasing fatigue and emotional exhaustion.”
