Tips for Engaging a Remote Workforce
CT: What are some of the ways that you gather employee feedback and take the pulse of your workforce culture?
LaFountain: Our Voice of the Employee program, which is what we call it, has multiple channels. First, we have a monthly pulse survey. We also utilize Gallup's Great Colleges to Work For annual survey. And then beyond that, we utilize focus groups and interviews to dig deeper into topics of interest. So, for example, employee recognition was an issue that we identified from our Voice of the Employee surveys. And we used that as a jumping off point to really dig into the problem and figure out what we needed to do, where our gaps were.
The analogy that I like to use with regard to our surveys is: Employee engagement is like a big ball of Christmas lights. It's all tangled, you don't know which end to start with and how to really begin to untangle it. What our monthly survey does is help us determine which end to start with. So it doesn't completely solve the problem, but it helps us identify which end to start with — so we can actually untangle that ball to get to a place where we can plug the lights in and see if they work. Sometimes they work, sometimes you have to replace a bulb, but that's how we know where to start.
CT: You mentioned employee recognition. What kinds of recognition did you have in place already, pre-remote workforce? And were those methods compatible with working remotely?
LaFountain: Back in 2020, prior to the pandemic, we looked at all of our data, and our data told us that recognition was an area of opportunity. And what that meant we weren't entirely sure, but our hypothesis was that our recognition was ineffective in that it wasn't an equitable experience. So we began to untangle our ball.
Our first step was we wanted to learn more. So we created what we call the Engagement Council, whose sole responsibility was to dig into this topic as a project team. That council consisted of about 25 folks from across the university; we made sure that we had folks from everywhere we could find to make sure that we had diversity of thought in the room. The very first thing that we asked them to do was what I called a recognition inventory. We gave them a series of questions, we sent them back to their business units, and basically what we found was that we had over 200 individual recognition programs. Twenty-six percent of those were tied only to performance. Many of them had to do solely with food — there was a lot of food, so much pizza. We had all kinds of fun stuff that was going on, but there was very little insight, not just in budgeting, but also in the employee experience. To be an employer of choice, we needed our employees to have at least a foundational equitable experience when it comes to recognition. We needed a university program that touched everybody.
CT: Can you walk us through the steps you took to get that project going?
LaFountain: We took a phased approach to rolling out our program, which we call Shine. The first thing that we started with was non-monetary recognition: the day-to-day thank you e-cards. Those are the foundational behaviors that will get us to where we want to go, which is having a culture that is rich in appreciation and recognition. We very quickly learned that we would need a technology to be able to do this, given how we were distributed. We started looking at vendors who could meet our needs, and pretty early on, we were able to narrow it down to three organizations — Reward Gateway being one of them, spoiler alert. The entire process, we always made time to go back to the employee to get their feedback. Everything we did, we kept bringing back to our employees to say, "Does this meet your needs? Do you like this?"