A recent Gallup study found that employee disengagement costs businesses $7 trillion a year.
Yes…7 trillion!
Meanwhile, research shows that investments made by organizations to increase employee engagement have barely had an impact over the last 15 years.
$7 trillion in costs and employee engagement stagnation for the past 15 years…the status quo isn’t working for companies to say the least.
From turnover to absenteeism, businesses are suffering from the lack of engagement from their employees a different approach needs to be taken to stop the bleeding. This needs to happen sooner rather than later.
Crowdsourcing, in particular, is one approach that has emerged as an effective way to driving employee engagement over the years. From Campbell Soup Company to Pfizer to Herbalife, there are a collection of companies around the world that have used this to completely transform how their employees interact with each other and the company.
Employee engagement has always been a bit of an obsession for the Planview IdeaPlace team.
If 11 years of experience in the crowdsourcing space has taught us anything it’s that employee engagement is the engine that enables everything else to work. Without it, the value that companies get from their crowdsourcing efforts is significantly diminished.
As the team got to work on our Fall release, helping customers drive more employee engagement was our constant North Star.
With that guide in place, we spent a tremendous amount of effort re-imaging the experience users had when interacting with Planview IdeaPlace. The end result? New capabilities that we’re extremely proud of.
New recognition tools
Guided experiences aren’t the only new enhancements in this release.
We’ve incorporated new recognition tools that enable users to be recognized for their contributions through “Achievements” and “Endorsements” in the Planview IdeaPlace platform.
Achievements are unlocked when a user reaches a milestone based on actions. For example, if a user submits a certain number of ideas, they would unlock the “Creator” achievement. Once unlocked, the user can level up by submitting more ideas.
As employees earn achievements, the platform will notify them about what they can do to get to the next level, encouraging the behaviors that make crowdsourced innovation effective. This incentivizes users to take specific actions that not only help them achieve a new level, but are most valuable to their organization.
For example, if your colleague is routinely going out of their to help others with their ideas and concepts, you can endorse him or her as an “All Star.”
Skills and interests
There’s an old saying: teamwork makes the dream work.
To facilitate teamwork and collaboration within the Planview IdeaPlace platform, users now have the ability to add skills and interests to their profiles. This serves an important purpose.
For the first time, users can form teams within Planview IdeaPlace to help develop their ideas based on the skills or interests (even both) of other users. For example, you can create a small team of collaborators with a diverse set of skills – such as graphics design and communication – to help you refine your idea.
However, forming teams isn’t the only use case for skills and interests.
Innovation Program Managers can now make challenges visible to users with specific skills or interests.
Imagine launching an innovation challenge focused on surfacing your company’s next software product. With skills and interests, you can target employees who have a genuine interest in technology and have their fingers on the pulse of the latest technological advancements. What this does is give you an ability to optimize your challenges, and also generate more impactful ideas from employees.
We believe skills and interests are a game-changer for Planview IdeaPlace customers, and will have a huge impact on their employee engagement efforts.
Guided experiences
When you think about engagement, a big part of maximizing it is optimizing the experience users have interacting with the product.
Spigit’s VP of Product Management, Gareth Bradley, touched on how we’re optimizing the user experience through new guided experiences in a recent video interview. We believe this will make a significant impact on the engagement our customers get from their crowds.
It’s worth noting that when we started the planning process for this latest release, we took a hard look at how users interacted with the Planview IdeaPlace platform – which pages they regularly visit and why, for example.
Going through the process of collecting and analyzing the data led to some eye-opening discoveries, which resulted in a completely re-imagined experience.
We’ve incorporated personalization and an all-new look at feel that guides users in a way that encourages them to take action from their first visit or when a new challenge is set.
The overall Planview IdeaPlace experience with this new release is slick, very intuitive, and even easier to use. All of this combined means a richer experience for users, which ultimately means more engagement and meaningful results for Planview IdeaPlace customers.
Final thoughts
Spigit’s CEO, Scott Raskin, said it best: “If employees feel valued, engaged, and listened to, then an innovation culture can flourish. It’s time for leaders to consider how they are driving engagement through transparency and encouraging employees to be more invested in the wider company strategy. Planview IdeaPlace gives employees a voice in the enterprise, helping the C-suite to understand what’s going on on the front-line and focus resources on the best ideas.”
In the world of software, the right type of gamification and incentives can have a huge impact on engagement. We’re excited to get these new enhancements and capabilities in the hands of Planview IdeaPlace customers to help them drive employee engagement!
