With a special focus on diversity, inclusivity, and people-centric initiatives, Melissa Ribeiro, Chief People Officer, and Anabel Montiel, Head of People & Culture - Mexico, joined dojo.live for a special webinar on how pivotal work environments are to employee wellbeing, turnover, and hiring.
It’s been downright impossible in the past few years to escape the pressure of hustle culture, but we may see the end of it in 2023. There is a clear shift in priorities coming out of the pandemic, and people are beginning to realize how important it is to cultivate happy, healthy, and meaningful workplaces in 2023.
Organizations across all industries, especially in the tech space, find themselves re-engineering workplace strategies and adopting new best practices that lead to happier, more productive, and all-around more awesome work environments.
Melissa and Anabel kick off the conversation by highlighting how important it is to leverage technology to understand the effectiveness of people-centric initiatives. For instance, Encora leverages systems and technology to manage and standardize employee communication and people workflows. By using a centralized hub for data, analysts have readily-available insights, graphs, tables, and interactive views that serve as the basis for reports and factual metrics that power decision-making. Another good use of technology at Encora is to build resource libraries for informative business intelligence, boosting employee performance.
Encora’s Most Prominent Initiatives that Promote Employee Wellbeing Include:
1. Providing employees with numerous resources and flexible options to balance their personal and professional lives
During the webinar, Anabel highlights how inspiring it is to her and the entire People & Culture team to help people befeel their true selves at work without compromising who they are as individuals. Melissa reinforces that notion by emphasizing how important it is for her and Encora to embed authenticity into every aspect of the workplace.
2. Delivering a people-centric approach that promotes safe spaces for all Encorians
3. Designing and executing activities and initiatives through the Wellbeing Leadership Team
The Well Being Leadership Team is comprised of a group of volunteers across different roles and locations within Encora. The team discusses topics most relevant for the Encorian communities and decides how to allocate the budget or the type of activities that should be promoted. Some examples of initiatives that have emerged from this group are:
- Investing budget in free external psychotherapy sessions for all Encorians and discounts for their family members on mental health services
- Nutrition talks
- Sports events
- A gym at the office
- A gaming room at the office
- Adequate lactation and prayer rooms within our offices
Connecting Dots aims to keep work-from-home employees interested, connected, and social. Initially, Connecting Dots’ sessions were just fun gatherings but over time, they progressed to more focused engagements that addressed specific challenges across all teams. The games and activities gained more meaning and context so those involved could learn while having fun and getting to know each other. Since using a hybrid model, the program's scope has grown, and Encora began implementing the program for office-based employees.
The business goals of Connecting Dots are:
- Give employees a change to get to know their team members on a more personal level, helping build and strengthen relationships
- Remove barriers that make it difficult for People & Culture and teams to talk to each other, giving employees the chance to feel genuinely heard
- Deal with underlying problems within a team through fun and interesting activities. At the end of the program, participants talk about the lessons learned such as working together, commitment, and more
- Encourage employees to apply their knowledge to their jobs and see positive outcomes, leading to better teamwork and caring for one another
- Engage employees with meaningful work to build loyalty
- Keep employees interested, connected, and motivated by addressing specific issues and improving communication, teamwork, and employee engagement, which simultaneously helps us increase productivity in the long run
Taking a More Holistic Approach to Retention
At a time when turnover rates are skyrocketing, it’s vital for the tech industry to stimulate creativity, enabling professionals to innovate and be in contact with different, exciting technologies all the time. This helps professionals seek opportunities that align with these experiences.
Without the geographical barriers to working in a specific part of the world, talent is now more widespread than ever. With higher demand for software developers, it’s important to attract and retain available and qualified professionals. In this scenario, remuneration becomes a greater asset for candidates to seek profitable opportunities.
To address this scenario, Encora takes a holistic approach to financial compensation where salary is only one aspect of the full spectrum of tangible and intangible benefits such as cultural fit, stability, workplace environment, diversity, projects and technologies, excellence, career growth, and more.
Post-pandemic, all industries are beginning to pay more attention to physical and emotional well-being and mental health—a widely neglected aspect of a person’s health. Thus, employees are now more interested in self-care and emotional intelligence.
For the new generations, it is important to have flexibility, and growth opportunities, add value to the company, and find a balance between work and personal life. Thus, it's important to have benefits that encourage these things. Working from anywhere, which is more popular than ever, training opportunities to learn new skills, and a good work environment that lets them enjoy what they do all make a big difference. The fact that we can work from anywhere is one of the best and most valued benefits Encora offers. Encorians can work from home, on the beach, or even in the jungle.
Finding Alignment with Work Culture and Values
Creating an awesome work environment goes beyond perks and benefits; at Encora, employees find strong alignment with the culture and values and, thus, build a strong sense of loyalty and authenticity.
Some of the aspects that contribute to this strong bond between Encorians and company goals include:
- Transparency in communication, whether in sensitive moments or not, so everyone understands the message and works in unison
- Present and inspiring leaders who bring solutions and participate in decision-making initiatives with all employees
- Trust across all leadership levels
- Recognition that working conditions are fair and compatible with each project’s level of delivery
Regardless of location, Encorians have a strong sense of teamwork, availability, and flexibility. This is what makes Encora stronger. To achieve this, Encora places the highest attention to creating a good work culture and environment by actively hiring Encorians from different cultures and backgrounds, always focusing on what matters most: talent, skills, and expertise. An Encorian is a person who is:
- A team player
- Someone very interested in learning
- Someone who wants to help others and also get help from them
- Someone looking for a career path and stability
- Someone who wants to work with world-class projects for a global company
The most important thing is to stay close to employees and listen to their concerns, wishes, and ideas for improving things. Encora uses many tools, but the most important thing is to ask Encorians for their opinion and then act on them.
When driving the message home, both Melissa and Anabel agreed that the key to an awesome and extraordinary work environment is to take a reverse methodology approach where what matters is to look uniquely at each employee to help make them feel recognized and valued; when an employee is individually cared for, they create a tighter bond with Encora and build loyalty. All in all, Encora finds that treating people at an individual level will help unlock their greatest potential. Join our team: www.encorajobs.com.
