When Luka Winterborne joined EDF Renewables as Head of Employee Experience, HR Projects & Employee Communications in November 2021, he quickly noticed the sheer length of time the company took to carry out its annual employee-engagement survey.
“It didn’t give us the information I needed, that regular pulse check to tell us how our colleagues were thinking and feeling at any one time. This was a huge gap, because colleague data is gold: you simply cannot do anything around your employee-experience strategy without that continuous listening and insight.”
Luka was already familiar with Workday Peakon Employee Voice, regarding it “as the leader by a long way in intelligent listening. Peakon puts engagement where it should be, back in the hands of the organisation. It allows managers to take ownership of how their colleagues are feeling and do what’s needed to drive incremental improvements in engagement scores across the organisation.”
For EDF Renewables, Peakon is much more than just a platform for analysing employee feedback and data: it’s a cultural evolution platform.
Luka Winterborne,
Head of Employee Experience
Deeper insights enable managers to identify and respond to issues.
After just one survey, the introduction of Peakon is already driving significant cultural change at EDF Renewables. According to Luka Winterborne, “Managers have never before had a dashboard showing the engagement scores coming through from their direct reports and hierarchies.
There are insights coming through continuously highlighting factors that haven’t been appreciated before – for example, the realisation that recognition may be more of an issue in one team than another, enabling action.”
Now, line managers can actively approach colleagues in confidence, without breaking anonymity, to gain an understanding of what the root cause of a problem might be. As Luka adds, “You might initially only be presented with the outer layer of a problem, but with Peakon you can peel away layer after layer to gain insight that data alone can’t give you.”
New platform enables employee voice to come to the forefront.
While acknowledging that these are early days for EDF Renewables’ Peakon journey, Luka is delighted by managers’ response to the new platform. “They’re seeing for the first time the full potential of what it can do for us,” he says.
“They can view the comments coming through, and data telling us where we sit on our engagement scores across all the metrics we’ve built into the platform.”
“It’s great for managers to see just how honest and open colleagues are being. The comments are lengthy, showing that everyone has an opinion and wants to be heard. Providing a platform that enables that voice to come to the forefront on a regular basis is really important in this day and age.”
Listening and responding to colleagues’ views supports employer-of-choice status.
Luka Winterborne is particularly pleased by the active involvement of the company’s 55-strong leadership team, including the full support of the CEO.
“They recognise how the employment market has recently shifted in favour of the employee, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic. Flexible working, the focus on D&I and the growing emphasis on having your voice heard have all changed people’s expectations.”
“Those organisations that have failed to open the door and allow the colleague's voice to come through have continued to see higher attrition rates than those taking positive action. Our business is acutely aware that to maintain employer-of-choice status, we had to maintain and develop our employee-voice framework.”
“And Peakon was the best and obvious choice for us to do that.”