One of the reasons Ricoh Australia has been so successful is because it has an intimate understanding of how technology impacts the way people work. It is always looking for new ways of improving productivity and innovation in order to stay competitive. Ricoh’s HR team – known internally as People & Purpose – applies the same approach to its people strategy. It has become a pacesetter for adopting new technology and solutions that “make work life better” for people throughout the business. In the past, it would take 3 or 4 months to process the results of an engagement survey and share them with the rest of the business. Employees felt their feedback was going nowhere, managers had very little to act on and the HR team was stuck in an endless cycle. The CHRO at Ricoh Australia explains why the company decided to replace its previous provider, how the platform enables its team to work in a more agile way, and the results it has been able to achieve using Workday Peakon Employee Voice.
Key Results
- Ricoh’s HR team eliminated at least 100 hours of admin that would usually be spent on data analysis, workshop preparation, creating presentations and writing internal communications for each survey round.
- Since introducing Workday Peakon Employee Voice in May 2019, Ricoh’s Communication engagement driver has increased from 6.2 to 7.3 – moving it from the bottom 25% of industry peers to the top 25%. These improvements happened as the result of ~16,000 employee comments.
- Ricoh’s Recognition driver score improved from 6.4 to 7.3 after introducing a new recognition programme in April 2019 – which increased from -18 to +14 in the same time frame.
In search of an agile engagement solution.
One of the ongoing frustrations with other engagement platforms is that whether you use them annually or on a more regular basis, there is a lot of work to be done in between every survey. To use an Australian phrase, it felt like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge. By the time you crunch all of the data and put it into a format that can be shared with your managers and employees, it was time for the next survey.
In the early days of working at Ricoh, it took 3 or 4 months to get all of the survey data into a format that could be analysed and presented to the rest of the business. After discovering Workday Peakon Employee Voice, it became clear that the big names corporations have been using for a couple of decades are not the only products out there. Ricoh started out as a print company, but people are printing less so the industry is being disrupted. When things are changing so quickly, it makes a huge difference to have all of the analysis done for you – which allows the organisation to survey more often, provide more feedback to employees and act on the results without a delay of 3 or 4 months.
Solving problems through two-way conversations.
A game changer was the ability to have two-way conversations. In the past, employees would complain because they were providing the same feedback over and over again, without any way of knowing if it was being received – let alone acted on. This is a common view expressed about engagement surveys in general. Workday Peakon Employee Voice made it possible to not only capture and automatically analyse feedback from employees, but respond to them – whether it was a simple “We’re working on it”, or the person’s manager being able to explain the actions being taken.
When new initiatives are launched, or specific organisational changes made, it’s possible to highlight that actions are being taken in direct response to feedback submitted in Workday Peakon Employee Voice. There’s a link there, which validates an engagement survey in the eyes of employees as something that helps them improve their experience – rather than just being a tick-box exercise. The fact that people feel the organisation is listening has been a real driver of engagement.
Validating new initiatives with employee feedback.
The organisation launched a new recognition programme around the same time that Workday Peakon Employee Voice was introduced. Scores for the recognition driver in Workday Peakon Employee Voice improved instantly, and people were commenting to say how much they appreciated the new platform. That not only vindicated the choice of platform, it validated the feedback from Workday Peakon Employee Voice as a way to measure and track the success of our initiatives.
Another area that has improved is communication. Scores were very low in the beginning, with lots of specific feedback related to the company intranet and the need for more visibility from senior leaders. After rolling out a series of new communication initiatives, not only have scores improved for the communication sub-driver, the team is able to fine-tune its efforts based on feedback from employee comments.