GVC Holdings, the multinational sports betting and gaming group behind Sportingbet and bwin.party, has implemented a new employee engagement platform to bring its company values to life following a series of acquisitions. In the first three months, the platform, AvinityAlive, has created employee engagement of 70%.
AvinityAlive is a social engagement platform that brings values alive, boosts personal happiness and shapes positive cultures. It uses social technology and the latest behavioural science to re-imagine the traditional reward and recognition concept.
GVC needed to do things differently to unify its 2500 global employees after a series of acquisitions. Judith Schmuck, Head of Employee Engagement, GVC, explained:
“We had a lack of shared values across the group, and people had a strong allegiance to their individual brands – not surprising when they had put their heart and soul into building them. However, the issue was hampering the sharing of knowledge, news and skills, as well as integration of teams. On top of this, our old recognition scheme was ineffectual, perceived to foster favouritism and rather dry. We needed something that was a better fit with our dynamic business and offered purposeful fun, personal choice and total transparency.
“Within three months, we dramatically increased engagement, with the platform creating a buzz around the business and employees enjoying the freedom it gives them. As a result, we are taking the company’s values off the page and putting them front of mind every day, and critically, helping employees understand what kind of behaviour is most important to the business – and how good it can feel to bring the values to life. Eighty-five per cent of employees didn’t know there was an engagement factor in the engagement and reward programme previously.
“I love that it is so social, it’s how people live their lives nowadays so it’s such a natural way of feeding in a business HR objective.”
At the heart of the programme is an assortment of challenges. These are linked to each of the company values so employees can pick and choose challenges according to their interests and motivations. The challenges encourage and reward activities, from the quick and fun to challenging and life-enriching. These can be undertaken at work and beyond, showing what the company’s values look like in action, bringing them to life naturally and triggering behaviour shifts to benefit the business. GVC chose to use a selection from AvinityAlive’s challenge bank and some of its own ideas, all related to its values of ownership, dynamism, recognition, collaboration and transparency.
GVC employees also recognise their colleagues for the impressive and helpful things they do. This peer-to-peer approach is set within a digital community – the social wall – which means recognition is personal, immediate and public, enhancing its value to the recipient. One employee said, “When I was notified that a colleague had recognised me, I went online to read what they’d said and it was so lovely, and seeing all the other recognition messages and photos of challenges on the social wall, you do feel a wave of emotion.”
Points are earned when a challenge is completed or recognition received and are redeemed for rewards chosen from the online catalogue, ranging from products to experiences to concierge services and charity donations. GVC decided that the reward for recognition should be something particularly special – time off.
GVC is the first company to use AvinityAlive, launched by performance improvement specialist, Avinity.
Rupert Poulson, CEO and Founder of Avinity, said: “GVC gave a lot of attention to the breadth and weighting of challenges to make sure there were opportunities for everyone, whatever their lifestyle and however deeply engaged they are, to earn realistic rewards and feel positive about themselves and the programme. Reports generated by the system monitor employee and team engagement and activity levels as well as the popularity and completion of challenges. Within 3 months, 1935 challenges had been taken and 4460 recognitions were received by employees from employees.
”AvinityAlive breaks the rules to achieve breakthrough employee engagement. In this all-in-one platform we’ve wrapped up emerging best practices around social engagement and peer-to-peer recognition with the latest thinking about the role of happiness in engagement, the most effective way to change behaviour and our unique challenges concept. Our clients can simply hand it over to employees to enjoy.”
Avinity has helped hundreds of companies improve their performance through employee engagement and customer loyalty since it was set up in 2005. One of the benefits for its new employee engagement platform, AvinityAlive, is its expertise in global and in-country reward sourcing and fulfilment.
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