1. Make a Diagnosis

Before working on a subject like mental health, it is necessary to make a diagnosis of your company’s current situation. In this diagnosis, it is important to understand how people deal with the separation between their professional and personal life. Some key questions could be about their daily habits, other activities in their life and wellbeing habits. This diagnosis makes it possible to identify the main problems and implement solutions adapted to the real needs of your employees. Furthermore, different teams are made up of different people, with different working methods, who may have different problems for which adapted solutions are needed. With GFoundry, through Contributions, you can share well-being forms that can be filled in by all employees in your organisation. This way you have access to key information about how your people feel, what problems they experience, and what needs they have in their context.

2. Promote education on the topic

Once the issues have been identified, it is crucial to disseminate information on the topic of work-life balance. Some options are organising webinars on work-life balance or sharing newsletters on wellbeing. The aim is to ensure the sharing of tools that employees can use to identify their needs and subsequently take action so that they can improve their wellbeing. At GFoundry, through the Learn Module, besides being able to integrate all your employees’ training content, you can also insert new categories with wellbeing content to which users can have access whenever they need it.

3. Implement well-being activities

Besides promoting knowledge on the subject, it is also crucial to demonstrate its practical side. Promoting physical and/or psychological wellbeing activities allows your employees to pay more attention to their own wellbeing, having healthier lifestyles. Some examples could be joint physical exercise classes (in person and/or online), healthy cooking classes, yoga sessions, among other possibilities – possibilities that may come from suggestions left by your own employees in the diagnosis phase. On the GFoundry homepage there is a News Feed where you can communicate all the scheduled activities, allowing your employees to always be aware of the wellbeing agenda within your organisation.

4. Use flexible working to your advantage

Giving your employees the possibility to have more flexible working hours is an important tool for the well-being of your employees. There are several possibilities regarding flexible working policies in organisations. Whether it is through flexible starting and ending times, the possibility to choose working hours freely or even not having defined working hours but rather objectives to be accomplished, allows your employees to reconcile their professional life with their personal issues in a simpler way. Employees can fulfil their tasks and still be present at important family moments, do physical activity at a time that is more beneficial to them, or enjoy leisure moments that are necessary for their well-being. With GFoundry’s Goals Module, it is extremely simple to manage your team’s objectives through the OKR – Objective Key Results – methodology. Having all your objectives on your mobile phone, and even having access to their completion status, it is much easier for your employees to manage and achieve their goals.

5. Use remote work to your advantage

Together with the flexibilization of work, the possibility of being in telework allows the employee to better manage his personal life conciliated with his professional life. Whether it is because their children are sick, or because a doctor’s appointment has been scheduled for mid-morning, the possibility of being on remote work allows the employee to meet their personal schedule while still being productive for their organisation, and not disrupting the normal flow of work. In addition, some studies show that employees can increase productivity rates by 13% when working from home. GFoundry, being a multi-platform solution, allows employees to access its contents anywhere – either through their computer or through their mobile phones.

6. Promote discussions on the subject

Even more important than promoting a culture of wellbeing and balance, is to implement a culture of open discussion about the issue. Ensuring that people can discuss the issue openly with their colleagues and superiors allows employees to feel comfortable discussing any need they feel, preventing the issue from escalating. Through GFoundry’s Engagement Thermometer, it is possible to constantly and periodically analyse metrics such as work-life balance, alignment, feedback, satisfaction and well-being, among other essential metrics to understand how your teams feel.

7. Lead by example!

Finally, it is important to demonstrate to employees that this balance can and should be promoted by anyone within the organisation. It is not only important that teams use all the tools at their disposal, but that their leaders can also encourage their peers to promote a culture of wellbeing and balance. At the end of the day, employees feel more motivated and productive, ensuring better results for the organisation as a whole. Would you like to promote a better balance between the professional and personal life of your employees with the help of GFoundry? Learn more about our solution and book a demo with us! Read more: How to promote a good work-life balance for employees post-COVID-19

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a popular goal-setting framework used by individuals, teams, and organizations to set ambitious goals with measurable results. OKRs are typically set quarterly, but they can also be set annually or monthly.

Objectives are the long-term goals that you want to achieve. They should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Key Results are the specific, measurable steps that you will take to achieve your objectives. They should be quantifiable and trackable.

For example, an objective for a team might be to “increase website traffic by 20% in the next quarter.” The key results for this objective might be to “increase organic search traffic by 10%,” “increase social media traffic by 5%,” and “increase referral traffic by 5%.”

Increasing Employee Engagement with OKR Method!

Employee engagement is a critical factor in the success of any organization. Engaged employees are more productive, more innovative, and more likely to stay with the company for the long term. However, increasing employee engagement can be challenging. This is where the GFoundry OKR platform comes in. In this article, we will explore the importance of the OKR methodology in increasing employee engagement in an organization. The OKR method provides a clear framework to help employees understand what is expected of them, what they need to do to achieve their goals, and how they will be measured.

Do: Invest time in Internal Communication

For internal communication to be structured and effective, it is necessary to invest time in its planning. It is not only important to plan what kind of messages are important to transmit internally, but it is also essential to understand which channels are used, how often this communication is used, and also how feedback can be collected on how the communication is working internally.

This planning should not be done in the short term, but in the medium-long term, and it is also important to define the main objectives of this strategy. Is it to align all employees with the values? With the strategic vision? With the objectives? With the market strategy? Or with all of these?

Do: Listen to your employees and give them a voice 

After the implementation of an internal communication strategy, it becomes crucial to listen to people. Just as it is important for a Marketing department to listen to consumers regarding their advertising, it is important for the person responsible for Internal Communication to understand what their performance is on the messages that are trying to be disseminated internally.

With this feedback, it is possible to adapt the strategy and continuously improve the communication that exists in the company, allowing even more promising results.

Furthermore, giving employees a voice in a more agile and direct way so that they can share their ideas and suggestions allows innovation processes within the organisation to become more frequent and simpler. This possibility allows employees to feel more comfortable sharing their ideas and suggestions for improvement, which can lead to very interesting performance results.

Do: Adapt to changes! 

Today, more than ever, the contexts in which we are inserted change from one day to the next. If prior to a pandemic period internal communication in the company could use physical communication channels (such as face-to-face meetings or events), today the key lies in the digitalisation of communication channels.

Being different from case to case, and from organisation to organisation, it is important that internal communication is adapted to the reality, in order to guarantee that all employees receive the same information, the same content, at the same time. This way, it is possible to avoid misunderstandings and even internal misinformation.

Don’t: Complicate contact between departments

One of the main mistakes made by organisations is to bureaucratise communication between departments / areas / teams. Depending on the organisational structure, it is important that everyone is in contact. Not only does it allow for more efficient contact between different structures in the organisation, it also facilitates the sharing of information and messages between people.

An organisation that bureaucratises communication tends to create more internally isolated groups, leading to more withholding of important information between different groups.

Don’t: Use only email as internal communication channel

The messages transmitted internally may be on various themes and subjects. Therefore, it is important to understand which communication channels are the most efficient for each topic.

Very often, email is used as the main tool for internal communication. However, email is also a work tool, where employees may receive messages related to their functions, causing corporate information to be left aside.

Thus, it is important to understand what other channels you have at your disposal to communicate important messages for the organization, ensuring a general and common access to all, avoiding loss of information.

Don’t: Forget to share progress reports

Since it is important to share the strategic objectives of the company, and align all employees with these same objectives, it also becomes extremely relevant to share what their state of completion is.

In this way, employees will not only be aligned with the goals they have to achieve, but they will also be aligned with their degree of completion, and what efforts they will have to make to achieve them, feeling increasingly responsible for the organisation and its success.

How does GFoundry impact my Internal Communication?

GFoundry is a leading solution for Employee Engagement. More than just being a platform for gamification and employee engagement, it is also a tool for internal communication. 

Not only can it represent a company’s information centre (in the same way that an intranet works), it can also function as the top layer that encompasses all the available platforms in the organization, making the employee experience more interactive and centralized.

Being a cross-platform solution (being available in web version and Android and iOS app), it allows employees to be in touch with their organisation directly through their phones.

In addition, GFoundry has very important tools for an efficient internal communication.

Push Notifications

With employees having access to an application on their smartphones, it is possible to send push notifications, either to all employees or only to a certain group. In this way, it is possible to transmit short messages in an agile and fast way.

Want to inform your employees about a meeting? A new piece of news? Or even wish them a good day at work? You can say anything you like!

News

On the homepage of the platform there is a News section. In this section, you can share any type of information with employees and it can also be filtered for certain groups within the organisation.

In the news, you can include text, images, PDFs, videos, or even links to other platforms, making it an important information centre for your teams. Do you need to communicate new training sessions? New events? New internal processes? New employees? You can communicate it all!

Engagement Thermometer

The Engagement Thermometer is an essential tool to understand the feedback from your employees regarding their connection with the organisation itself. This way, you will be able to have frequent and clear feedback on the level of employee engagement, being directly impacted by the effectiveness of internal communication.

You can learn more about the Engagement Thermometer here.

Surveys

With the Contributions Module, you can listen more directly to your employees, sharing internal questionnaires on how internal communication is working, what suggestions for improvement they may have, and even collect opinions on other types of messages that can be shared.

You can lear more about the Contributions Module here.

Goals

With the Goals Module, it is possible for the employee to have access to their individual objectives, team objectives and also their completion status. 

In addition, and through the OKR (Objective Key Results) methodology, the employee will have greater insight into how their individual roles will impact the overall set of objectives of their team, their department and even their organisation, resulting in greater strategic alignment.

You can learn more about the Goals Module here.

Innovation

With the Innovation Module you can manage innovation processes within your organisation. Whether for a specific area of the organisation or for the structure as a whole, you can allow your employees to share ideas and suggestions for improvement in a simple and agile way.

Furthermore, all employees will be able to access the shared ideas, vote on the ones they like best, and even comment with feedback and new suggestions on the same idea!

This crowdsourcing model (model that uses the knowledge of your community) allows a greater involvement of your employees in the continuous improvement of your organisation’s processes.

You can learn more about the Innovation Module here.

Would you like to know more about how GFoundry can help your Internal Communication? Book a demo with us!

Agile OKRs Purpose and Benefits

It ‘s common sense that people improve their performance when they are committed with challenging goals – it’s part of our nature, right? But do employees know what their employers and managers expect from them? According to Gallup, only half of the employees know what outcomes are expected from their work.  They refer that “Meeting employee’s achievement needs is important to encouraging high performance. When managers help employees set work priorities and performance goals, they give employees more freedom in meeting these objectives, enabling them to take initiative and work autonomously.” It’s from this gap – organizations focus on their strategic priorities – that OKRs methodology aligns every stakeholder by unfolding objectives for the teams, having them simple and clear for everyone, with scanning metrics designated as “Key Results”.

In practice, using OKRs is different from other goal-setting techniques because of the aim to set very ambitious goals. When used this way, OKRs can enable teams to focus on the big bets and accomplish more than the team thought was possible, even if they don’t fully attain the stated goal. OKRs can help teams and individuals get outside of their comfort zones, prioritize work, and learn from both success and failure. re:Work in https://rework.withgoogle.com/

OKRs framework is implemented with a meaningful communication plan in which the teams acknowledge the strategy, as also:

1. Demystify what is objectives and explain their purpose;
2. Establish a comparison between the present organizational  framework and its results against the outcomes with OKRs;
3. Explain how it works from a practical perspective, from the cycle’s definition, what is expected from each one, steps and deliverables, and how people are going to be recognized.

The link between people and this “culture” is directly related to where companies want to be and defining what the path to measure success.

GFoundry, as an employee engagement solution, is the ideal tool to support OKRs implementation in the sense that responds to the main key attributes, as following: Simplicity: because its a mobile first solution it demands simple and direct descriptions; Transparency: allows defining objectives as public and share their progress with the stakeholders in real time; Agile and dynamic: super versatile in updates and sharing results, which can be auto declared, manually inserted or automatically, from a data source; Alignment: Sensibilization sessions accessed from content libraries, with different formats types and from the feed news with the main events and information; Feedback and Recognition: Follow up and regular support with access to reward plans and incentives from gamification techniques;

Some tips and best practices to manage OKR Objectives & Key Results

Objectives should be written with action verbs, with clear terms, tangible and prioritized according to the needs of the business. It’s recommended between 3 to 5 objectives to stay focused, which links with 3 key results.

What are the Key results?

Key results are metrics that show work outcomes produced by an employee to progress on the team objective. The results should be supported by clear evidence (Accounting, CRM´s, ERPs reports, etc) defined in the beginning, with a start point to a finishing one. It’s recommended to adopt the quarter for team cycles, with touchpoints in the middle of the term for feedback and coaching and to decide the eventual refresh or resolution of any objectives settled in the first place. At the end of the quarter an evaluation takes place to prepare objectives for the next quarter on the way to meet the organization strategic goals at the end of the economic year. Remember also that dashboards with some of the most relevant data are fundamental to follow the progress of some indicators:

What is GFoundry’s OKR’s Module?

The OKR’s Module is a tool for Goals definition and management that allows the implementation of OKR methodology and can be used by teams and individuals for setting ambitious goals enabling measurable results.

Main features of OKR GFoundry’s module:

• OKRs and Initiatives
• Roadmap visualization
• Due dates
• Check-ins Reminders
• Statistics with filters
• KR’s progress Dashboards
• KR’s Activity Stream
• Settling objectives and personal challenges;
• Settling objectives and professional challenges (smart goals);
• Investment system with virtual coins where one can invest in objectives from others;
• Objectives mass creation and management system;
• Objectives status follow up on a simple and efficient way (start>progress>results);
• Full integration with other modules for different purposes (Eg: Recognition, Feedback, Reward Market, Innovation, Performance Appraisal)