Colt Technology Services is a global provider of agile, high bandwidth connectivity solutions, that employs more than 5,000 people, across 22 countries in Europe, Asia and North America.
Its diverse international workforce ranges from tech savvy and computer literate technicians to high performing sales and management professionals as well as a range of back office and support staff.
Colt approached Xexec to develop a comprehensive employee recognition programme that would support the organisation’s vibrant and exciting culture by effectively engaging its diverse international workforce.
The objective of the recognition programme was to strengthen engagement, increase motivation and improve Colt’s employee experience by rewarding the behaviours that are vital to the business, making its systems more engaging to use and aligning its practices to be simple and transparent.
Moreover, Colt required a scheme that could be delivered on an international scale, rolling out to its more than 5,000 employees operating across dozens of countries.
Against this backdrop, Xexec created Colt Inspire, underpinned by its award-winning online employee recognition portal, to make it quick and easy to recognise great work, simplify the processing required and generate high levels of engagement amongst staff operating across the globe. Colt and Xexec promoted the programme to employees via an integrated launch campaign, across internal print and digital media including email-distributed video teasers.
Due to the size and geographical scope of this scheme, this was an ambitious and complex programme to develop. Xexec designed the programme to mimic many aspects of a social media platform, with functions such as newsfeeds and the ability to tag in employees showing exemplary behaviour. At the same time everything was designed to be accessible from a range of different devices to ensure that access was quick, easy and intuitive for employees, wherever in the world they were based, encouraging engagement and, most importantly, nominations.
In response to the international footprint of the organisation, Xexec developed a multi-currency programme, incorporating cost of living index calculators alongside local country redemption catalogues with retail vouchers and multi-currency prepaid cards. The portal has been built for mobile, tablet and desktop devices and includes a ‘Facebook’ style newsfeed, with winner entries, messaging and likes.
Colleagues can nominate each other for multiple financial and non-financial awards; including peer-to-peer thank yous, special occasions, instant financial awards, quarterly awards, career milestone awards and a CEO award. Back-end functions include cost centre budget management, bespoke reporting and RSS feeds into the company intranet.
Features such as Xexec’s telephone concierge service were introduced to make remote redemption of rewards and gifts quick and easy. Proxy nominations (ability for colleagues to nominate on behalf of others) were also introduced with this in mind. Other functions such as ‘Tag My Manager’ were designed to encourage employees to think upwards and celebrate achievements of managers as well as their peers and more junior members of the team.
The platform has enabled staff members to easily recognise and reward each other’s contributions on a global basis, making employees across the world feel part of a global team and ensuring their achievements are recognised. After just three months of the scheme going live, there was a huge increase in levels of engagement. For example:
Over the first 11 weeks:
- Total approved awards 3,234: average of 294 per week, circa 1180 per month
- 54% of awards were financial
- Total awards nominated 3619 (i.e. including declined and pending): average of 330 per week, circa 1320 per month
- Total countries nominated: 21 (of 22)
- Total currencies involved: 12
The scheme automates the process for granting recognition awards, is completely online and avoids the need for any paper filing (thus introducing operational efficiencies) and automatically collects management information, providing the global team with an array of insightful data on performance and talent management.
