Companies with the most engaged employees tend to have a larger profit margin. Gallup, a global management performance consulting company, also noted that the higher the engagement of all workforce, the greater the earning per share in companies in the stock market.
Engagement is the fuel to sustain value creation. Exago’s management innovation solutions are based precisely on expert services and on a software platform that engages collective intelligence to solve key business challenges. From costs reduction through to the promotion of a culture of transformation and the incorporation of skills, we help companies achieve real results.
Large companies from 19 countries and a wide range of industries have been successfully using our solutions. Let’s consider just two examples:
a) A market where everyone generates ideas
A reference in innovation in Brazil from its beginning, Fleury Group is the largest group of clinical analysis in Latin America, with more than 10,000 employees currently. Looking to the future, the group embraced the challenge of developing a culture of innovation among all employees, promoting organisational creativity and harnessing the collective intelligence of the company.
In 2011, to further improve its innovation programme, the group introduced the ‘Central de Ideias’ (‘Idea Market’), an Exago solution capable of unlocking the innovation potential of Fleury’s staff. This platform works like a social corporative network, where all employees can participate, not only gathering their ideas, but also evaluating and improving them.
Similar to a stock market, participants in this platform can use a virtual currency – the ‘inove’ – to invest in ideas that, as they rise in value, pass on to the next evaluation phase. Consequently, everyone and anyone can contribute with ideas, debate other participants’ suggestions, and invest in the ideas they believe are the best.
Due to gamification mechanisms and to a plan of incentives and prizes, employees are motivated to participate over time. Their own value and the company’s increases. Predictive market models ensure transparency in decisions and make sure the best decisions are taken, increasing the system’s credibility.
Within a year, the results overtook even the most ambitious targets:
In the beginning of 2014, more than 6,800 participants were active and interconnected. Within little more than two years, more than 900 ideas were implemented, generating millions in value. More efficient, sustainable, environmentfriendly processes also resulted from the ideas suggested in the platform, reducing operation costs.
Above all, the model allows not only the creation of value, but also the growth of motivation among employees. They feel acknowledged, having a say on the decisionmaking process and on the company’s future.
This model is also a tool for the detection and retention of talent: some of Fleury’s employees were invited to join management teams facing new challenges as a result of their active participation and value amplification in the innovation process.
b) Cross-countries successful innovation initiatives
Endesa, the largest electric company in Spain, is determined to invest in the search for new ways of acting and responding to questions regarding the environment and its developed market. To achieve that, the group is seeking to get its nearly 22,000 employees all over Spain, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Colombia involved in a set of challenges that will determine the industry’s leaders.
From April 2012 onwards, by using an Exago solution, mass participation of employees in the identification of innovative solutions became possible. Within a year and a half, 47 innovation challenges had been proposed to the company’s employees; by December 2012, nearly 2,000 ideas were submitted in the platform, 247 of which were approved and their implementation considered.
The results of the use of Exago’s model were so encouraging that, in the beginning of 2014, it was extended to the whole Enel universe (owner of Endesa). The group has 71,000 employees in over 30 countries.
To take your initiative to the next level, over time you may also feel the need to gather a constituency ready to support you. Ongoing training programmes that ‘produce’ innovation practitioners is one way to go, as we’ll next see.
READ MORE:
How to build and train your internal army of innovators
FROM THE START:
The future of work and the transformation from within
Pedro do Carmo Costa, Exago’s director and co-founder
Francisco de Rhodes Sérgio, VP Inbound and Sales for LATAM