La firme Inbox favorise la reconnaissance et l’engagement des employés!

NDLR : Un très intéressant article sur l’entreprise de mon fils, Inbox. Wow!

Revue de presse

Inbox promotes employee recognition and engagement

By Peter Hadekel, Special to The Gazette December 5, 2013

MONTREAL — Employees need to feel the love.

In today’s fast-paced corporate world, where burnout is at epidemic proportions, turnover is high and loyalty to the employer is a thing of the past, companies are looking for new ways to motivate and reward their workers.

Photo ci-dessus : Une photo récente présentant quelques-uns des membres de la firme Inbox. Les deux premières personnes assises, mon fils, Marc-André et son épouse, Isabel. (photo Inbox)

It’s not just about retaining their best talent, it’s about creating a workplace environment that’s fun and supportive so teamwork and productivity can improve.

That’s where the Montreal-based firm Inbox comes in. It manages employee recognition and engagement programs for such clients as Bell, Imperial Tobacco and Hydro-Québec.

With $4.5 million in sales and 17 employees, it is seeing rapid growth among corporate clients with 500 employees or more, says chief executive and partner Marc-André Lanciault.

Inbox supplies these organizations with strategies to recognize employee achievement and incentives to boost performance. Among the tools it uses are customized web portals, games and a rewards program with an online boutique.

It’s all in response to a profound malaise in the workplace. Employee loyalty has been affected by the massive layoffs that have occurred in the North American economy over the past decade and workers are shouldering more responsibilities than before, at wages and salaries that are often frozen.

More than ever, they are looking after their own interests first. Lanciault cites surveys showing that in the United States, 70 per cent of employees do not consider themselves committed to the organization they work for — at an estimated cost of $350 billion per year in lost productivity.

The high turnover rate imposes a real cost. It’s been estimated that the cost of recruitment per job averages 1.5 times an annual salary, leading to billions in additional expenses for employers.

Two-thirds of people quit their jobs because they do not feel appreciated by their employers, he notes. “They don’t identify with the vision and the culture of the organization, they don’t feel recognized and they don’t feel that their work has meaning. This is what we’re trying to change.”

Founded in 2003, Inbox started life as a web consultant, managing content for large companies. A 2006 intranet project for the Sympatico division of Bell Canada “met with great success and kept growing,” Lanciault recalled.

Introduction of a rewards boutique marked a key point in the program and in 2009 Lanciault received a new mandate from Bell to create an internal web portal for employees in the television division.

When the Vancouver Olympics rolled around in 2010, Bell was a major sponsor of the Games and wanted a way to get all its workers engaged. Inbox developed a portal covering some 15,000 employees.

Its current portals allow employees to “communicate, learn, teach, congratulate each other, and play and receive reward points” that they can use to purchase gifts on an online boutique.

“It’s kind of like the intersection of Facebook, Wikipedia and your corporate intranet,” he says. Employees can read about the various campaigns and follow results on a dashboard so that sales and client satisfaction can be monitored.

The rewards program offers 1,500 products and 170 different brands, including electronics, travel, outdoor and sports equipment and gift cards. As it evolves, Inbox is adding new wrinkles including quizzes, surveys, games and blogs.

Can all this be a distraction for the workers involved? Not really, says Lanciault. Yes, employees will spend some of their day enjoying the site but that’s time well spent if it can boost overall productivity and loyalty.

Recognition and engagement programs can be rolled out with precise sales objectives in mind, he adds.

“People are talking about this a lot more in the last 10 years. It’s still progressing as companies come to understand the benefits of taking care of their workers.

“It’s often as simple as saying ‘hey, what you did today was great.’ That’s the first step and it’s something I try to do with my own employees.”

Revue de presse publiée par Jacques Lanciault.