An Agile HR: Key to develop a People-First Culture - Vantage Circle

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An Agile HR: Key to develop a People-First Culture
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An Agile HR: Key to develop a People-First Culture

An Agile HR: Key to develop a People-First Culture

10th February, 2021

In an interview, Anjan Pathak CTO and Co-founder of Vantage Circle shares his insights on an agile HR and agile employee engagement practice. An agile HR is around adopting new tools, structures, and processes to become more flexible, boost collaboration, build better cross-functional teams, and aid faster decision making.

Pathak spent 15 years working in the UK and other parts of Europe prior to the inception of Vantage Circle – a one stop solution for employee engagement and wellness. He is a veteran in creating e-commerce applications and building and deploying cross channel web applications. He believes health and wellness is the key differentiator which determines the ranking of an organisation and positions it apart in the business firmament.

With the rapid transformation of work across many different industries, there’s a growing premium placed on an organisation’s ability to be agile, adaptive, and rethink who to engage, and retain their preferred talent. What is your take on it?

We have reached the crossroads of where we, as leaders, have two basic choices. The first one is to stick with our previous traditionalist mindsets and refusing to change. The second is to make some headstrong decisions and enable your people (and your company) to respond to any new crisis, change, or transformations in a new way.

Unless you are opting for a second choice, you are probably making the wrong choice. Being agile is synonymous to growth, post 2020. Change is happening at a rapid pace. A leader should be willing to restructure, efficiently budget, and redefine roles, to match the dynamics and quick demands of today’s remote workforce.

Going forward every aspect of the workforce will be agile in nature – including employee engagement. Organisations need to rise to the challenge and adopt to agile approach to reward their employees (who are mostly remost post 2020) in a more efficient way. The people of today want to be recognised frequently, timely, and on-the-spot for their efforts. Leaders must avoid delaying the task of recognising their employees and provide appreciation as soon as they see their people doing a great job.

How has Vantage Circle designed its reward platform- that promotes cross functional team work, celebrate team successes, and at the same time recognise team members – who have excelled as individual performers, or team players?

2020 has been a challenging year to navigate for leaders, employees and organisations alike. Despite the numerous hurdles and difficulties that have come our way, Vantage Circle has retained our current team with minimal attrition rate. We attribute a large part of this success to the frequent and timely recognition that our team members receives and gives to their peers. This form of peer to peer recognition forms an integral and significant part of our culture. Every project completion or collaboration is actively appreciated by the people associated with it.

The inclusion of such team friendly practices has been a major help during 2020, where morale and productivity were understandably down for everyone. Our team, albeit remote, was able to connect, express and appreciate each other for the efforts and contributions that their peers were putting in.

It certainly helps that we have an employee rewards and recognition platform called Vantage Rewards that our team actually feels comfortable and convenient to use frequently. It helps that recognising someone is thus not a long, drawn out process but instead is a fast, easy and instantaneous. Vantage Rewards also has the option of reviewing peer-to-peer nominations and ingress analytics reports to spot top performers and provide mentoring opportunities.

How can HR use an agile approach to give perks in a more meaningful way to their employees?

An agile HR is adopting new tools, structures and prosesses to become more flexible, boost collaboration, build better cross-functional teams, and aid in faster decision making. All in all, it is about empowering people to deliver their best work possible through automation and investing in the necessary tools.

When used correctly, agile HR is a much better way of managing your people, especially in the post pandemic era. When it comes to employee benefits, the agile way of compensation is clearly the best way to do so.

With the majority of the workers being either Gen Z or Millennials, our world is shifting towards a people-first culture. The attract the right people of our organisation, you need to form and offer an employee benefits package that addresses the digitally oriented workforce’s needs and wants. Their needs are as dynamic as the changes happening today ie even the benefits they seek are ever-changing. For example, the benefits before 2020 were oriented towards the fun aspect of the work culture, while the post 2020, most employees are seeking benefits that will make remote work easier and more accessible.

Remoter workers seek benefits such as flexible working hours, time off, health and wellness benefits, and want to be recognised on the spot for their contributions. The solution to all of these challenges is to shift to an agile approach for your HR functions because it truly can improve every metric in your organisation- starting from engagement to management.

Shifting the focus from HR pain points, enabling a robust employee wellness strategy is very challenging for HR. How can Vantage Circle’s agile recognition appraoch help in increasing the penetrability of their wellness initiatives?

There are various challenges that can come with a lofty ambition of encouraging employees to live better and healthier lives. We took it as a personal challenge of sorts to make such an initiatives to make implementing a corporate wellness plan an incredibly efficient process. The features of the app keep the users (i.e your employees) in the forefront by making it easy to do numerous things to keep track of their health in a much better yet easier way. Vantage Fit comes with an option of nutrition, water intake, measuring the heart rate, activities, etc. Moreover, there is an amazing feature called Mood-o-Meter which is a powerful way of measuring the state of your mental health in the long run.

Vantage Fit influences employees to make better choices regarding their wellbeing by awarding reward points to those who complete a specified fitness goal. There is also an option of reward point redemption on an extensive array of products and services to ensure employees choose something personal and memorable to them. Attaching a reward to the end of an especially tiring task make people more enthusiastic and positive about taking some necessary steps for their wellbeing.

The world is changing and its time for the recognition programs to catch up with the dynaminism of engaging the minds and hearts of employees together. What, according to you, should be the employee recognition approach in the near future?

The future of the corporate world is moving towards a more digitized and agile way of recognising your employees better. Letting go of your traditional rewarding approach and embracing an agile reward and recognition platform is the best bet for you to nurture an engaged workforce.

Post 2020, companies should adopt a more flexible yet robust way of appreciating employees in a way that is not hampered by the working conditions, geographical locations, or other constraints. Remote workers should be able to receive instant recognition for their efforts and dedication, despite their managers and peers being hundreds of miles away. Peer-to-peer recognition will gain precedence over the ususal top down rewarding process followed by companies. Since people are geared towards embracing a practice only if it is considerably simpler to do, the need for a rewards and recognition platform that is incredibly accessible, fast and user-friendly would be the employee engagement measure to focus our attention on.