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Industry:
Financial services
Number of employees:
450
Number of locations:
1
Platform features:
Employee benefits, employee recognition, employee communications, wellbeing
The challenge
Cuscal’s leaders knew that in order to maintain its position as a leading provider, it needed to create an environment where collaboration and innovation came easily. They began to review the technology that teams were using internally, knowing that these were critical to improving communication and visibility, and could impact the motivation, productivity and engagement of their people.
While Cuscal employees had online and mobile access to Reward Gateway’s employee benefits platform, it was accessed on a separate system to Cuscal’s online recognition and reward program, which had lost momentum and wasn’t hitting the mark with employees. Instead of improving the company culture and encouraging cross- team collaboration, the recognition and reward program was forgotten, ignored, or used by specific individuals as a bartering system.
The People and Culture team organised focus groups to gather employee and manager feedback, which uncovered a disjointed and diluted recognition and reward experience. They also found that employees had to access multiple systems to get things done, and there was no central place to access company news and important policies, or communicate with Cuscal’s growing and increasingly dispersed workforce.
The approach
Employees were vocal about their desire for a centralised system and a refreshed and relevant recognition and reward experience. Cuscal was already partnering with Reward Gateway to provide employees with a benefits platform, so the People and Culture team saw this as an opportunity to bring other elements of its EVP into one place, including communication and recognition and reward.
The team worked with Reward Gateway to workshop and refine Cuscal’s existing recognition framework, concentrating on redefining the focus and goal of the new program. Cuscal redesigned the recognition framework and budget to increase the dollar value attached to values-aligned awards and ran a number of initiatives to gain manager buy-in, including feedback sessions and focus-groups that reframed the purpose of reward, and reinforced importance and meaning of ongoing, everyday recognition.
Employees came up with the name for Cuscal’s new, centralised employee engagement hub “Central,” and it was launched with a colourful, bespoke design centred on the name of Cuscal’s recognition program and culture mascot “BOB,” which stands for “Be Our Best.”
The results
As the name suggests, Central is the centrepiece of the employee experience at Cuscal – the colours, images and language used across the platform reflect the energetic, fun and friendly culture of the organisation. Everything from company news and the “A-Z Guide for Working at Cuscal” is available alongside its company- wide recognition and reward program, BOB, and access to exclusive employee discounts.
When new employees join Cuscal, they are set up on Central and introduced to BOB on the first day so they are aware of where to access important company updates, how to send and open an eCard, how to redeem rewards, and how and where to use their employee discounts.
As the one-stop-shop for engaging all Cuscal’s employees, 95% of the company actively use the platform one year after its launch. In its first year, employees sent 1,900 eCards through BOB, generating over three
times the volume of recognition moments compared to their old program and showing that employees now prefer giving and receiving recognition over monetary reward.
Central’s pages and blog posts have received almost 30,000 views and have provided different teams an easily accessible channel to share information across the business, including updates to projects, team movements, answers to questions that employees have raised, information about mentoring and learning opportunities, tips for improving financial, physical and mental wellbeing and summaries of company events that employees may have been unable to attend.
“The great thing about Central is that it really brings our values and our EVP to life,” says Jennifer Bass, Employee Experience Manager. “All the information that employees need about what it’s like to be an employee at Cuscal is in one place and that makes it easier for everyone to Be Our Best and adapt as the business does."
