By Cindy Blendu, Chief Transformation Officer and CHRO
Employee engagement is a top priority for us, and we have implemented several strategies to foster a strong connection with our workforce. We support a variety of recognition programs to allow for timely recognition of employees. We offer specific budget for team lunches, happy hours, and events. But probably one of the most important aspects of keeping nearly 2,000 employees around the globe in lock-step is our communication efforts.
We hold monthly town halls, weekly team meetings, and regular training starting with an aggressive employee onboarding and continuing with MBA-like frameworks, power hours, and self-directed training, including Udemy and LinkedIn Learning. All of this culminates with regular sharing of information as it flows via our internal tools. We receive extremely positive results from our employees on their ability to learn, efficiently work, and stay motivated. It also helps that we have continually met our goals over the last five years, which propels further motivation.
Below are the tactical elements to our employee engagement program.
1. Office leader program. Each of our offices has a senior leader named to be the local office leader. Each office leader is given a budget, and their role is to drive employee engagement and alignment to company goals using a “glocal” approach. Under the office leader, there are also “squads” that employees can volunteer to participate in and they take the lead to organize events for the office. Our major offices have four squads: D&I, “CW Cares” (our social responsibility program), fun, and wellness/sports. We have a global calendar that is updated each quarter by the local office leader or the local team.
2. Recognition programs. We recognize employee birthdays and years of service through systematic emails and communication to their manager. We offer mostly technology-based anniversary awards for an employee’s five-year, 10-year, and 15-year anniversaries. We also have quarterly SPOT awards that managers can hand out to employees who go above and beyond. Finally, we have “Bravo!” awards that are non-monetary awards that can be done at any time via Workday.
3. Manager budget. Every manager has a monthly budget that they can spend on team lunches and events and we encourage them to!
4. Regular communications. We have monthly town halls and a company-wide Teams chat—"ONE Clearwater”—that provides at least weekly updates to the company. Examples of posts on our ONE Clearwater teams chat include local office events, “Feel Good Friday” posts, employee spotlights, and other office posts to share broadly on what is happening across the globe.
5. Talent enablement. For our size of company, we have a rigorous training program. Each employee has access to either Udemy or LinkedIn Learning depending on their role. During the month, we offer many role, department specific trainings that we call “Power Hours” to address a specific need. We also have Clearwater Academy, which provides one training session per month and continues with MBA-like frameworks such as SWOT analysis or VUCA framework to provide our employees access to this type of content. Each month we also have a theme like growth mindset and suggest courses that the employee can do self-directed either via Udemy or LinkedIn Learning.