Living Case Study: Employee Engagement

about what they do. They genuinely like their work and look forward to accomplishing the tasks before them. These feelings lead to outcomes such as

,

, and

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At Brightwing we have implemented many practices over our 40 years in business that aim to engage our diverse and ever-growing workforce. Some of the tactics we’ve utilized have been a little less than conventional. As Marketing Director for the organization many of these quirky and not-so-traditional endeavors have fallen on me and my team.

As such, yesterday evening I found myself painting an oversized mural of a tree on a wall in our office’s main hallway. This art project was just the first step in a new campaign to increase our referral business. At the beginning of the year, our business from referrals was 33% and by the end of the year we aim to grow that number to 50%. Taking the time to ask for referrals and leads sounds like an easy thing to do, but we’re all human, we simply forget. Therefore, we’re currently implementing a company-wide campaign that we hope will make asking for referrals apart of our Brightwing culture, something we talk a lot about around here.

This is where the giant tree comes in: the organization has been split into teams. Each team gets its own branch on the tree. As teams collect leads, off-shoot branches and leaves will be added to the mural. Essentially, it’s a visual representation of how together, we are all (sales, recruiters, operations, marketing) working together to organically grow our business from the ground up. Additionally, daily, weekly and monthly updates will be cascaded out to the organization. We even have our very own mascot, the WHOOT owl, that is being displayed around the office in various forms and is sending out helpful WHOOTS about creative ways to ask for leads and shout outs to top performers. Take note, we realize this may sound a little elementary, but we’ve found that at Brightwing humor goes a LONG way. We never take ourselves too seriously and push the cheese limit at times, all our weekly prizes are owl themed.

Running a 6 month campaign to drive referrals won’t make your company employee engagement super stars, but creating animated contests and programs around behaviors you want to instill is a great start.  It is one piece of a large puzzle that can help you energize employees to actively participate and genuinely love the work they do.

Stay tuned for updates on our current employee engagement campaign and to get creative ideas for engaging your workforce.

Author: April Jennings, Marketing Director