The Pain Point
During the peak of pandemic lockdown in 2020 the company I was at had to quickly pivot to remote work in order to ensure the safety of all employees. We also had to stand up remote sales appointment immediately, as all of our current appointments to talk to potential customers about solar were in-person only. These challenges, combined with the larger uncertainty regarding the future landscape in a world changed by COVID-19, led to concerns around the morale of employees as they were adjusting to all of these changes.
The Project Requirements
With no budget and no in-office interaction, the challenge was to develop a way to continue to relationship-build across the teams and provide some morale boost and much needed distraction during the pandemic. To this end, our marketing department developed two programs that could completely built and developed in-house with the goals to:
- Drive engagement from employees via submissions and comments
- Foster inter-department relationship building in an open forum
- Improve employee morale
- Develop a cost-free campaign
PosiPraise
The first development was the PosiPraise “Thank You Thursday” campaign – this employee led effort would ask employees weekly to nominate a peer who had recently gone above-and-beyond for a shout-out on our social media pages. Participation was entirely voluntary and employees could nominate team members anonymously if they so chose. Nominated employees were also given the option to not be featured online if that is what they wished.
Employee of the Month Feature
The second effort was a partnership with HR and was a social media feature of the Employee of the Month. The created graphic included some facts about the employee and also a write-up that HR provided championing their hard work and their positive impact at PosiGen.
Both of these campaigns included custom developed graphics like the ones above that were shared on the company social media pages along with tags for the employee if they approved. There was also a weekly internal email from marketing featuring the weekly PosiPraise employee and monthly emails from HR highlighting the employee of the month.
Results
Both campaigns succeeded in driving engagement and improving morale amongst our isolated employees during the height of the pandemic in 2020. Employees enjoyed seeing themselves and their peers featured online and posts achieved 50% more comments and clicks than the standard scheduled posting.
Long-Term Campaigns
Even after the peak of the pandemic passed and employees could return to office for in-person interaction, the Thank You Thursday posts continued for years as employees enjoyed providing recognition for their peers. Likewise, the Employee of the Month feature became a main monthly post campaign as well with the additional added benefit of showcasing the work environment and team spirit of PosiGen while providing valuable employee relationship building