About 62 percent of employees today are actively open and on the lookout for new opportunities—a 4 percent increase from last year, according to the State of Employee Engagement 2019 report of WeSpires. This only means that the challenge of retaining employees is getting harder for companies.
Companies must understand what drives employees to seek out alternative opportunities. Also, businesses must take on employee engagement initiatives to effectively retain valuable talent and boost employee morale within the workplace.
IT outsourcing company Cloud Employee, which has an office in Makati City, gives employee engagement a new meaning with the hands-on and present nature of founder and chief executive Nicholas Hargreaves who is in each initiative that the company holds.
Cloud Employee is a UK-managed IT outsourcing company that specializes in supplying Java, .NET, PHP, WordPress and mobile app developers to tech companies worldwide.
Recently, Hargreaves took a group of his employees on an overseas trip to Taiwan as a token of appreciation for their hard work and loyalty to the company. The team traveled around the beautiful city of Taipei enjoying the sights and sounds the city had to offer.
When asked on why employee engagement is vital to him as a CEO, Hargreaves said: “One of the issues with the company was staff retention; in fact, we have multiple clients, so a lot of our developers may have been sat next to somebody, but they weren’t working directly with them. The actual interaction within the company was very limited. This form of business can be very lonely. So, I wanted to address that.”
In the same research by WeSpire on Employee Engagement, it was revealed that over 82 percent of employees are interested in prosocial rewards and incentives, particularly among millennials and Gen Zs. Cloud Employee has many unique initiatives that cater to the current generation’s expectations of their employers and take extra care of its staff because of how isolating the outsourcing industry’s nature can be.
One of the company’s initiatives is a small weekly gathering called Supper Club, where the CEO takes a handful of employees out for dinner. This small gathering gives them the opportunity to bond in a more relaxed and friendly setting.
Aside from this, the company also livens up the whole office with monthly fun games or activities, free food during in-office events every Friday, health and wellness classes memberships, free training to help employees improve on soft and hard skills and even free office massages and haircuts
Xamarin developer Jayson Ragasa shared his experience of working at Cloud Employee for three years now. “It has always been fun. I have never felt the need to go looking for other opportunities. With all the opportunities and benefits we are offered here, my heart still chooses Cloud Employee over other opportunities that come along. Not only because the benefits are great, but also because the company puts its employees first,” he said.
Having attained astounding employee retention of 100 percent in the first half of this year, Cloud Employee’s efforts on employee engagement seem to have paid off. By prioritizing employee engagement, Nick Hargreaves saw a definite shift within the company.
“[The workplace] became a more positive environment. People started to create bonds; it took away the robotic offshoring environment and made the environment something all of us enjoy,” he said.
