The employee at the forefront of digital transformation

Up Hellas recently launched a new digital tool, adapted to the modern era and employees' changing expectations. Up Hellas has been active in the Greek market for five years, designing and delivering digital-first employee benefits that transform the workplace experience.

As Bastien Agnes, Managing Director of Up explained, HR Squad is an employee engagement tool, enabling communication between corporate leadership and employees, on a mission to build happier, more connected teams.

HR Squad is built on 4 pillars:

• The weekly Beat allows organizations to see how teams are doing and identify points for improvements
• Custom polls to fully comprehend important issues for organizations
• Reward & positive feedback mechanism between peers
• Improved Suggestion box to collaborate on transformation & improvements

"HR Squad empowers organizations to measure how people are doing. To understand how engaged they are, to help leadership understand where they need to focus on to improve engagement; to build a culture of positive feedback and teamwork, to empower employees to build change" Mr Agnes noted.

The importance of employee engagement

HR Squad is Up's latest solution, which is added to the company's existing ones, such as the meal voucher, meal card, gift card, gift voucher, all of which increase the purchasing power of employees.

These solutions are offered to companies that place their focus on employees, as the importance and benefits that arise from such business practices is shown by the fact that companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable.

As Mr Agnes explained, we are moving towards a new system that will redefine many aspects of the employer-employee relationship:

· The importance of work / life balance · The impact of home working in the medium to long term: · The capacity to engage employees (and to keep them engaged in this environment) · The capacity to retain engaged employees

"These are the real 'people' challenges of organizations for the next few years – and solving these equations are not simple but are critical" Bastien highlights and adds that according to a 2018 research by Gallup, the cost of employee turnover was three times higher than that of employee engagement. . In Western Europe only 10% of employees fell into the “engaged” category – and that was before the pandemic.

"So, to summarize, in an ideal world - organizations need to find a way to engage about 90% of their employees; and retain all of them. That’s the essence of our solutions and what we try to solve every day", emphasizes Mr Agnes.

The role of Digital transformation

At a time when business transformation is on the daily agenda, employees of a company have to be part of this process.

According to Mr Agnes, transformation requires a clear vision; and runs on employees’ understanding and embracing the change to come. "And here lies the devil: how can leadership be fully aware of what people really think in an organization? Remember only 10% of them are engaged", he noted.

He pointed out that "a positive company culture fuels people’s energy, it allows the exchange of ideas, it releases people creativity to the tune of the “what if we did”, it unleashes the power of collaborative work. Suddenly you start feeling people’s engagement – and you know why? Because they matter! And boom – transformation becomes easier and easier."

According to Bastien, That’s a key feature of HR Squad – to ignite the spark of engagement. It allows employees to matter, and it gives a blueprint for HR and leadership to work with. Employees can start rewarding each other, all the small wins, the extra efforts become visible for all to see. The fog of transformation is slowly retrieving as the vision becomes clearer: the goal is in sight and easily reachable.

"Now let’s also be honest – it won’t be the answer. It will only work as well as organizations allow it to work. Once the blueprint to more engaged employees is identified, leadership will need to act – because there is nothing more dangerous than asking, hearing the answer to only ignoring it. But then again that’s just not a positive company culture is it?", adds Mr Agnes.