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Below you'll find a concise summary of our conversation with Inge Van Belle. You can listen to the full episode via Spotify & SoundCloud.
About Inge Van Belle
Inge is co-founder of Herculean Alliance and an expert in employee engagement. Her inspiration for Herculean Alliance comes from the Hercules Trophy, which, just like Inge, stands for connection and feeling good in your own skin.
Herculean Alliance
Herculean Alliance is building an ecosystem of employee engagement specialists. They help improve employee engagement across 4 domains:
- Programmes: tailored to an organisation to measure and improve employee engagement
- Events: that boost employee engagement by focusing on gamification and sportainment
- Platform: that brings together all activities around well-being, engagement... and maps out employees' state of mind
- Formats: programmes organised to improve employee engagement. The most well-known? Undoubtedly the Hercules Trophy!
What is employee engagement?
Literally translated, employee engagement means the involvement of employees. It's the degree to which employees perform with passion and enjoyment for a company. A complex concept that can't be captured under one single label. At Herculean Alliance, they've defined 12 parameters that influence employee engagement. Think of well-being (which includes nutrition and movement), leadership, office environment, satisfaction, feedback...
The ecosystem of experts
Herculean Alliance helps businesses achieve better employee engagement. They're building an ecosystem of specialists within the 12 parameters mentioned above, in order to offer their clients the best possible support.
About the platform
We asked Inge about the employee engagement platform they've developed. A platform that maps out a company's situation through measurements, so-called "pulses" in the form of quick surveys. Using a dashboard, the results are communicated transparently to the entire company. This way, employees know they're being listened to and that their opinions are actually acted on, which increases their engagement with the company.
This platform makes it possible to quickly identify pain points and respond in the most fitting way.
Employee engagement during corona
The "novelty" of working from home has long since worn off, and with it, the productivity boost that the situation initially brought has faded too. "Employees miss the connection with their company and colleagues," says Inge. That's why it's important to - as much as possible - combine a digital work environment with physical (and corona-proof) meetups.
The combination of a physical and digital work environment is called "phygital" and will increasingly become the norm, Inge predicts. To bring teams closer together, both literally and figuratively, Herculean Alliance organises fun yet responsible city games, tailored to the company.
Tips for greater engagement
- Employee engagement is a continuous process. "The perfect employee engagement plan doesn't exist"
- It's important for a company to clearly define its own vision & mission, and communicate it in its own "tone of voice" that employees can identify with
- Make sure internal communication is tailored to every target group within the organisation (age, background...)
- If you want to bring about behavioural change within your organisation, you need to change the environment. If you want employees to eat / snack in a more nutritious way, make sure more nutritious food is available in the workplace
- Now, more than ever, is the moment to invest in employee engagement, since it's a key factor in a company's survival strategy