Transforming employee engagement

Celebrating milestones within an organization is crucial for boosting employee morale, fostering a sense of community, and enhancing job satisfaction. Recognizing events like birthdays, work anniversaries, farewells, and retirements makes employees feel valued and appreciated, which in turn increases their motivation and loyalty.

However, managing these celebrations can be challenging, especially when done manually. This is where many organizations, including our client, a leading CPG giant, faced significant hurdles. Let’s delve into the specific challenges they encountered and how Fractal helped them overcome these obstacles.

The CPG client struggled with maintaining a manual tracker for various employee milestones such as birthdays, work anniversaries, farewells, and retirements. This process was not only cumbersome but also time-consuming. Gathering wishes and messages, then manually sending out milestone emails to different groups, required a lot of effort. Each occasion demanded personalized messages and wishes, which meant manually collecting inputs from various team members. This added to the complexity and increased the chances of errors and omissions.

Additionally, security concerns prevented the use of online tools like MS Forms for collecting messages, which meant manually extracting and compiling them into a PowerPoint presentation. This manual extraction process was not only tedious but also prone to data loss and inaccuracies. The lack of a standardized method for these tasks led to inefficiencies, as different teams followed different processes, resulting in inconsistent and delayed communications.

Recurring reminders had to be sent to contributors, further adding to the workload. These reminders were often overlooked or delayed, leading to last-minute rushes and incomplete messages. The overall process was fragmented and inefficient, causing frustration among the employees responsible for managing these tasks. The client needed a streamlined, secure, and efficient solution to manage employee milestone celebrations effectively.

To address these challenges, Fractal adopted a human-centered design approach that prioritized user emotions before focusing on features. This methodology ensured that the final solution was hyper-personalized to meet the unique needs of each user. Fractal leveraged Azure Data Factory and Azure SQL tables to build a scalable architecture capable of supporting a large number of users. This robust infrastructure allowed the platform to handle the growing demands of the client organization efficiently.

Each occasion, such as birthdays, work anniversaries, farewells, and retirements, generates a unique, customizable board that reflects individual preferences. This personalization ensures that every celebration feels special and tailored to the recipient. The ReactJS web app developed by Fractal allows users to upload various types of media, including photos, videos, memes, and GIFs. This feature adds a personal touch to the messages and makes the celebrations more engaging and memorable.

To ensure reliable media storage, Fractal utilized Azure Blob Storage, which provides secure and scalable storage solutions. Additionally, Azure Key Vault was implemented to safeguard sensitive data, ensuring that all personal information and media files are protected. The platform’s performance and data storage reliability were further enhanced by using Azure App Service and PostgreSQL. These technologies provided seamless performance, ensuring that the platform could handle high traffic and large volumes of data without any issues.

Successful adoption is the cornerstone of any analytical platform’s longevity. We created an employee engagement platform grounded in human-centric design thinking, which goes beyond technical implementation. This approach started with empathy, keeping the user at the heart of the development journey. By addressing not just functional needs but also user emotions, motivations, and aspirations, we cultivated an adoption mindset from the outset rather than as an afterthought.

The Fractal Experience, Consulting, and Cloud Tech (CDT) teams embodied this philosophy. Together, we delivered a platform that combines compelling visual appeal with robust functionality, ensuring it meets genuine user needs while leveraging cutting-edge technology, eventually leading to high adoption of the tool globally.

Overall, this human-centered design approach and the use of advanced Azure technologies resulted in a highly efficient and personalized employee engagement platform. This solution not only addressed the client’s challenges but also significantly enhanced the overall employee experience by making milestone celebrations more meaningful and enjoyable.

The platform, initially designed for 250 users, has now expanded to support over 11,000 users globally, with a capacity for 107,000 users. This significant growth demonstrates the platform’s scalability and effectiveness in meeting the client’s needs. The platform has facilitated the creation of over 1,200 boards and 15,000 posts, which has greatly enhanced employee engagement within the organization.

In the first eight months alone, the platform attracted over 3,000 users. This number doubled in the following four months and quadrupled in the next four months, showcasing rapid adoption and user satisfaction. The platform’s ability to foster a sense of community is evident as team members actively share messages for various occasions like birthdays, work anniversaries, farewells, and retirements. This initiative has not only improved employee satisfaction but also contributed to a more connected and engaged workforce, making milestone celebrations more meaningful and enjoyable.