CFO’s: If you want to save money this year, engage your employees through AI. Some $300 billion is the annual cost of unhappy employees.
Globant, (GLOB) an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, created a tool to boost collaboration among its employees that were distributed around the globe. Nowadays, with more than 14,000 associates worldwide, the tool has transformed their way of working and is helping their clients, too, through what they call augmented collaboration. No wonder, Globant shares(NYSE:GLOB) gained 41.3% in the first six months of the year.
The lower productivity of actively disengaged workers penalizes U.S. economic performance by about a figure nearly equal to the nation’s defense budget as per a Gallup research. Disengaged workers report more days of work missed for illness and increase turnover. And these costs are previous to the pandemic; keeping employees engaged while working remotely is even more challenging.
Companies are working hard to create virtual brainstorming sessions and develop tools to track performance and capture ideas, but keeping the culture alive is not an easy task.
Augmented culture
In an interview with Martin Migoya, Globant’s CEO, he said that “culture is an imitation game. In the early days, we developed a manifesto with our core values. Still, the challenge was how to communicate it to the employees. Globant was growing too fast in many different locations. We decided to use our own technology to solve it. As we were not the only ones with the problem, we decided to pack the solution so that other companies could also benefit from it.”
Starmeup.com is an employee-centered platform. It is an operating system that fosters a high level of employee participation, forming a great sense of belonging and creating a strong social tissue throughout the organization.
For instance, it allows employees to do peer-reviews. Each associate has 20 stars to recognize other team members for a specific action that represents company values, such as aiming for excellence, being kind to the environment or being more inclusive.
Martin thinks that the leaders represent the company culture, but it is lived by the teams, so companies need to find ways to recognize the people that make the difference living up to those values.
Peer reviews are starting to be applied by many companies as a method to ensure that performance evaluation is more transparent and fair; in most cases, replacing employee rankings and annual reviews. Globant conducted a survey in 2019 and confirmed that 72% of respondents said they were not satisfied with their organization’s current feedback process in key areas like career development (73%) and job performance (70%).
Augmenting the employee experience
Culture and values are also useful to hire and predict employee disengagement. So StarMeUp OS also allows them to identify the cultural traits that are more successful at Globant, and help recruiting people that show the same patterns. Likewise, they can even predict attrition by analyzing the engagement curves of people that left the company. Now they can tell when someone is disengaged, enabling leaders to start a conversation before they decide to leave the company.
Working remotely
The challenge remains how to keep people emotionally engaged, self-motivated and particularly how to drive innovation after the pandemic. The U.S. saw a 7.2% drop in productivity after March 2020. One of the reasons is that the power to trigger ideas through informal connections in open offices and in-company cafes dissipated.
StarMeUp OS can recreate these casual encounters. Employees can ask for slots to meet people with specific characteristics or interests within the company. The software will trigger random meetings with other employees around the world in what they call virtual chill outs. While they meet, they will also access to “augmented information” on their Zoom account on who they are, what do they do or how many stars they have.
The other challenge that companies have to deal with when working remotely is training and coaching new hires or junior employees. So Globant has also developed “augmented coding,” a tool to help junior coders get technical suggestions. While it cannot replace leaders, it ramps-up their productivity and reduces mistakes by using artificial intelligence.
Transitioning to self-organizing teams through augmented collaboration
Migoya firmly believes that pandemics will keep people working from home for an extended time. It’s the perfect moment to use technology to help to improve the daily dynamics and make work more efficient, even when getting back to the office. He says that “command and control structures are no longer what people want in a company.” He advocates for a new structure, an inverted pyramid where customers are at the top, and the POD’s or self-organizing teams are at the center of the action.
A study conducted by McKinsey shows that self-organizing teams proved to be the most efficient in transitioning to remote work and dealing with the crisis. Autonomy, one of the self-organizing team’s fundamental values, allows employees to be closer to the customer, improve decision making and increase motivation and engagement. By augmenting collaboration through technology, companies can accelerate their transition to a new way of working to boost productivity and engagement, even in remote work.
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