HR Awards
Best employee wellness programme
IHS Markit
BRONZE AWARD
"This new recognition programme is completely owned by our 15,000+ employees worldwide—the stories are in their own words. It's meant to help everyone feel included, visible and connected to our firm and values."
Cassady Winston, Executive Director, Human Resources, APAC
IHS Markit is the leading source of information and insight in critical areas that shape today's business landscape. Every day, people in business, finance and government make decisions with wide-ranging implications. These leaders need to see the interconnected factors that impact their organisations. This knowledge allows them to make the best choices and achieve their business goals. IHS Markit calls this the ‘New Intelligence’.
Against this backdrop, it makes perfect sense that IHS Markit would take a systemic and forward-looking view of employee recognition within their firm. It makes perfect sense that they would seek to empower their 15,000+ employees across the globe to participate first-hand in the process and that they would look to leverage this network to drive new connections and unlock value.
IHS Markit launched their new global employee recognition programme in October 2020, with the project design and management led out of Hong Kong, with in-house technical development by their teams in the US, UK and India. The foundation of this programme is something very simple: authentic stories submitted by colleagues in their own words. Each story is an example of organic peer-to-peer recognition, highlighting one of their six company values. Each of these stories is immediately made visible to all employees on a public online wall, with automatic notifications to the employee and their manager. To make the experience as streamlined and transparent as possible, no approval process was required—and what employees see on the public wall is all authentic and from the heart, in their colleagues' own words. With 2020 being such a challenging year for everyone, IHS Markit felt it was the right time to double-down on this sort of recognition. It is noteworthy that the company focused 100% on pure recognition—the stories themselves and what they say about the company culture—and that the programme was launched without any financial component.
This programme was launched with the following goals in mind:
- Increase employees' general awareness of their six company values and show real-life stories of how they look in action.
- Enable a culture of recognition where employees of all levels and locations feel included and visible.
- Streamline the data collection process for shortlisting stories/nominations for existing awards programmes.
Since launching just three months ago, IHS Markit has had over 5,000 individual stories submitted by employees from all over the globe. They have also been able to pull valuable insights from the data, which tell not only of engagement with the new platform but also provide novel insights into collaboration. The company, for example, can track the number of times an employee recognises a colleague from a different region or business division rather than from their own, revealing insights into overall organisational health and agility.
This has been a wildly successful initiative and has already been very well received in the first few months since its launch. During the current pandemic, when employee wellness is critical, as is maintaining employee connection across the firm, IHS Markit felt that investing in this type of non-monetary recognition platform was a no-brainer.
BRONZE AWARD
