Sports betting and gaming organisation GVC Holdings introduced a new values-based recognition and engagement platform as part of its global culture project, which aims to re-motivate and engage the organisation’s 2,300 employees following an eight-month takeover process.
The platform, named The Kudos Club, was implemented in conjunction with provider Avinity in April 2017 as a tool to help advocate GVC’s five new organisational values to its newly combined workforce. The new values, recognition, transparency, collaboration, ownership and dynamic, were derived from a series of employee-led workshops in autumn 2016, after the finalisation of the takeover process in February 2016. The new values were launched to staff in January 2017 via global breakfast sessions.
Judith Schmuck, head of engagement at GVC, says: “It was [an organisation] that had already acquired a few other [organisations] and was more or less a mosaic of [organisations] buying an even bigger, stronger [organisation] in terms of volume, so it was really difficult to reach out to people and start a discussion about [how] we should be one global group.”
The platform enables employees to collect points for completing challenges that ask them to act according to the organisation’s values. For example, a transparency-based challenge could ask employees to update their profile picture on the staff intranet. Once employees have enough points, this translates into credit they can spend on items from an online shop.
In addition, The Kudos Club provides employees with a budget of points per quarter, which are used for peer-to-peer recognition. These points are translated into extra days of annual leave. Since its implementation, more than 85% of employees have used the peer-to-peer recognition feature.
The Kudos Club has replaced the organisation’s previous recognition tool, which was based on recognition for performance, and required managers’ authorisation to gain the financial rewards to spend online. Via the new platform, the organisation’s values champions or Schmuck can authorise a reward once employees have completed a challenge successfully.
The Kudos Club was launched with a party, and supported with online information via the organisation's intranet site, emails, town hall presentations, desk drops and screensavers. The organisation also held video tutorials.
Schmuck says: “People get the feeling that the [organisation] invests in human resources, in humans, in them, and that is what motivates them, because nothing is more demotivating than the fact that no-one cares who you are or what you do. By doing what we did and bringing in a new tool, […] we could reach out to many people in terms of convincing them that this is a good place, they should stay, that they can stay for longer; that we want and need them, and that we are grateful they are here.”
