Engage Employee Summit UK: All the best bits

Last month, our Parkable UK team attended the Engage Employee Summit in London. They listened in on 10 speaking sessions over 3 days, soaking up advice and wisdom from internal communication and engagement experts from companies including Microsoft, BP, Bupa, Virgin Media O2, and Airbus.

Here’s their summary of all the best bits.

The best digital engagement tools

It will come as no surprise that in the age of remote and hybrid working, ways to engage staff digitally was a huge talking point at this year’s Engage Employee Summit. Among the software products being lauded were Firstup, Donut, Workvivo, Rally, and Glint.

Firstup

Both Virgin Media O2 and BP spoke highly of Firstup, an internal communication platform which also gathers insights and data on engagement levels. Adding a bit of colour, Virgin Media O2 said that Firstup enabled their team to rally around a campaign and measure metrics from employee social posts.

Donut

Donut is a platform that digitally connects staff for those ‘watercooler’ moments that otherwise can’t happen when working remotely. It was lauded many a time during the Summit, and in fact Parkable uses Donut to help new hires build their network, meet for virtual coffees, and launch peer mentorship programs when staff are working remotely.

Workvivo

Gideo Pridor, Workvivo’s CMO, gave a fantastic talk about the company’s employee experience app. Pridor said that their clients call Workvivo the “digital heart of the company”.

Rally

Airbus touted the benefits of Rally, a platform for building independent digital economies through cryptocurrencies. Specifically, Airbus uses Rally to create tokens which are given to employees as rewards when they take part in brand-building activities, like joining communities, engaging with content, and referring friends.

Glint

Sarah Hood from Bupa explained how her company uses Glint to help them “create a culture of action with continuous listening.” The platform allows employees to deliver insights on their work experiences and encourages managers to act on that information, creating a “feedback-rich culture”.

Here are 5 more apps proven make you staff happier

Building work culture

Of course, it wouldn’t be an employee engagement summit without discussion of the importance of great work culture, and how to build it. We jotted down our favourite quotes on culture from the summit -here they are, unfiltered, like little bursts of inspiration.

“Find the moments that matter the most in the employee lifecycle. Work out how to adjust these to the relevant settings, and create different experiences for all the different ways of work - in office, hybrid, and fully remote.

- Victoria Lewis-Stephens, United Culture

“Companies need to engage people in body, heart, mind, and soul. To do this, you need real clarity of company values, and also clarity of your employees’ personal values. These two value sets must be in alignment if you want to create genuine commitment to a company.”

- Nicholas Brice, Engage Business Media

“There are four enablers of culture - strong strategic narrative, engaging managers, employee voice, and organisational integrity. To find out whether people are engaged, ask if they are EXCITED about where the organisation is going."

- David Blackburn, FSCS

"If your customers are referring your business, you don't need a marketing team. The same goes for employees and talent acquisition.”

- Chris Burton, Microsoft

“Internal comms should never lose the ability to surprise people. Try new things. Shake things up. Find stories from people within the company, and communicate those - because authenticity comes from the people themselves, and relating concepts to storytellers.”

- Sam Bleazard, Fortnum & Mason

Our two cents

Parkable is an award-winning staff parking management software company, which improves workplace parking so that employees can start their days stress-free. By providing seamless, bookable, and fairly distributed staff parking, clients improve the entire employee commute, as well as culture and engagement.

Read more about how adopting park sharing in the workplace increases staff happiness

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