Spigit

Workplace culture is a major factor in retaining key talent, and strategic HR leaders are looking for new ways to set the agenda and drive a cultural transformation. The market for talented employees is increasingly competitive, and companies need new ways to not only retain employees but to keep them happy and engaged. Failing to do so can be extremely costly and lead to turnover, absenteeism, and lost productivity. “Culture is defined in many ways, of course, but it really comes down to how employees behave,” says Virginia Lee Williams, Spigit’s VP of Global Innovation Management Solutions. “If employees feel valued, engaged, and listened to, which is the often-reported result of crowdsourcing programs then the innovation culture can flourish.”

Spigit is the leading crowdsourced innovation platform that provides an effective, transparent approach for leaders to ask for employee ideas. The platform gives employees a voice in the business, which enables organizations to foster a culture of engagement.

Traditional approaches to employee engagement in the HR tech solution space are often inadequate and don’t engage employees in a meaningful way. Surveys and suggestion boxes simply aren’t enough— leaders need new ways to connect employees to corporate strategy and give them a voice in the company. Spigit brings with it this change. Organizations using Spigit are able to engage their employees while also tapping into the knowledge and insight that is spread across the organization. Senior leaders can now make more informed decisions based on more complete information, which leads to better company outcomes.

Spigit’s enterprise-scale platform allows people from across the business ideate together regardless of their location, department, or job title. Organizations can build company-wide campaigns that create an inclusive environment in which all individuals have equal access and can contribute fully to the organization’s success.

When you look at Spigit, there are major advantages that the company offers both from a technology and support standpoint. Starting with their machine learning technology.

Sourcing new ideas from employees through crowdsourced innovation challenges is quickly becoming an effective strategy for HR leaders looking for new ways of engaging their entire workforce. But when your team is generating hundreds, even thousands of ideas, program managers need a streamlined way of sifting through ideas. Not only does Spigit have built in measures that help the best ideas rise to the top, their machine learning technology enables managers to instantly see comparable ideas and opportunities for team formation. This provides a level of efficiency that’s unmatched by any other vendor. For participants, the ability to see ideas that are similar to theirs opens up collaborative opportunities with other colleagues. This alone is a significant value add when it comes to employee engagement.

Culture is defined in many ways, of course, but it really comes down to how employees behave

Research by Bloomberg conducted in 2017 showed that for every 100 employees, companies have 1.4 HR staff on average. As employee headcount increases, the importance for HR leaders to identify effective ways of engaging their entire employee base to aide in the retention of talent increases. Unfortunately, many of the current strategies HR leaders use to engage employees aren’t effective—Bloomberg also found that HR spending dipped to a 10-year low in 2017. When it comes to strategic employee engagement, Spigit addresses the issue of low engagement by giving HR leaders a platform that enables them to achieve more with less by being able to tap into the ideas of employees and allowing them to do the heavy lifting. Ultimately, Spigit clients have the ability to easily run hundreds of concurrent innovation challenges—from identifying new product ideas to surfacing ways to improve company culture—with tens of thousands of participants and have little more than a single employee managing the process, which allows them to significantly scale their employee engagement efforts.

Spigit has also built a passionate, supportive community of forward-thinking leaders and executives from their global customer-base. While the company provides high-caliber customer support and strategy, there’s nothing like being able to interact with your peers. Through the numerous in-person events, live webinars, and online customer portal that Spigit provides, the community is able to connect with one another and share strategies on a regular basis. For forward-thinking HR leaders looking to drive employee engagement to add value to the bottom line of their businesses, these are fantastic opportunities to learn the dos and don’ts of crowdsourced innovation.

Herbalife is a Spigit customer and provides a good example of the platform’s success. Previously, Herbalife’s employee base was not being fully tapped into for ideas. Spigit’s platform allowed Herbalife to unleash the natural creativity of their employee base and reap the benefits. The company ran a crowdsourced innovation campaign with the goals of improving the value their North American call centers provided, increasing employee job satisfaction and better—integrating team members, regardless of their location. Not only did this particular challenge save a business unit, but it brought to light the fact that the call centers were missing tools and functions that everyone had assumed they had. Herbalife was able to quickly rectify this, giving the call centers a better foundation for success.

Spigit is continually looking for ways to increase effective management of the innovation lifecycle, improve data analytics, and expand the use of new technologies such as machine learning. In September, Spigit announced a new product release focused on fueling high levels of engagement, creating connections, and leveraging the diversity of knowledge, to help companies advance the best ideas and drive business results. The reimagined user experience enables participants to find collaborators based on skills and interests and connect people with the ideas they can add value to encourage teaming and foster networks across the organization. Consumers can expect Spigit to continually refine its product, with an eye on improving user engagement and collaboration. Spigit was acquired by Planview on December 20, 2018.