Case Study: EBMS Employee Engagement

Situation

An industry leader in health-risk management and third-party administration of self-funded health plans, EBMS engaged Kinetic to assist them developing and implementing an innovative employee value-delivery program with the goal of meaningfully realizing employee engagement and increase employee satisfaction and retention.

Through our conversations, it became clear that they needed to push beyond the state-of-the-art to develop and implement a collection of employer best practices to increase engagement and directly impact company performance.

Actions

We kicked off the effort by conducting on-site interviews with EBMS’s executive team and a random sample of 18 employees to gauge the status of current employee-facing programs and practices. Through these one-on-one interviews we were able to clearly ascertain individuals’ goals and whether they felt supported in their aspirations, or if not, where they felt the obstacles lay.

We then facilitated an intensive 5-hour Design Thinking Summit with the leadership of EBMS to adopt a common language and operating framework for engagement and to present our best ideas about an engagement optimizing program for EBMS.

We learned the key challenges faced by EBMS employees were a lack of clarity in position expectations, a feeling of not being ‘heard’ and no real emotional connection to the company’s mission. There was also prevalent sentiment regarding a lack of new hire enthusiasm after initial on-boarding.

Results

We were then able to develop a compelling and unique Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and worked with leadership to bring it to life through implementation and communication strategies both internally and externally.

It was important that we work to accelerate the adoption of the new EVP and make sure employees felt they were being heard. We worked with EBMS to develop a social-media-like platform to enable employees at any level to “ask and get answered,” weigh in on company decisions and share uplifting stories in order to give a voice to their “employee community”. Additionally, ‘Proactivity’ in anticipating and delivering on employee needs, became a characteristic of the engagement initiative.

So what was the final EVP? EBMS is a business that supports its employees in achieving the most heartfelt outcomes in their lives: financial security, professional development, work with real meaning and a workplace journey characterized by empowerment, trust with supervisors and connectedness with others.

This cohesive employee engagement effort has been incredibly successful. EBMS has seen dramatic increases in retention, recruitment and levels of employee satisfaction.