Employee Engagement To Grow And Become Centre Stage For HR Tech: Sourabh Deorah

Sourabh, congratulations to your organization for winning the Excellence in HR Technology award at the BW People HR Excellence Awards 2023. Advantage Club is a Global platform for Employee Engagement, Recognition and Communities. How have you leveraged HR tech to enhance the company's business objectives?

Our HR technology has garnered much attention among employers and employees in recent years. It has helped us connect and benefit both the brands and the organization's clients/employees. We intended to provide an end-to-end solution to facilitate meaningful client & employee engagement through exclusive privileges and rewards our brand partners provide.

The platform has become a trusted tool for businesses to engage with their employees/clients meaningfully and for marketers to reach out to their target customer groups quickly.

- We have reduced attrition by 55% for employees engaged on our platform.

-  We have made one platform for all employee engagement needs.

- Our redemption rates are north of 90%, whereas the industry standard is 60%

What challenges or pain points was the company facing in the absence of the right HR tech solution?

Without Advantage Club entire process was done manually, which meant having the complete decision-making on Excel or emails and gifts being very rigid, ineffective, and painful to manage. Unfortunately, most software providers were very rigid, offering point and catalogue programs that lack value & impact, and in-house manual programs just don't work!

A well-thought-flexible benefits program has proven to increase employee engagement, higher productivity, and performance effectively. It also facilitates attaining an improved organizational culture and a strengthened employer brand.

With this initiative, the HR department made immense efforts to make employees feel special and that the organization they are working for has provided such curated benefits for their well-being. At the same time, employers don't have to struggle to create an ideal plan to appease every employee when offering flexible benefits. Instead, they can empower employees to decide by themselves, ensuring they receive the benefits that best serve their health, finances, and personal and professional goals.

What factors do you consider when evaluating and selecting HR technology solutions for your organization?

When evaluating and selecting HR Tech, we ensure employee benefits are meaningful, valuable, and holistic to their needs.

With this view in mind, we have launched several holistic employee well-being offerings, such as the Flexible Benefits solution that allows employees to choose what they want category-wise.

We have also launched financial wellness via the Advantage Card for Tax Saving, which helps employees with their financial needs.

We are today one of the most comprehensive platforms offering solutions for all employee engagement & welfare initiatives.

Can you share any best practices or lessons learned from your experience in deploying HR technology within your organization?

As we operate across more than 3m employees and 100 countries, the biggest learning that we gained is that every stakeholder should be happy. At Advantage Club, we value every end user as much as the executives or HR leaders of the company. Hence, we have implemented policies like anti-breakage, high redemption, etc. All other HR solutions in the space run their business on breakage, which essentially means that if any point is unredeemed via the end user, the entire reward budget goes into the HR solution's pocket. We do not do that at all and hence see high adoption.

What role do analytics and data-driven insights play in your decision-making at the top?

As a tech-driven platform, we are constantly on the go to help organizations customize the platform and find opportunities to make the offering more relevant.

We are using analytics to find early indicators of employee disengagement and help organizations tweak their R&R program or spruce their employee benefits program to cater to unique needs.

We are extensively using ML to map user behavior patterns on the platform to offer a unique experience basis their past interactions. We also use homegrown recommendation engines to drive redemptions. 14% of our redemptions are originated via our ML engines.

From a reporting perspective, we give access to dashboards and numerous analytics to HR managers to help them understand the level of employee engagement and where there might be potential for attrition.

Looking ahead, what do you see as the future trends or advancements in HR technology that will have the most significant impact on your organization?

We believe engagement will continue growing and become the centre stage for HR technology. Our next generation expects more from their job beyond salary and stability, and organizations will have to continue evolving to deliver on their expectations. Earlier, HR used to be a function, just there from a welfare point of view, but now it has moved into creating an employee experience. Organizations will also look for a unified AI-enabled global solution that manages the entire employee experience journey, from onboarding employees to recognition to wellness. We will continue playing our role in helping organizations and employees achieve maximum engagement and happiness.