Employee engagement remains a top priority for HR leaders throughout the pandemic, but managing that with a distributed workforce can be challenging. On this Workday Podcast episode, Deep Mahajan, senior director of people development and culture at technology company Nutanix, shares insight into how her organization is keeping up with employee engagement regardless of where they are.
Audio also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
As the global pandemic continues to extend many businesses' work-from-home orders, companies are struggling to find new ways to maintain employee engagement over the long term. I talked with Deep Mahajan, senior director of people development and culture at Nutanix, a cloud platform provider, about how her organization continues to be resilient and nurture employee engagement through this difficult time.
Below are some of the insights that Mahajan shared during our chat, edited for clarity. You can find more Workday Podcast episodes here.
“We wanted to make sure our employees stayed engaged while working from home, so one of the things we did was create a new Slack channel called the idea box where employees can post ideas about things leadership can do to support staff during the pandemic. Many ideas posted on this channel got implemented. For example, we now have a quarterly wellness day off, which was an idea suggested on the channel. Other suggestions we executed were virtual yoga classes, daily meditation classes, and a kids’ camp.”
“We started ‘the most good philosophy,’ which is an inclusive decision-making approach. There were some very hard decisions the company has been faced with during this time, including the decision to optimize our employee resources and think about layoffs. We conducted a survey, which involved a lot of our leaders across the world, and the results concluded that most people preferred to do a furlough instead of a layoff so that we can all share the pain instead of having a group of people bear it all. That's a representation of how decisions have been made and how we’ve been able to sustain our culture of communication, transparency, and doing the best by our people.”
“We're still a growing company and we can’t abandon our purpose on account of the pandemic. We went to our employees and explained why it's still important for us to continue performance reviews to seek alignment in our growth and goals. But, we still wanted to be considerate of the current situation and not burden our employees with a complicated undertaking, so we tweaked our approach and used Workday to simplify our performance process. As a result of that, we had an 86% review completion by employees and a 92% completion by managers.”
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