Simple Ways to Achieve Employee Engagement

Here at ComOn Group, we are very proud of our company culture. We have over 80 employees in different departments that work as one team. The company is 22 years old but has a start-up-like environment as we give privileged communication between leadership and employees. There are no separate offices for the co-founders or management team, we all co-exist in the same open space where we can easily ask or provide help and collaborate.

As a digital marketing agency, our main challenge is to keep up with the daily trends and innovations regarding internet, mobile, social media, brands and consumers. We know we can only win the challenge, every single day, with a really engaged team, and the two key factors for that are Empowerment and Recognition.

For Empowerment, we’ve implemented a «Gatekeeper» concept, where everyone has the opportunity to become the «go-to-person» for new trending topics in different fields related to our core business. The gatekeeper has the mission of understanding the subject, experimenting with it, and then sharing that knowledge.

This promotes a sense of ownership, but the gatekeeper's mission isn’t finished until everyone in the company is on the same page. All gatekeepers are invited to create a small workshop or crash course and call all co-workers to attend it during work hours. This creates a great environment for knowledge sharing and breaking information barriers between different teams and different departments.

After this phase, the gatekeeper is ready to receive another mission, on a different subject.

We’ve also realized that recognition, especially peer recognition, is a great motivational incentive to keep improving our everyday performance. So, we’ve created an app for that. With the «Tap My Back» app, we can give a tap on the back every time a co-worker excels at his/her job, or “just” because he or she brings great vibes to the team!

The app gradually took part in our daily lives and company culture and we decided to make it available globally. You can know more about it at Tap My Back and try it with your team. You can also get a brief introduction to what Tap My Back looks like, here is our promotion video where some of the functionalities are exposed.

We were almost forgetting to talk about the “Cuttlefish Brotherhood”. It’s a trimestrial get-together where we all have a dinner party. Cuttlefish is the main delicacy of our city and we have the motto of “What happens in the Cuttlefish Brotherhood stays in the Cuttlefish Brotherhood”. In between dishes, all workers are invited to share their most personal and embarrassing stories so we can all laugh at and with each other. This strengthens our bonds as a team and helps us integrate new co-workers. Once again helps all of us feel part of this company!