Sodexo wins top employee engagement Award

Sodexo earns Melcrum Award for Best Strategy for Engaging Hard-To-Reach Employees - recognised for unique mechanisms that address the challenges of reaching out to employees across thousands of client sites

Meeting the challenges of engaging more than 120,000 employees working at more than 6,000 separate client sites scattered across the United States has earned Sodexo, the worldwide leader for Quality of Daily Life Solutions, Melcrum's 2011 Employee Engagement Award for the Best Strategy for Engaging Hard to Reach Employees.

In 2010, at a time when many companies were experiencing a decline in employee engagement due to the poor economy, Sodexo had an overall five percentage point increase to an already-high level of employee engagement.
The company utilises a wide range of methods to ensure that employees have knowledge, team spirit and sense of belonging that are necessary to build a highly-engaged workforce.

Sodexo biennially conducts a survey of employee engagement in which all management employees and a sample of our frontline employees are encouraged to participate. The company employs managers and frontline employees who work at client locations or virtually from their home offices, speak many languages and whose job functions do not include the use of computers and email as part of their daily tasks.
Sodexo refers to this population as its hard-to-reach workforce. Therefore, in addition to measuring engagement, it has taken a strategic approach to maximising the engagement of this population. Of the many engagement programs targeted toward these hard-to-reach workforce, some of the most powerful are:

• Daily Huddles - short, informal meetings at all locations allow employees to discuss activities of the day and managers to emphasise the importance of customer service and safety, reinforcing the mission and values of the company.

• Iamsodexo.com - a dedicated website, in both English and Spanish, serves as a central portal to all critical information  providing frontline employees with access an array of company information, such as personal and company-wide benefits, available training, and support resources.

• Sodexo Employee Connect - provides frontline employees with access to a variety of tools including signing up for training, changing payroll deductions, and other at-work tasks through cutting edge onsite kiosks.

• Virtual Meetings - bring field managers and support staff together in a time- and cost-effective manner. Virtual meetings are held semi-annually and include presentations from leadership, complete with on-line live discussions with senior company executives and industry experts, e-learning courses, and recognition of outstanding performance. Feedback has shown that Sodexo's virtual meetings allow more employees to participate and drive engagement higher than face-to-face meetings at a fraction of the cost.

• Best Practices in Recognition - sharing best practices for recognizing and rewarding employees with all managers. Tips for recognising accomplishments are discussed in Sodexo's weekly e-Bulletin and during regional/district conference calls. Satisfaction with recognition increased three percentage points in 2010, and the company continues to identify and share a variety of creative methods for recognising employees.

These programmes and many others demonstrate the company's strategic commitment to ensuring that its hard-to-reach workforce remains engaged and committed to the organisation and reinforces its sponsorship of the Customer Engagement Club Employee Engagement Directors Forum last November.