The real-time audience engagement app from Vevox has helped Aggregate achieve its goal of raising the level of active participation in company meetings, workshops and events.
James Roberts, Aggregate’s Organisation and Human Resources Director, explains, “Over time, we were becoming increasingly aware that when we got large groups together in company meetings, the same people raised their hands. We were not hearing from large swathes of the business. We knew we needed a better way of engaging with everyone across the organisation.”
“For us, the driver was around how do we capture more diversity in the organisation? How do we promote more inclusivity? And how do we get more inputs and elicit more innovative comments and ideas from people who would not necessarily speak in a typical meeting?”
Aggregate started using the Vevox technology primarily for big, set-piece company meetings, and now uses the app extensively on these occasions. Aggregate makes the app available to employees in advance, and then asks them to highlight issues and topics they would like management to address, as well as outlining how the company could best support them in their role.
Typically, Aggregate uses the tool to ask the audience questions throughout the meeting. If a question is especially topical or attracts a lot of engagement, it will ask attendees to use the app to vote on it. Then, the executive team take the process further by fielding out the questions and providing responses.
The app is now utilised across the business in meetings and workshops rather than only the big showpiece events. It is used most widely for the Q&A section at the end of debates, but also for snap polls during meetings. It gives senior management a quick take on the balance of opinion on hot topics impacting the business. Aggregate has also started using the app in HR talent meetings to gauge the overall employee perspective on how effective the company is at developing talents today.
Implementing the Vevox app has helped Aggregate to capture the views and feelings of a wide variety of people within the organisation in a way that is non-immersive and fully anonymous and confidential. That enables the company to tap into a much wider and more inclusive set of opinions.
The app has also helped to usher in wider organisational change. As Roberts explained, “Having this kind of technology in place has helped kick-start a change in the culture of our meetings. If you go back three or four years, they typically took the form of an update pitch from senior leaders on how the business was performing. Today, thanks at least in part to the technology, they are far more participative.”
“The last one day meeting we had consisted, for example, of just one hour of corporate presentations,” added Roberts. “The rest of the time was focused on team building around our strategy and growth plans.”
The app also helps employees by enabling them to have important tweaks made to their working approach.
Roberts highlights one such example: “We had one recently through the app, questioning the time that the payroll department was having to spend waiting for the timers on their laptops to move through their standard processes. It brought the issue to our attention and gave us the opportunity to make fast changes and bring in new laptops for the team.”
“That’s important”, he added, “because for many employees, personal engagement tends to come from their own work, their boss and their outlook on their future. Engagement may resonate across the business but it also resonates at a personal level.”