HighGround: Bringing Transparency through Employee Engagement

Employee engagement can be critically important to competitiveness in the contemporary business environment. Organizations should create a culture defined by meaningful work, deep employee engagement, job and organizational fit, are now business issues, not just Human Resource (HR) management challenges. Taking a step ahead in the HR market is HighGround, headquartered in Chicago, IL. “We find employees are lacking a voice in their work environment. This is primarily because traditional HR applications are focused on administration, rather than their people,” says Vip Sandhir, Founder and CEO of HighGround. According to Sandhir, the traditional system is centered on annual performance, review, and annual employee survey, which challenges the core idea of transparency within an organization. “Today, information is consumed in real time and employees, particularly, want to be connected incessantly with the core mission of the organization and believe they are doing meaningful work,” reasons Sandhir.

The revelation that there was no supporting technology to assist companies with people problems and build cultures, led Sandhir to devise a solution. “We have built a people platform that drives real time engagement and encourages continuous feedback to and from employees that transforms the way companies engage and develop talent,” states Sandhir. The platform which is cloud enabled offers pre-built integration solutions and connectors. Employees and managers can interact with HighGround through the apps and systems they already use in their normal day-to-day operations, such as CRM, collaboration and social applications.

The cloud platform helps companies largely do three key functions that support engagement, including:
1. Enabling top-down and peer-to-peer recognition in real-time, the cloud platform highlights individual and team achievements, customizes awards, and reinforces core value across the organization. Through the platform, employees also have the opportunity to choose rewards that are relevant to them, including non-monetary, monetary and creative cultural rewards.

2. The platform also encourages ongoing coaching and feedback sessions between and employee and manager and track that in a way that when it is time for the annual performance review, the employee can quickly access a “report card” of their work history over time, including recognitions received, goals achieved and coaching snapshots.

3. Additionally, benchmarking and pulse engagement surveys are enabled with a configurable feature that can manage and measure the data collected.