How Moxa uses recognition to enhance employee engagement

Moxa is a leader in edge connectivity, industrial computing, and network infrastructure solutions for enabling connectivity for the Industrial Internet of Things. With over 35 years of industry experience, Moxa has connected more than 94 million devices worldwide and has a distribution and service network to serve customers in more than 85 countries. But when it came to their team, Moxa knew that connection was just as essential.

Moxa’s culture shift leads to global recognition

To strengthen their global team, Moxa partnered with Achievers to launch Bravo — a recognition platform that transformed their employee experience, empowered managers, and celebrated the behaviours that foster connection, purpose, and belonging. In just two weeks, they exceeded their activation goals, creating a more engaged and connected workforce.

Achievers 50 Most Engaged Workplaces

Workplace engagement means employees care about the future of the company and are willing to invest the discretionary effort to see that the organization succeeds. The Achievers 50 Most Engaged Workplaces® Awards recognises top employers that display leadership and innovation in engaging their workplaces. Employee engagement is how each employee connects with one’s company and its customers.

The Achievers 50 Most Engaged Workplaces® Awards were reviewed by an esteemed panel of judges comprised of industry experts and thought leaders who reviewed anonymized submissions in a rigorous assessment. As the highest honor within the awards program, the Elite 8 accolade is granted to companies that most exemplify one of Achievers’ Eight Elements of Employee Engagement® used to evaluate the most engaged workplaces: Accountability & Performance, Belonging, Equity & Inclusion, Culture Alignment, Manager Empowerment, Professional & Personal Growth, Purpose & Leadership, Recognition & Rewards, and Well-being.

Moxa participated in the awards and not only emerged as a winner for Accountability & Performance, but was also featured in the Elite 8 that included the likes of General Motors, Cadillac Fairview Corporation, Zurich North America, Lloyd’s banking group, Telus, Meijer, and Air Canada. Moxa was recognised for its demonstrated leadership in leveraging innovative employee engagement and recognition tactics and for always ensuring that employee experience stayed as a top priority.

Some of the key areas where Moxa stood out include:

Culture alignment

Moxa’s culture is the key foundation that serves as a critical element for organizational sustainability. Their dedicated “Corporate Culture Team” has a major focus on supporting and creating employee experiences through culture activities.

Culture activities include:

• Global Annual Culture Award

• Company Run

• Olympic sporting program, year-end party, it serves as platform to express their culture of “work hard, play hard”.

Manager empowerment

This is key to Moxa’s people success as employees spend most of their time with managers. As a company that values people and people engagement, Moxa has developed a structured six month training program for new managers whilst providing on the job learning opportunities for existing managers.

The recognition platform ‘Bravo’ is an important tool that managers leverage in motivating their teams. Social/points-based recognition can be easily distributed in addition to their existing corporate awards to recognise the contribution of employees (e.g., RD award, Culture spirit award, Sales Award).

Impact on diversity, equity, and inclusion

Practicing diversity, equity, and inclusion are the backbone that define one of Moxa’s core values of ‘mutual respect’ and play a massive role in cultivating diversity and a sense of belonging. All employees receive one full day of training along with case study resources and training aids to further ingrain DEI related values.

Moxa wanted to create a culture that was centered around its people and built on a foundation of peer-to-peer recognition and connection. With the launch of Bravo, they were able to link DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) topics addressing key issues related to gender empowerment and employee well-being.

Purpose and leadership

Leaders at Moxa use townhalls and the Bravo platform to connect with employees, recognise their behaviours and build a sense of connection, purpose, and belonging. Employees are encouraged to take leadership roles in key company initiatives via participation in various in-house company clubs and cultural events like Trans Alps Cycling, Family Day, Year-end Party, Annual company run, etc. Employee Feedback captured from these events reflects the strong sense of connection and belonging that employees feel with the company culture through their frequent participation and recognition of their efforts during these events. These events also provided Moxa a platform for cross departmental collaboration and relationship nurturing whilst contributing proactively apart from functional duties.

Moxa believes that these events are well aligned with their people sustainability strategy of growing people from within and aspire to bring visibility to those who silently contribute and create a virtuous cycle. They set themselves a target of filling 80% of the roles through internal recruitment within the five years.

Recognition and rewards

Business challenge

As an employee centric organization, people connection and collaboration to strive for a team-oriented environment has been key to Moxa. With the pandemic (COVID-19) that deprived people from human connection, Moxa needed to create new ways for employees to be known, seen, and heard. They needed an environment where employees could say “Thank you” and recognise each other instantaneously.

The Achievers employee recognition solution stood out thanks to its superior mobile applications and ability to integrate with many of the company’s existing workplace applications including Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Outlook. Moxa launched their peer-to-peer recognition program ‘Bravo’ with a focus on recognizing the journey and rewarding the outcomes.

Moxa wanted to foster an environment where all employees could be involved and have an equal role in driving and promoting meaningful recognition. Their main goal with the recognition platform was to provide an instantaneous way for employees to spread positivity, recognise, and empower colleagues.

Business impact

By implementing the Achievers recognition solution, Moxa has been able to closely align their employee recognition and rewards program with their values, resulting in a fun, engaging, and connected workplace.

Since rolling out the program, the overall feedback and communication associated with it have delivered tangible results with steady growth in activation and usage. In addition, the regular catchups with the Achievers team on understanding the analytics and refining what success looks like through timely interventions and communication campaigns have also been very well received.

Key statistics

• 90.8% user activation within 2 weeks of launch
• 4,000+ peer-to-peer recognitions were recorded in the first month and helped spread positivity in the workplace.

The launch of Bravo had the backing of the company Board of Directors. They saw the program fostering a strong sense of belonging amongst employees. The post-launch employee response has been very encouraging and positive. The combination of social recognition coupled with points-based recognition was very well received by employees.

A total of six recognition descriptors were designed:

• Reliable partner
• Hardworking
• Awesome improvement
• Great Idea
• Positive energy
• Super team player

Employees could connect with each other and say thanks, celebrate anniversaries and applaud positive behaviours using attractive GIFs, downloadable service milestone certificates, and customized celebrations cards. Employees were awarded 1500 points renewable monthly to participate and accelerate recognition activity. The Bravo Platform was designed to make it easy to provide real-time recognition contributing to employee well-being.

From the enthusiastic employee participation and key results, it has started to create an engaging and positive working atmosphere.

What’s next?

Moxa has committed a dedicated HR BRAVO team for the long-term sustainability of the platform. Moxa is rolling out the program globally and will also leverage the platform to promote key employee engagement topics that include diversity, inclusion, and well-being.