IBM, Armonk, New York, USA: Become Your Best Self: Helping IBMers to make the best of out of 2021

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In 2021 February we have launched a new engagement program, Become Your Best Self. Its aim was to help our employees to learn new things, pursue their dreams and boost them up with energy after 1 year of challenging period due to pandemic and being at home office. In 2020 our program was focusing on Mental and Physical health after the pandemic hit us. Sadly, the virus stayed longer than expected and changed our lives completely. Our homes became our offices, we had hardly ever met our colleagues face to face, all our sessions and everyday meetings moved to the online zone. By the end of 2020 we all got completely exhausted. For 2021, we wanted to have a fresh start and give our people opportunities not just to improve the skills needed for their everyday work but to give them a variety of possibilities to improve & energize themselves in other areas as well. We wanted to help them to re-charge. Our goal was to give broader development opportunities, bringing in outside of work topics helping employees skill development as well as to complete their 40 hours yearly learning target and acquiring new certifications (internal badges).

The program was designed as a combination of 30-45 minutes knowledge sharing sessions and 30 minutes TED Talk sessions. Based on experience, we decided not record TED Talks as we wanted to create a safe and intimate environment where employees could share their thoughts, which really made it a success. Being isolated for a while and brining in out of work topics helped a lot to colleagues to open up. We have also kicked off: a sport challenge, for which a great teaser video and best performer medals were created and a non-governmental collaboration project where participants could practice project management and design thinking skills that usually they are not able to during their normal work.

With more than 1700+ attendees this was a significant employee engagement program. Besides increasing the total learning hours (137,651 in 2021 -18% completed via the Become Your Best Self Program), it also helped employees to learn new skills and complete their yearly learning target. 86% of our population reached the 40 hours milestone. We also had an increase in number of badges achieved per employee, which increased from 0.87 to 0.89 in 2021. As the essence of the program, we also wanted to motivate our employees to change their lifestyles, try to give them motivation to leave their computers for a while and re-charge themselves. For this reason, we brought to life the Move Around the Globe Challenge. Our intention was to motivate them to do some outside activities, embedded into a virtual tour around the World as we did not have the chance to travel in real life. As a joint effort, our colleagues have collected 13,000+ km with running, walking, and biking during the year and we were motivating participants with best performer medals and the most dedicated ones participating during the whole year received a company branded package of products. Our company engagement index increased with +0.2 and attrition rate decreased by -4% YTY.