Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of the SPEAK|pr Podcast

Luke Fisher is the CEO and co-founder of Mo.Work, a platform for employee engagement and recognition. The brand itself is actually just two letters, 'Mo,' because it stands for 'moments.' They believe moments are at the core of building relationships and enhancing the productivity of a team. They focus on how the team is motivated and how they are brought together so that they are more productive and perform better for the organisation, because employees get much more from work if they're experiencing moments and having a great time with their colleagues.

As people transition to working remotely and not going back to the office, Mo's time has come, because people are lacking energy and a sense of connection. All of those little interactions in the day-to-day work life in which people learn are lost. Conversations are now so task-orientated online meeting are solely to discuss a certain agenda and then that's it, and so this is where Mo.Work comes in. At a practical level, it is a SaaS platform, which can be accessed on their website with a user account, on a mobile app, or integrated into a system like Slack. People can post and share experiences that matter to them, and these are the moments that are worth celebrating from one end of the employee lifecycle to the other. From the moment that you first get your job, the first day in the office, when you pass your probation, when you get promoted all the way through to when you leave, these are the things worth sharing. You can also link it to other things to elevate the moments like rewards or experiences you might want to make or improve, such as for someone delivering a significant contribution.

People in their personal lives are familiar with segmenting communication channels. In the same way that WhatsApp, Facebook, Microsoft Teams, Instagram, and other platforms serve different purposes, Mo is for those high quality moments that are much more emotional than functional. This is what sets them apart. The functionality is consistent, along with the posting and interaction, but more than that, there's this level reserved for high quality that creates distinction. The aim is to capture the memorable experiences, not the everyday interactions.

Recognition from the company to a member of the team is gratifying, as is recognition from team member to team member, and this is another big part of the company culture that's missing when people are working from home. Most leaders of an organisation don't see everything that happens, and so there's a visibility and context gap the larger a company gets in understanding how somebody is really contributing, and that contribution, often at a leadership level, will only be visible if it's related to a performance or strategic objective or an operational plan. However, there are a million things that people do each and every day that aren't captured in terms of a value contribution in those relatively fixed measures. Those contributions when somebody makes your day, helps you out, or puts in a little bit of effort to help you overcome a challenge feels good for them, but it also feels good for you and enables both of you to grow. Those interactions when working in a modern team aren't necessarily driven by the company, because it's a team of experts driven to achieve a goal in a different matrix-like structure compared to a command and control type of organisation.

In terms of the kind of companies that use Mo.Work, it's not so much about how big the company is but rather, how much care there is. If you are a people-orientated leader and you know that you can't do everything, therefore, to deliver the outcomes in which you aspire to achieve, other people have to help you get there and be compensated for their contribution, then Mo.Work is perfect for you. Complexity, scale, and multiple locations add to that difficulty, and undoubtedly, the larger a company is, the less awareness there probably is, or the more countries that you operate in, the harder it is to create that sense of connection, energy, and momentum within the company along with the atmosphere, the conditions, and the culture being one in which people thrive in. But with Mo.Work, their service works well internally regardless of company size.

As companies go global and have offices or even outsource teams in different countries with different languages, Mo works as a transnational, multilingual platform thanks to third party services that can access the codebase and do machine translation with a human check within weeks. Mo.Work uses Smartling which can translate 15 different languages. Mo.Work also helps companies with the ideation process. The key thing when it comes to employee engagement is that employees feel like they have a say. Most research talks about it in the context of employee voice, meaning these people have the opportunity to speak up in a safe space for them to share ideas and views on how to improve something through simple voting mechanisms like a thumbs up or thumbs down to give a sense of something's significance. Employees can layer on their comments and suggestions and let the idea evolve. A recent addition to their platform enables leaders to put forward specific challenges, so employees are encouraged to come up with ideas related to their challenges. It's a nice way to align top priorities and suggest improvements for the organisation.

Companies have become fairly savvy when it comes to employer brand, employee value proposition, and articulating what it means to be associated to the organisation. As much as you might design a beautifully-looking web page or as much as you might pen down the perfect words that summarise what it's like, there's nothing that represents the company better than the experiences that the people share, and there's nothing better than taking content which is being shared and celebrated by the people and bringing that to life and adding more credibility to the business.

People invest in this market for either moral improvement and investment or economic investment and economic gain. Many just want to create the environment for people to succeed and, therefore, don't seek to measure. Others aren't measuring because they're not commercially savvy enough to measure the impact, but the few that are measuring impact see results across what they call a value ladder. They'll get a level of sentiment improvement first, then see a level of reduced churn wherein staff are less likely to want to leave, and they will see improvements in employee engagement. They have countless examples of surveys conducted to measure the level of employee engagement or satisfaction, and the opportunity there is figuring out how to motivate people such that they become more productive and perform better. Proving that with confidence and good, solid attribution to productivity improvements is the challenge.

With their focus being meaning over money, they steer away from the traditional prize-type reward structure. To understand what's important to somebody comes down to individual circumstance. How something might be motivating and meaningful to one person might be very different to someone else, and they apply this to how people should be rewarded, because it should be about what matters to each one. An example of that might be the ability to take a day off or to take a course that gets that person accredited. These are means to creating a moment and elevating it with financial enablement from the company.

Their pricing plans are based on the number of people, and it's around the price of a cup of coffee (or less) per person, so it really is a low-cost solution for companies, which is why Mo.Work is used by companies like William Hill whom they work with across five countries and SHL, a company in the HR tech space, whom they work with in 25 countries around the world.

COVID has acted as a catalyst for many of the changes that were bound to happen in the workplace. Many people have been wanting to work flexibly, work for a company they care about, work for a company that makes good decisions and has values that they could stand by, and COVID has somehow let that come into fruition. The level of digital acceleration to support working from home means that all of these things have happened a lot faster than most people expected them to. This becomes the chance to help people find the right balance between productive work, collaborative work, and the level of social connection one gets from work. The opportunity depends on where these things wash out. Hopefully, this means that employees continue to work more flexibly in a way that allows them to make the best out of the work experience and see it much as a means to an opportunity rather than just a means to an end.

To learn more about this amazing service, visit Mo.Work's website. In summary, Mo.Work is a great platform for team engagement, which all businesses need, as evangelists of the business are one of the best ways to ensure productivity and get the desired alignment and results. For your staff, think about engaging them through Mo.Work.

This article is based on a transcript from my Podcast SPEAK|pr, you can listen here.

Photos from Mo.Work