HackaVoice: Why and how we launched an Employee Engagement Hackathon?

Last April, for the first time at Axway, we launched an Employee Engagement Hackathon. In the past few years, many successful hackathons took place at Axway to build new or improve existing customer or technical solutions.

We wanted to leverage these experiences for the benefit of our own employees and see how they can work again together and propose a collective solution to make Axway a better place to work.

Measuring employee engagement

Employee engagement is very important at Axway. We have been measuring it for the past four years through the Axway Voice Survey (AVS).

Every year since 2016, all Griffins are invited to share their feedback by answering anonymously the 43 same questions since the beginning of the AVS.

Two important metrics that we follow are:

1. The participation rate and the engagement score. The participation rate allows us to understand how representative the feedback is, whereas the engagement score is linked to employee retention, customer satisfaction, vision, management, leadership, and benefits.
2. We also measured different factors such as collaboration, pride confidence, communication, and more. After each edition, different areas for improvement were identified by the Executive team.

In the past, different focus groups were created, and Griffins volunteered to participate in one of them.

Rely on Griffins’ creativity to make Axway the place we want to be

After the AVS 2020, we aimed at enhancing a more inclusive approach. We decided to embark with the Griffins on a unique journey with the HackaVoice: the first Employee Engagement Hackathon, under the direct sponsorship of the Executive Committee.

The goal was to give Griffins from all over the world the opportunity to join and propose an initiative to help make Axway a company we all want to work for.

Through our past hackathons’ experiences, we knew how ingenious, team-focused, and collaborative that our Griffins are in this field. We also knew that they would imagine ideas that will have a positive impact on all of us.

85 Griffins participated: 22 initiatives — five topics, three winners

We were pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm of our teams. When we launched the registrations, we didn’t expect to have 85 Griffins volunteer and create 22 different teams to propose a solution under one out of five identified topics by AVS 2020.

The Executive team took an active role and each of the topics has an Executive Sponsor but also a People & Culture Sponsor.

On April 8th, all teams connected and started brainstorming and building ideas. Each team had 36 hours to find an idea and propose a new initiative.

As a company with employees in 17 countries, we had participants from APAC, LATAM, United States, and Europe, and we had to juggle between different time zones.

On April 8th, we started at 8 am CET and we finished on April 9th at 6 pm MST.

Once the projects were submitted, each team could pitch and defend their ideas in front of the first jury, including the executive and P&C sponsors, other P&C team members, and our country AVS leaders.

The first-level jury selected the best initiatives to be presented live to the final jury, including the Executive Team and the People and Culture sponsors.

At the end of this journey, we chose three winning initiatives that convinced us of their short-term feasibility and the high-positive impact they can have on Griffins.

All the other proposals were great, and we shared them with the broader audience so they can be also considered later.

The three initiatives that we selected are currently in progress and focus on the company vision, mentorship, and careers.

While this is the first experience in this digital format, it was a fantastic way to engage employees to be creators of their own life at Axway.

We are very proud of all the creativity we witnessed, and we cannot wait to see all the initiatives live and the outcomes for all our Griffins.