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.

Real time results are published through dashboards and metrics for executives. “Essentially, we help companies capture their employees’ voice more effectively and at the same time modernize their performance management strategies,” adds Sandhir.

We built a people platform that drives real time engagement and obtains continuous feedback from employees that transforms the way companies engage and develop talent

HighGround has made an indelible mark in the world of business application by delivering efficient solutions and helping customers create greater value. In an implementation highlight, a logistics company with over 2000 employees had no holistic engagement strategy before approaching HighGround. Most of the client’s workforce celebrations and recognitions were happening offline, which was indirectly retracting the productivity of the organization. After deploying the cloud platform of HighGround, with a joint strategy, the company could increase the number of interactions by more than 4000 within a month and those interactions are directly correlated with the vision and values of the company. The client’s engagement score also improved significantly within a year.

HighGround has been transforming the way companies engage and develop their employees. The firm’s cloud plat¬form gives a holistic view of the employee engagement within an organization. The platform also helps companies to establish a fully motivated workforce that performs at the highest level. “Most of our competitors use disparate technology, whereas we give a single unified platform that helps our customers build cultures,” said Sandhir.

Looking ahead into the future, HighGround is developing their current platform to further integration efforts with all top computing systems in the coming years. “We also look forward to build an extensive partnership with companies, giving all levels of support for a change management and talent development strategies quickly and efficiently,” concludes Sandhir.