Our Story... so far
The Problem
One of our best technicians was close to quitting. She was finding it unbearable working for her direct manager, to the point where it was drastically affecting her home life and her overall well-being. Her work quality was suffering as a result and her manager was making complaints to Human Resources with the intention of replacing her. We suggested to her that she speak to HR herself, but her response was that it would only make the situation worse - and she was probably right. She was relatively junior and felt none of the instances would be believed, nor were they individually so serious to make a formal compliant. She felt that the only solution was to resign, which she did a few months later.
We learned that this manager had a history of these instances going back several years, but that none had ever been reported. However, from talking to him, he seemed oblivious to the effect he was having on some of the staff. His view was that he was "tough but fair".
The Solution
It seemed to us that with advances in technology, there had to be a better way to improve the way we work together. A way to give staff a voice without having to take the leap of a formal complaint and a way for us all to be gently made more aware of how our attitudes and actions are affecting each other. We knew that with the growing importance of team-working, engagement and shifting workplace demographics, the traditional performance reviews, 360 reviews and "open door policies" were not enough.
We aimed to build an App that all employees would want to use, to give both positive and negative feedback to each other in a non-confrontational way, not just eliminating bullying but improving and encouraging emotional intelligence of all staff through raising self-awareness. We designed the system around our 5 Emotional Intelligence core values of Trust, Appreciation, Motivation, Teamwork and Positivity. As well as being fun, we set an objective for it be quick, simple, anonymous (to the person given feedback) and for the gift of feedback to be available wherever and whenever by whoever to whoever. Also as managers, we appreciated that the system must be simple to implement and be highly efficient and cost-effective.
The Recognition
We initially trialed Sentemeter in Media One Hotel, Dubai in early 2018. Within weeks engagement was such that that we were getting several thousand feedbacks from staff every day. To be able to handle this and produce easy and quick but incisive analytics for HR we built a fully-integrated, real-time analytics platform available not only on PC but also embedded into the App. We believe this analytics capability is essential for effective governance and is core to Sentemeter's success.
In our first year we were shortlisted for HR Technology Provider of the Year at the Middle East HR Summit Future Workplace Awards and won the Award for Best Start Up. In 2019 we went even better and won the HR Technology Provider of the Year Award due to our innovation and expansion in the region.
Since then, we have added additional functionality in Sentegram (sending positive messages to your colleagues), Sentepede (Voting for your colleague of the month). We have also built a bespoke option where partners can adapt Sentemeter to incorporate their own established core values (up to a maximum of 7). Sentesurvey gives you the ability to send out questionnaires within the App and see real-time responses on your dashboards.
The Future
In 2020 we were excited to have launched internationally. We would love to hear from you wherever you may be and however large or small your organisation.
We believe that this is just the beginning of our story so if you would like to be part of it, please contact us below.