When Dr. Bob Randall founded Transcend Engagement over five years ago, he saw an opportunity to disrupt the employee engagement field by creating a platform and methodology to demonstrate a bottom-line impact. Today, he sees more interest in strategy and analytics than ever and has added a full suite of advisory services to provide clients a complete, measurable employee engagement solution.
Dr. Randall is one of the few executives in the engagement business who did not come out of the rewards, recognition, or incentive business. Before launching Transcend, Randall held senior management positions in sales, manufacturing and business development for over 20 years. He is also Assistant Professor of Management for the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN.
"The concept of the Transcend Engagement technology came out of my research on employee engagement,” explains Randall. “From both research and experience, it became clear to me that what organizations lacked was a clear strategy for employee engagement designed to help achieve goals in a measurable way. It became clear that technology would make it easier for organizations to better align all of the ways they engage people to achieve better results."
An Integrated Approach
The Transcend Engagement SaaS-based platform is designed to make it easy for organizations to provide a complete a la carte suite of engagement solutions designed to engage, equip, and inspire employees, including:
- Communication to regularly update the team on critical information.
- Surveys to monitor and act upon employee sentiment.
- Feedback systems making it easy for employees to contribute constructive ideas.
- Recognition to promote and support organizational values and goals, not simply length of service.
- Social connection to develop team spirit.
- Supervisor relationships—identifying and addressing the effectiveness of managers.
- Employee development—creating feedback loops with an emphasis on skill development.
- Analytics—the ability to track and compare employee involvement and program effectiveness.
The platform also supports rewards and recognition, company stores, and surprise-and-delight programs using tangible rewards to further enhance emotional connections, Randall says.
"Research shows that when properly used, carefully selected tangible rewards properly presented can have a measurable effect on someone’s commitment to an organization and their willingness to engage and to refer key stakeholders."
Randall explains that the easy-to-implement platform enables almost any size company to integrate all their employee engagement tools into a single application, tracking engagement of employees in real time based on their behaviors across all the tactics designed to engage them.
Beyond Rewards to Performance
Until recently, Randall observes, most organizations purchased employee engagement software as a means of updating the traditional length-of-service experience for which little reporting was demanded. Today, he says, there’s much more interest in using employee engagement strategies and tactics to support the culture and the brand.
"Companies are asking a lot more questions than they used to about how they can use our expertise, technology and processes to improve the ROI of their programs."
Unlike many companies offering employee engagement technologies, Randall observes, Transcend offers additional advisory services, including:
Program design. For clients serious about program design and measurement, Randall says Transcend’s advisory service provides a systematic approach to designing programs based on evaluating organizational or departmental goals, the audiences involved, and the best ways to achieve the goals in a measurable way with a return-on-investment.
Employee development.Randall reports that Transcend offers multiple employee development programs led by highly trained coaches to address:
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
- Team Effectiveness
- Leadership Development
"The company's approach to employee development identifies and supports areas where the manager or employee can continue to learn, develop and improve," Randall notes. "Visual dashboards help employees know where they stand and where they can improve."
Performance management. Most performance management systems demotivate people because assessments are infrequent, top-down, and cumbersome, Randall observes. His company’s approach is “easily configurable to your culture and includes regular check-ins with managers to create more trust and alignment. Gen Z and Millennials want more feedback and coaching from their boss—so we built a platform to promote and track this activity."
The process, he says, is partly self-managed by employees, which "helps them maintain accountability and a sense of ownership over their performance and development in a way that enhances engagement and increases the chances of achieving or exceeding goals."
Transcend's technology was recently recognized by Adobe as a leading SaaS innovator on their Cold Fusion platform. "We have married up best-in-class technology with proven organization development principles and now seeing measurable results with our clients," says Randall. "When employees are engaged, everyone wins, and it is our mission to make that happen."
For More Information
Bob Randall, Founder
transcendengagement.com
612-804-0862
Bob@transcendengagement.com