Hive launches new training initiative to give businesses skills and confidence to drive employee engagement

Hive working alongside Thirteen Group, AVEVA and InsureTheBox

Employee engagement software startup, Hive HR, has launched a new coaching and training offering, in response to growing demand from organisations looking to implement employee engagement for the first time or to get more out of existing engagement programmes, but lack the necessary support.

Hive, which launched in 2015, has also appointed Lisette Nicholson as Employee Engagement Coach to run the new initiative, and has already held a number of of training days and facilitation workshops with customers, including Thirteen Group (a large housing association), AVEVA and InsureTheBox.

“As a company that helps organisations understand, measure and improve employee engagement, it made sense for us to offer a support network to help them through the process,” says Lisette Nicholson, Employee Engagement Coach, Hive. “We work with HR professionals who are hugely experienced in terms of organisational and people development, but often lack the specific skills or confidence to drive employee engagement throughout the business.
They may have had an experience already or dipped their toe in the water in terms of engagement, but not got the results they wanted or faced certain challenges. Our job is to go in and do a mixture of coaching, guiding and facilitating, as well as provide support where it’s needed.”

As part of the new initiative, Hive will offer clients bespoke training and coaching, either working one to one with a project lead, such as an HR manager, or go in and train a whole HR team so they can then train other managers within the organisation. The company’s USP is its ability to create affordable, tailored sessions that can deliver exactly what the business needs, regardless of size, organisational structure or number of employees.
The sessions will focus on strategic challenges like how to embed employee engagement within the culture of an organisation and getting buy-in from the top down, as well as how to build employee engagement into an overall people strategy and how to measure the impact. Hive, which develops an always-on approach to employee engagement though automated micro surveys, will also advise on developing the right questions to ask employees to ensure managers get the right feedback at the right time.

John Ryder, Founder and CEO of Hive, adds: “We speak to companies every day who know they need to change the way they are doing things, but either lack the experience, the knowledge or the confidence to start. Many are stuck in the past, wedded to the annual employee review, which is both time consuming and unpopular, especially among younger people. We need to move on from this ‘rear view mirror’ approach and focus on real-time feedback that delivers value for the employee and the business. With Lisette on board to drive this new initiative, we feel we can offer a more consultative approach that will help businesses makes those changes.”

With a broad range of experience in leadership development, culture, employee engagement, learning and coaching, Lisette joined Hive in 2016.
Prior to Hive, she was at Gentoo Group for 13 years, most recently as Assistant Director, responsible for developing and delivering the Group’s People Strategy, leading on culture, employee engagement, leadership, management, talent development and transformational people change. Lisette also worked in staff training and employee development at Newcastle City Council and Middlesbrough Council.

While employee engagement is growing in popularity in this country, the UK still has a deficit, with just one in three employees engaged in their jobs, and now ranks at the bottom of the G7 countries in terms of productivity per head.

About Hive:
Hive is a highly flexible, agile and scalable cloud-based solution that provides an always-on approach to understanding, measuring and improving employee engagement within an organisation. It is the first product to be launched out of Visualsoft’s Innovation Lab, the incubator department of the award-winning software company based in the North East.

Founded in 2015 by the Head of Innovation at Visualsoft, John Ryder and supported by an experienced advisory board, comprising members of Visualsoft and other business leaders, Hive successfully raised £300,000 during a funding round on equity crowdfunding and co-investment platform, GrowthFunders, via a mix of retail, professional and institutional investors.

Web: https://www.hive.hr
Twitter: @hive_hr
Facebook: @Hiveapp
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hive-hr

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