Improving team culture in a challenging environment
“Partnering with Mo is one of the best decisions we’ve made. Mo has helped our team to build a consistent habit of peer-to-peer recognition.”
Alex Goodanew, Comms and Engagement Lead, OVO Energy
Overview
We spoke with Alex, Internal Comms and Engagement lead at OVO Energy to find out how his team has been using Mo.
Alex’s responsibility is to build and deliver the engagement roadmap in the Operations departments at OVO, and ultimately make sure that OVO employees in the Energy Operations department are happy. This has proven tricky recently after OVO bought over SSE in 2021, meaning that teams are still integrating, coupled with a large number of employees going through redundancies in the coming months.
Mo has enabled Alex to save a huge amount of time, empower employees to easily redeem rewards, and bring a disparate team together in a challenging environment.
Background
The merger with SSE meant that teams are more separated geographically. With people scattered all over the UK, the vast majority of the 750 people in Energy Operations have never met each other.
In addition, the two companies had different brand identities and loyalties.
Add on 40% redundancies and a pandemic where everyone was working from home, and you have a situation where morale was running low and emotions were running high.
With a large demographic of people who know they’re leaving the business, understandably there are frustrations.
“I’m trying to manage that attitude, create positivity, and make OVO a good place to work.”
Prior to Mo, Alex had a very manual rewards and recognition system in place. It used a combination of Google sheets, Google forms, and his own personal credit card (which often got blocked due to so many transactions) on Amazon. It could easily go wrong, and it was very clunky and time consuming.
The problem was that no one really spent the credit that they’d built up, because they didn’t have an effective tool to purchase things. As a result, the rewards and recognition system wasn’t delivering fully.
It also took Alex far too much time to sort out rewards – having to manually ask each employee for their address and process each order individually.
When the company looked into Mo, it was a breath of fresh air for Alex.
50%
80%
8%
Results
With Mo, the Energy Operations team now has a feed of recognition Moments shared, which improves the team’s overall culture.
“Everything I’m trying to do is around building culture. You can see positivity oozing through the feed. We want people to feel that that’s what it’s like to work for Energy Operations.”
Now with Mo, Alex doesn’t have to request each individual employee’s address in order to reward them.
Prior to Mo, Alex found R&R a battle to get done, and would almost limit what he was doing in order to keep up with the work. With Mo, Alex spends so much less time on delivering the R&R program, that he can expand it out and offer more initiatives.
“My life is so much easier. All the things I was struggling to keep up with before, I can now do effortlessly. So now I can do a lot more than I could before.”
One thing that Alex has started doing with Mo is regular ‘Village Hall’ meetings, with awards, raffles, and lucky dip prizes. He was able to give out a full day’s worth of gifts to 50 people in just 30 minutes from the last Village Hall meeting. The same thing using the process before would have taken days of work.
Another benefit of Mo is the reporting.
“It’s made it really easy for me to track all the information that I need to track.”
Alex can now see the way that total budget is being allocated, how much each department has spent, and overall usage year to date. Reporting is now a breeze.
“My life is so much easier. All the things I was struggling to keep up with before, I can now do effortlessly. So now I can do a lot more than I could before.”
Alex Goodanew, Comms and Engagement Lead, OVO Energy
What Mo users at OVO have to say
“Mo allows me to show gratitude to my colleagues in a place where others will also be able to see how helpful they have been. It’s an excellent incentive for people to work hard.”
“Superb rewards system. The entire system is simple, intuitive and a breeze to use. The user interface with gifs and emojis enables a more personable touch, which just makes me want to use it all the time!”
“It’s great being able to recognise colleagues and pass on appreciation through Mo. It’s a great way of spreading the love and reinforcing collaborative behaviours.”
