‍Soham Desai is the Senior Executive, Corporate HR at KPIT Technologies, responsible for handling organizational development initiatives and interventions. He drives all key employee engagement initiatives at KPIT and focuses heavily on improving employee performance management, promotions, rewards, and recognition.

Physical gifting for rewards
The previous rewards program at KPIT was limited to disbursing physical gifts. These rewards made the R&R programs vulnerable to multiple issues that negatively impacted the employee rewards experience.

Hassles in delivery of employee rewards
The previous rewards platform vendor had tie-ups with local vendors to procure physical gifts and deliver them to employees' homes. The use of physical rewards meant that they were frequently prone to damage during transportation. And when KPIT reached out to the rewards vendor to address these concerns or report the damages, the customer support wasn't responsive.

Employee dissatisfaction with rewards
The hassles in manually delivering the physical employee rewards and the poor customer support from the vendor created immense dissatisfaction amongst employees. Additionally, the employees weren't happy with the physical gifts they received so most of them stopped redeeming their points from the platform.

Overall inadequacy of the existing R&R platform
The existing R&R platform was not robust. And the platform interface was not user-friendly, resulting in a poor user experience. The platform did not have nudges for prompting employees or admins to have multiple essential touchpoints in the rewards process.

"Even though several employees had 3000+ points in their account, they would not redeem these points for rewards, since they felt that the rewards listed for redemption were not providing value for money" - Soham Desai, Senior Executive, Corporate HR, KPIT Technologies.

Employee R&R made easy with Empuls
The first action that KPIT undertook was to tie up with a company that provides the best-in-class gifts as e-vouchers. KPIT's previous association with Xoxoday for long service awards and the HR team's happiness with the services availed led them to explore Empuls as a potential platform for implementing their R&R. A user-friendly and robust solution coupled with an extensive redemption catalog containing close to 20,000+ rewards options, Empuls seemed to be the perfect solution to solve all their R&R woes.

Employee Satisfaction (ESAT) survey
Every year KPIT runs an ESAT survey, an employee satisfaction survey, around October to capture employee pulse and feedback on every process across departments. The survey assessed multiple topics ranging from HR connect to the quality of internal systems built by IT, employee training, and R&R.

Need for a Robust R&R Platform
The R&R assessment historically showed low ESAT scores for KPIT due to the inefficiency of their previous platform. With issues such as lack of robustness, no nudges, and no groups leading to low ESAT scores, the company was looking to launch new R&R initiatives to improve this score. One such initiative was to build a "culture of excellence" to acknowledge employees' efforts and celebrate their contributions. And a robust Employee R&R platform would be the perfect way to help drive this culture.‍

Building a “Culture of Excellence” with Empuls
Unlike the previous platform, Empuls turned out to be the perfect platform to drive KPIT's "Building a Culture of Excellence" initiative. With Empuls Nudges, employees are notified whenever their peers receive appreciation. The platform prompts peers to visit the appreciation post on Empuls and congratulate those who received appreciation.

A truly “Social” Recognition experience
With Empuls Townhall Groups, these recognition instances are visible to every employee in the organization. These groups were a massive leap from earlier avenues for appreciation wherein recognition was contained between the manager and the employee receiving it. Empuls's Social Recognition bridged the gaps in an otherwise siloed way of delivering employee R&R.

The global rollout of R&R
Although KPIT is mainly in Bangalore, Chennai, and Pune, they also have a strong presence in the US, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Thailand. A global catalog of e-vouchers on Empuls and redemption in multiple currencies helped KPIT immensely with the geographical scalability of their R&R program and the culture of excellence initiative.

Running ESAT surveys on Empuls
Before Empuls, KPIT ran all ESAT surveys on Google Forms. As Empuls also has survey capabilities, with multiple survey templates for seeking feedback across the employee lifecycle,  KPIT started to run all ESAT surveys on Empuls since the beginning of 2021. The success of HRBPs and employees across the globe with other Empuls Surveys gave KPIT the additional confidence to shift their critical annual survey - ESAT - to the Empuls platform.

An increase in rewards budget
The previous budgets for awards at KPIT would range from 15 to 20 lakhs per quarter. This number has now increased to nearly 45 lakhs per quarter. Due to the seamless experience provided by Empuls for R&R, managers now have higher budgets for employee rewards. They are also encouraged to give more awards to their teams to foster a culture of appreciation.

Appreciating small wins
Implementing the Empuls R&R platform led to the birth of a culture of appreciating small wins building stronger connections with peers. The KPIT team tracks the appreciations on Empuls every month, and they are noticing a massive increase in the overall number of peer-to-peer appreciations.

In more ways than one, the use of Empuls at KPIT has laid a solid foundation for building and sustaining the culture of employee excellence.

‍Soham Desai is the Senior Executive, Corporate HR at KPIT Technologies, responsible for handling organizational development initiatives and interventions. He drives all key employee engagement initiatives at KPIT and focuses heavily on improving employee performance management, promotions, rewards, and recognition.

Physical gifting for rewards
The previous rewards program at KPIT was limited to disbursing physical gifts. These rewards made the R&R programs vulnerable to multiple issues that negatively impacted the employee rewards experience.

Hassles in delivery of employee rewards
The previous rewards platform vendor had tie-ups with local vendors to procure physical gifts and deliver them to employees' homes. The use of physical rewards meant that they were frequently prone to damage during transportation. And when KPIT reached out to the rewards vendor to address these concerns or report the damages, the customer support wasn't responsive.

Employee dissatisfaction with rewards
The hassles in manually delivering the physical employee rewards and the poor customer support from the vendor created immense dissatisfaction amongst employees. Additionally, the employees weren't happy with the physical gifts they received so most of them stopped redeeming their points from the platform.

Overall inadequacy of the existing R&R platform
The existing R&R platform was not robust. And the platform interface was not user-friendly, resulting in a poor user experience. The platform did not have nudges for prompting employees or admins to have multiple essential touchpoints in the rewards process.

"Even though several employees had 3000+ points in their account, they would not redeem these points for rewards, since they felt that the rewards listed for redemption were not providing value for money" - Soham Desai, Senior Executive, Corporate HR, KPIT Technologies.

Employee R&R made easy with Empuls
The first action that KPIT undertook was to tie up with a company that provides the best-in-class gifts as e-vouchers. KPIT's previous association with Xoxoday for long service awards and the HR team's happiness with the services availed led them to explore Empuls as a potential platform for implementing their R&R. A user-friendly and robust solution coupled with an extensive redemption catalog containing close to 20,000+ rewards options, Empuls seemed to be the perfect solution to solve all their R&R woes.

Employee Satisfaction (ESAT) survey
Every year KPIT runs an ESAT survey, an employee satisfaction survey, around October to capture employee pulse and feedback on every process across departments. The survey assessed multiple topics ranging from HR connect to the quality of internal systems built by IT, employee training, and R&R.

Need for a Robust R&R Platform
The R&R assessment historically showed low ESAT scores for KPIT due to the inefficiency of their previous platform. With issues such as lack of robustness, no nudges, and no groups leading to low ESAT scores, the company was looking to launch new R&R initiatives to improve this score. One such initiative was to build a "culture of excellence" to acknowledge employees' efforts and celebrate their contributions. And a robust Employee R&R platform would be the perfect way to help drive this culture.‍

Building a “Culture of Excellence” with Empuls
Unlike the previous platform, Empuls turned out to be the perfect platform to drive KPIT's "Building a Culture of Excellence" initiative. With Empuls Nudges, employees are notified whenever their peers receive appreciation. The platform prompts peers to visit the appreciation post on Empuls and congratulate those who received appreciation.

A truly “Social” Recognition experience
With Empuls Townhall Groups, these recognition instances are visible to every employee in the organization. These groups were a massive leap from earlier avenues for appreciation wherein recognition was contained between the manager and the employee receiving it. Empuls's Social Recognition bridged the gaps in an otherwise siloed way of delivering employee R&R.

The global rollout of R&R
Although KPIT is mainly in Bangalore, Chennai, and Pune, they also have a strong presence in the US, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Thailand. A global catalog of e-vouchers on Empuls and redemption in multiple currencies helped KPIT immensely with the geographical scalability of their R&R program and the culture of excellence initiative.

Running ESAT surveys on Empuls
Before Empuls, KPIT ran all ESAT surveys on Google Forms. As Empuls also has survey capabilities, with multiple survey templates for seeking feedback across the employee lifecycle,  KPIT started to run all ESAT surveys on Empuls since the beginning of 2021. The success of HRBPs and employees across the globe with other Empuls Surveys gave KPIT the additional confidence to shift their critical annual survey - ESAT - to the Empuls platform.

An increase in rewards budget
The previous budgets for awards at KPIT would range from 15 to 20 lakhs per quarter. This number has now increased to nearly 45 lakhs per quarter. Due to the seamless experience provided by Empuls for R&R, managers now have higher budgets for employee rewards. They are also encouraged to give more awards to their teams to foster a culture of appreciation.

Appreciating small wins
Implementing the Empuls R&R platform led to the birth of a culture of appreciating small wins building stronger connections with peers. The KPIT team tracks the appreciations on Empuls every month, and they are noticing a massive increase in the overall number of peer-to-peer appreciations.

In more ways than one, the use of Empuls at KPIT has laid a solid foundation for building and sustaining the culture of employee excellence.