Science can now help your workforce be happier and deliver better results
Less than 10% of South African employees are actually engaged at work! Silicon Valley start-up, Beaconforce, and a local consultancy, Singular Africa, have partnered up to change this — by fostering commitment, trust, and motivation from employees.
For several years, South Africa has been struggling with low economic growth that lies well below that of comparable countries. “Part of this problem is that people are not enabled to work at their peak performance, which means that existing skills and talents are not fully leveraged — let alone promoted,” says Singular Manager Anneline Basdeo.
The performance management consulting company Gallup, for example, reported that roughly 90% of South African staff in 2017 were shown to be disengaged at work, making it difficult for them to perform at their best. This has a domino effect, leading to companies having difficulty in finding a well-skilled workforce and achieving their goals.
Gallup also found that globally, disengagement at work led to an approximate $7 trillion annual loss in productivity. This loss may be compounded by the issue that the majority of companies experience problems with their strategy execution, as reported by Insead.
Simphiwe Mdakane, Senior Associate at Singular Africa, explains that there is a solution to these problems. “We see that companies with both a strategy-aligned culture and high engagement tend to perform better and retain young talent for longer.” This observation is in line with a Forbes report noting that companies with a strong corporate culture have higher employee engagement and up to four times higher revenue growth.
Singular Africa is proud to announce a collaboration with Beaconforce in launching a new product — an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based app — the first of its kind in Africa.
The product aims to achieve sustainable growth in South Africa by increasing trust within a company, creating stronger management teams, preventing burnout, and offering innovative interventions in the personal development space.
Singular’s Culturevate has already supported a number of South African organizations in adapting their corporate culture to match their organizational strategy. Beaconforce, a start-up from Silicon Valley, designed an AI-based app that allows managers to understand the intrinsic motivation of their staff in real-time and guides them to drive employee engagement. Beaconforce’s technology is based on cognitive science, neuroscience, game design and positive psychology all of which is implemented in the Singular Culturevate product.
This innovative collaboration tackles South African slow growth from two angles — solving culture-strategy misalignment as well as low employee engagement and motivation. “Our collaboration has successfully kicked-off with a number of South African mining organizations seeing the need to engage more with their staff,” Simphiwe Mdakane explains.
Anneline Basdeo adds, “with this partnership, we aim to introduce 4.0 technology to the South African workforce and lay the foundation for a new era of high leadership EQ.” She further states that together Singular Culturevate and Beaconforce want to contribute to making the world of work more people-centric and to create a professional environment in which people are challenged according to their skills — making work “hard fun”.
Christian Zoli, Co-Founder of Beaconforce, concludes, “we believe the combination of our trusted products have been proven to be successful in several industries, geographical regions, and cultural environments. We will contribute to growing the South African economy by enabling its people”.
