(*This Blog Post was created based on the interview with Mr. Onogawa Yasuto - IVC General Director after 1 year of applying Motivation Cloud to the company’s employee engagement improvement.

* The interview content was also published on the website of Link and Motivation Inc. Company at: https://www.motivation-cloud.com/case/isb-vietnam)

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IVC (ISB Vietnam Company) was established in 2003 by ISB Corporation and is celebrating the 20^th anniversary establishment this year. Our main business is offshore software development, and in recent years, we have been working not only with Japanese customers but also with other overseas customers. Currently, we have about 100 engineers who are diverse and well versed in a variety of expertise in software development outsourcing.

IVC Office - Working Station

The General IT industry in Vietnam has an issue with a high turnover rate. With more and more foreign companies entering the Vietnamese market, we have seen wage increases over the years, and the gap in salary ranges between companies is getting wider and wider. Similarly, if we look at Japanese companies, the current situation is that there is also a salary gap between companies like ours, which mainly focus on offshore development, and other companies that mainly focus on product development.

Therefore, enhancing employee engagement and improving the turnover rate is always a concern for IVC. With this in mind, we have implemented various measures before, but they have tended to be from our management’s perspective and have not been effective as expected. Since the relationship with employees had been a one-way street, we wanted to understand “how employees feel about the company.”

Mr. Onogawa Yasuto - IVC General Director

After carefully researching and evaluating a variety of related human resource systems in the market, we have decided to apply The Motivation Cloud System from the beginning of 2022 with the expectations that this system would support our management to understand how employees actually felt about the company and pinpoint countermeasures then address these issues.

After one year of applying the Motivation Cloud, we believe that the greatest strength of this system is its ability to quantify organizational status by score, which supports us to have an objective assessment of our organization. Moreover, all IVC employees are now able to send out messages and express their intentions through these surveys. It is very important for our company to listen to the voices of employees- we thought.

Especially, in the second survey, when we asked, “How do you feel about this type of initiative (survey)?”, more than 70% of the respondents replied they thought it was a good idea. It was the motivation for the company because our employees have a favorable impression of the survey.

Based on the survey results, we are immediately starting to review our benefits policies. We have many benefits policies, some of which have not changed at all over the years. While we can assume that employees are satisfied with some of the policies and whether or not some policies are utilizing the benefits properly, we have not been able to find out until now.

Since Motivation Cloud allows us to add optional qualitative questions, we knew how employees felt about the benefits, making it easier to make decisions such as “this is fine as it is” or “this doesn’t make sense, let’s change it.” In the future, we will be able to focus on more effective benefits.

After hearing the voice from employees and finding out which policies and activities in the company are evaluated as effective, the company has been putting effort into upgrading some current benefit policies and organizing many company activities to enhance employee engagement.

Moreover, it is important to communicate our philosophy and vision and to make employees empathize with the value of the company’s existence and the direction it is aiming for. This will give employees a reason to stay with the company other than just the salary, and this will make IVC become a stronger organization. The Fixed-points of observations were made on Motivation Cloud so that we can raise not only the “satisfaction level” but also the “expectation level” by consciously communicating the company’s policies.

Salary and benefits are, of course, also an immediate issue in improving turnover rate. The survey also identified this as a priority area for improvement, and it is also linked to the turnover rate. And in order to cope with the changing environment, the company is planning to develop a strategy for the future, including a change of business.

IVC will continue to utilize Motivation Cloud from now on, but on the other hand, we do not think it is a good idea to rely too much on the idea that “using this system will make the company better.” The key point is how the company can make use of it and what measures the company can take based on these results.

In Vietnam, We think there are still a few Japanese IT companies that focus on employee engagement and improve their companies by listening to employees’ opinions. In this respect, we believe that IVC is ahead of the rest, and we would like to take more and more measures to build a strong organization.