Bayt.com’s SAWTNA program

Bayt.com

Finalist Workplace of the Year Award 2016 and Innovation in Work Culture Award 2016
Internet/ E-commerce
Dubai

Challenges:

Employee wellbeing is of extreme importance to us at Bayt.com. This is what we believe in at Bayt.com as our mission is to “empower people to lead better lives by providing them with the tools and information to build their lifestyle of choice.” From this statement, we create our people-focused activities and strategies. We place people at the core of our operations because they are the drivers behind our success. The equation is simple: Successful hiring means that you have the right person in the "right place". The "right place" results in high employee engagement, productivity, and happiness. This, in turn, leads to further customer satisfaction and business success. To have the "right place", we realized we needed to prioritize employee wellness and satisfaction. After all, we all spend a huge part of our day in our offices. At Bayt.com, we work really hard on ensuring that we are providing comfortable, happy, and balanced work environments for our team at Bayt.com, where everyone knows they have a lot of room to grow and learn, be challenged and inspired, but also enjoy the work and have a sense of work-life balanc

Brief:

At Bayt.com, we have a Bayt.com Wellness Policy that is mandated across all our 13 offices in the region. It ensures that every person working at Bayt.com is benefiting from a healthy, happy, and productive work environment. We believe that a healthy work environment is key to any organization; so also the physical and mental well-being of every employee. Several years ago, we realized the importance of internally crowd-sourcing the evolution of Bayt.com and its products by involving all of our employees. We wanted to develop a formal system that ensures we receive a steady stream of input from our most valuable asset; our employees. That’s when Sawtna, an internal product for Bayt.com employees and developed internally by our team, came to be. It allows any employee to provide any recommendations they have for Bayt.com as a company, as a service, as a web site, and as a business model. Employees can submit recommendations as well as vote for their favorites. It was through this program that we were able to take things a step further and actually get a sense of what our employees prefer to have that can increase their overall wellbeing and what actually works for them, instead of just offering a standardized approach that might not apply to all departments / members. SAWTNA program is a reflection of our value of transparent and frequent communication as well as our flat hierarchy and friendly culture that encourages participation from all of our employees. Our approach to involve all of our employees in decision making, creative brainstorming, and collaborative learning is conveyed through this program as well as many other activities such as our quarterly fiestas to celebrate our top achievers and employee milestones, our Founder’s awards that every single employee can be nominated for, our cross-departmental learning opportunities through employee-lead training sessions and/or creative brown-bag sessions.

Process:

Sawtna was implemented on an intranet accessible to Bayt employees, and the HR team and “Wellness Ambassadors” are responsible for applying the ideas that come up. A few things that were implemented include: On the fitness front, our offices have fitness equipment to keep everyone moving like dart-boards, ping pong tables, foosball tables, or punching bags (choice of what the equipment is very much depends on what Baytheads in each office choose!) On the wellness front, our pantries have healthy food and snacks available to all Baytheads for free, where we get fresh deliveries of fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, and keep our pantries stocked up on cereals and herbal teas. We invite speakers related to health and wellness periodically to share some tips with our employees and raise health awareness. On the relaxation front, our pantry areas are designed to serve as areas wherein employees can take a break or simply use to get their creative juices flowing. We also have bean bags, as well as other areas where employees can unwind, relax and innovate; and reading shelves stocked with books and learning materials. Some offices have televisions for downtime unwinding, while others have Xboxes and gaming consoles to get some friendly competitions going. Offices have often organized their own activities such as movie nights, potlucks, yoga sessions, art classes, and much more. When it comes to office design, our offices have an “open” structure, wherein we don’t have closed cubicles. We have an open door policy wherein employees can knock on the top management’s doors at any point of time, including our own CEO, to voice their concerns or discuss ideas. We also have bean bags, couches, inclusive "Eating tables" so as many people as possible can sit and have lunch together. Different offices and teams are also encouraged to have their own designs and additions. For example, our IT office in Jordan has a wall for geeky jokes, while our office in Egypt enjoys a small private garden for relaxation or working outdoors.

Obstacles:

It makes it very challenging to provide similar benefits when our offices are located across the region, so we are always looking for ways to improve, either by selecting better providers, or introducing new incentives. We are our own harshest critic and while we look to our peers to take note of best practices, we look harder at what employees tell us. After all, our primary value at Bayt.com is “Striving to Be the Best”, and that means that we will always be challenging ourselves and pushing the envelope on the best practices and standards that we put for ourselves. We also battled this issue through our Sawtna program that helped us tailor our wellbeing programs to each and every department within our organization.

Impact:

We measure our wellness, engagement and success of Bayt.com as a workplace through bi-annual, mandatory 360-degree evaluations that are automatically scored by the system. We are very serious about these scores, and we work hard to continue to track and improve them. We also hold KVF Projects – Key Vital Factor sheets, which are formally drawn up between employees and their managers on an annual basis as the annual strategy is defined; and these are discussed and revised as needed on a monthly basis so employees and management are always aligned so progress and staff development remain on track. Additionally, the HR department at Bayt.com carries performance audits on a bi-annual basis. Our HR specialists visit all of our offices to work with the managers on auditing employee wellbeing, and designing customized action plans, which include developing and implementing new wellbeing programs. Theory audits are also carried regularly to ensure that our employees have actually benefited from wellbeing programs and are familiar with all outcomes.

Contacts and links:

Mohannad Aljawamis
Content and Product Manager
Email: mjawamis@bayt.net
Mobile: +962 6 550 7445
www.bayt.com