As a way to encourage professional development and foster excitement and engagement within our team, we created an employee program we’ve lovingly dubbed “SolidPRO.”
The idea of SolidPRO was born during Solid Digital’s Annual Planning meeting in 2018 as a way to promote new opportunities for people to continue growing and learning professionally. We kept our previous annual education stipend, along with adding a way for people to actually take classes, attend seminars and workshops during downtime. Over time, SolidPRO expanded to include culture engagement as well.
What is SolidPRO?
SolidPRO is an education and engagement program that lists activities, classes, and other tasks that people at Solid Digital can complete in order to get points. Those points are then traded for raffle tickets, where you become eligible to be rewarded with awesome “experiences” (concert tickets, museum memberships, restaurant gift cards, etc).
The activities are broken into different categories such as “Marketing”, “Leadership”, “Culture,” etc. In every category, there are online courses, certifications, and other various activities available to employees. Each of these activities are worth a certain number of points and are given to the team member who completed the activity, turned in a “What Did You Learn?” form, and submitted any relevant certifications.
We keep track of all of this, with our SolidPRO Tracker, where all activities are listed with point values assigned to each, complete with links to each class and instructions for completing a given activity. The tracker is fully managed and regularly updated to review forms submitted and keep track of points awarded via our High5 Slack application.
Benefits
As a company we have seen several positive benefits since introducing SolidPRO into our culture. We have also requested feedback on the program and have made adjustments to ensure that it continues to be something our team is engaged with.
Professional Development
There are many benefits to SolidPRO, but the one that always comes to mind is the opportunity for our team to get involved in continuing their professional development. SolidPRO is a fun way where people can use some of their downtime to expand their knowledge by completing courses, attending workshops, watching online-seminars, and more. Some of the courses that we use come from Udemy and LinkedIn Learning, which allow us to constantly have a library of new content for the team to choose from. In many cases these courses allow for a team member to earn a certification.
Culture Engagement
Another benefit is the opportunity to incorporate company culture activities that will not only allow people to interact with each other but also gets them out of their daily routine. Although there are certain culture activities that have designated points like Lunch Bingo, where you and a teammate will earn 1 point for going out to lunch together and learning 3 new things about each other.
There are also random culture points where they might be given to team members for going above-and-beyond, assisting another team member, participating in theme-day events (ie. wearing a festive shirt during our annual Hawaiian Day), etc.
Team Involvement
With everything we do at Solid Digital we want our team to be hands-on, we want people to be comfortable enough to voice their opinion, make suggestions, and help make changes for the betterment of the company. Team Involvement is key to SolidPRO and we need people to participate and be involved. We regularly see team members suggest new courses, online webinars, and other events that are added to our SolidPRO tracker. Without team involvement our program would surely not be as successful as it is now. SolidPRO has become a way for us to give back our team the opportunity to learn and better ourselves.
Rewards
That’s right! Participating in SolidPRO activities whether they are for professional development, culture, or going above-and-beyond, it all gets you points. We keep track of them throughout the year, and at the end of each quarter every 5 points will get you a ticket, that gets put into a quarterly raffle. During the quarterly raffle, we raffle experiences, like concert tickets, memberships to museums, golfing, etc. We believe that this not only gets people excited about participating, but it allows them to be rewarded for their hard work.
Get Started Today
What is your company currently doing to promote employee’s professional development? Is your team getting a holistic opportunity to engage in company culture? Remember the more qualified and skilled a team member is, the more the everyone benefits.
Whether you have an education program in place or you are starting from scratch, SolidPRO might be a fun way to take that program to the next level. The simple-to-use SolidPRO Tracker template will help you create your own list of courses and activities, assign points, create description and track employee’s points through out the year.
