We are delighted to announce that this month we have welcomed Craig Mathewson to the WeThrive team. Craig will be working closely with our co-founder, Andrew, as part of the new business team. This week I caught up with Craig to find out a little bit more about his background and why he decided to join the team at WeThrive…
Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
I have been working in software sales for over ten years following an early career in the music industry. I have helped businesses in a variety of sectors including email marketing & marketing automation, digital music promotion platforms and route optimisation software for the transport industry.
The key thing for me in taking on a sales challenge is working with a product and team that can truly have a positive impact on someone’s role.
Tell us a bit about some of your employee experiences in the workplace, do you think more can be done to improve this across businesses in general?
In general, all my employee experiences have been pretty positive. I have worked with some excellent and motivational managers who have highly influenced my success to date. The main reasons I have been less productive in a role or decided to move on have been when a company has made a change in direction which has not been communicated well (or at all) or made the effort to outline the value of the change to the teams. Often my line managers were overworked so you don’t always get the direction/responses you need.
My two takeaways; Communication is key and, as a salesperson, there is nothing more frustrating than waiting on approval before being able to act!
What has your experience been like with employee engagement surveys in the past, do you think they are valuable?
In the past I have always been happy to complete employee surveys but have maybe not been as honest with my responses as I could have been.
This has been mainly due to the fact I did not believe that my input would have any influence and that my response would just going to get lost in the wider ‘noise’. Also the purpose of the survey had not be communicated well.
Aside from this, as a rule, any changes or recommendations made have taken so long to execute that the business has already moved on to a new set of concerns or issues that need to be addressed.
Why WeThrive? What made you come and join us?
The passion and the vision of the team! As well as having an innovative piece of technology which really makes a difference to their clients, the company practice what they preach. Understanding my strengths, weaknesses and needs as a person I felt that I was valued, supported and able to contribute to the success of the business.
With the world of work evolving rapidly what are the most crucial things HR professionals should be doing to keep up?
HR are so very busy in their day to day and with the number of growing factors that influence their employees (both internal and external) the workload is only likely to increase. If this is the case, teams are going to have to work smarter and lean on new technologies to help them become more pro-active and less re-active. Traditional ‘business wide’ incentives will always have their place, however by truly understanding the needs of teams and individuals (and by being able to act on this knowledge) they should be able to improve the happiness, welfare and profitability of a business which will in turn help their own workload.
You can connect with Craig on LinkedIn if you’d like to know more about how WeThrive employee engagement software can help you in your employee engagement endeavours.
