Getting employees engaged with going remote

Lindsey O’Sullivan is the Director of People Operations at Nautilus Labs. When the business implemented Workleap Officevibe at the start of 2020, she says it was much-needed breath of a fresh air in their approach to employee engagement. Thanks in part to the Slack integration, they were able to move past labour-intensive manual surveys and survey fatigue.

Putting survey fatigue in the past

As a small start-up with limited budget, Lindsey says the company relied heavily on Google Forms. “We were running our engagement surveys through Google Forms, but also every other survey for the company. We’d wound up limiting the feedback on our engagement surveys to quarterly, because anytime you said, ‘I’m sending out a form,’ you could hear the audible groan. And then I’d chase people to fill it out, and by then, everyone was just sick of hearing about engagement.”

We’re very Slack-heavy. We rarely use email, and a lot of the other tools that I looked into early on for engagement measurement were bulkier.

Lindsey O’Sullivan, Director of People Operations

Competing tools involved adding yet another piece of software for employees to learn to use and login to, making it a harder sell for her team – and unlikely the tool would be used. “The [Slack] integration was huge for the team. It just made the process a little more mindless and made our response rate go way up.”

The choice also means Lindsey is no longer forced to manually parse and distribute engagement data to managers, saving her hours each quarter, and helping her to preserve employees’ anonymity. “You always worry that you may have missed a detail that lets somebody identify who said something on their team,” she says.

Making remote work, work

As Nautilus Labs rolled into remote work due to COVID, Lindsey says the data took on a whole new meaning. “It was not surprising, but clearer, how much stress the team was feeling. Workleap Officevibe allowed us to dig in with the team on what was driving their stress, like work-life balance. It allowed us to circle through our teams and ask how we could help.”

Without Workleap Officevibe numbers to point to in those conversations, she says her people would have just insisted they were fine. “Putting data into the conversation allowed people to feel free to express what was really driving their concerns.”

Today, the numbers help Lindsey determine whether a specific issue is widespread and needs addressing with a company-wide initiative, or if it’s simply a 1-on-1 issue. “If there’s an especially vocal person in the business who is feeling upset, we will often go to Workleap Officevibe to see if that’s reflected by the rest of the team.”

With companies scrambling to make the round peg of office work fit into the square hole of their new remote reality, Workleap Officevibe gave Lindsey the data to kick off conversations about remote socializing. This resulted in a shift in how Nautilus Labs thinks about social engagement across the team.

I really can’t say enough about how helpful Workleap Officevibe has been while we’re remote, because we’re not able to see everyone in the office day-to-day. I regularly enter 1-on-1s with managers, where they say, ‘Hey, can we pull up Workleap Officevibe real quick, because I saw this thing,’ or, ‘Did you see this feedback that I got? Because I want to talk about it.

In the end, she says, Workleap Officevibe means she’s not the only one getting a sense of the broader team sentiment through the platform: managers can visualize and apply solutions based on the data every day, placing engagement into everyone’s hands.