Rewind maintains its human touch with Workleap Officevibe

For Lauren Song, Senior People Partner at Rewind, being happy in your job and loving where you work should be part of every employee's journey. Considering that the average person will spend upward of 81,000 hours working in their lifetime, it should be an enjoyable, positive, and fulfilling experience.

That's why when Lauren interviewed for the People Team a year and a half ago, it was a major green flag that the Ottawa-based company was using an employee engagement tool to check in on their teams.

Rewind, a software development company dedicated to protecting businesses' SaaS and cloud data, first implemented Workleap Officevibe in February 2020. At the time, the company was missing a complete People Team. So, Rewind's Head of Finance sought a way to cultivate a positive culture without necessarily having a traditional unit in place. They also wanted to understand what concerns needed addressing once their team was complete.

Since its foundation in 2015, Rewind employs over 130 people in Canada, Europe, and the United States and boasts over 100,000 clients worldwide. According to Lauren, Workleap Officevibe allows them to stay connected with their people and better understand their needs. An intuitive employee engagement tool helps them maintain human connections while continuing to experience rapid growth, she added.

Read on to learn why Rewind hit pause on their search for any other employee engagement tool after trying Workleap Officevibe.

Why did Rewind start using Workleap Officevibe?

The tool actually predates everyone in our current People Team, so you could say that Workleap Officevibe was our first “People Person!”

The leadership team at the time was looking to create a solid, direct line of communication with our people leaders and executives and see how they could improve the work culture. One of our corporate values is to be open, honest, and respectful and Workleap Officevibe's built-in anonymity features help add a layer of truth that can be shared in a safe space. I think it helped double down on the initiatives they were taking around increasing and supporting psychological safety in the workplace and being able to close feedback loops with the teams.

How do you use Workleap Officevibe?

We use it for everything. It's almost like the “data center” for our People Team. Many tech companies are trying to be as data centric as possible, which extends to our People Team and us. We use the tool to get a better view of our team, how they're doing, what they need from us, and what we need to improve.

A lot of our corporate Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are team related, which we measure with Workleap Officevibe metrics. We'll put a program in place, and measure it against a score, or at least see if it's not declining in any way, as well.

One of the more exciting things that I learned when I started is that employee engagement is a key part of one of our corporate objectives. We have three main objectives per year, and one is about maintaining a diverse and engaged team with a score of 8.0 or higher. We'll be lifting that for next year because we've held a score of 8.3 for over 12 months.

Which features do you use most frequently?

Custom surveys are great because you can really take them in any direction. For example, we noticed that our employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) was relatively low. That's one of the more unique scores because it's hinged on only one question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company as a workplace?” Wanting to dive deeper into that, we leveraged the custom surveys to look into why that score was lower, and we were able to improve it by 40 points in the last six months.

We also really appreciate the Report page to understand how we're doing and benchmark against other teams. It helps with manager collaboration when it comes to score comparison because then they can start having conversations over how to improve things. That knowledge sharing is so important.

There is something that we haven't explored much because it is still quite new, which is the new feedback report that includes the response rate. We're so excited about that, actually! It'll help us restructure how we use the tool and adds another layer of accountability; we will restructure things on our end so that it looks a little bit more like our organizational chart. Having that response rate will help us because we've had minor inconsistencies in which of our managers go in and respond to feedback, so I think that will help us get those numbers up.

The pandemic has changed the landscape of the workplace. Has Workleap Officevibe helped you navigate this new reality?

We really leveraged the custom surveys feature as it allowed us to dig deeper into the well-being of our employees. We sent out a wellness survey midpandemic and the insights we got into how we can better support our team during that time were crucial. We always acknowledge when scores dip and we keep on top of our monthly engagement scores: where we've seen growth and where we've done less well, so we know what to strengthen.

We use Workleap Officevibe to shape our employee roadmap and our future projects.

Lauren Song, Senior People Partner at Rewind

How do you communicate Workleap Officevibe data and insights to your teams?

We have an open OKR and KPI plan where our employees can see which of our scores are tied directly to Workleap Officevibe. Every once in a while, especially when we change to how use the tool, we send out a company-wide communication. We recently opted to send out a monthly Pulse Survey instead of a bi-weekly one to leverage the custom templates and dig a little bit deeper into some of the scores with more Rewind-specific questions. But we make sure to always communicate these changes.

Do you still perform traditional performance reviews?

We used to do them quarterly, but now we do them twice per year. We conduct them to make sure employees are aligned with their managers on how they're doing to help them grow within the company. While we don't use Workleap Officevibe scores to measure performance per se, it helps with planning and measuring success.

When it comes to a manager, for example, if their scores have really dipped in one area, it won't be held against them in a performance review. Still, we'll chat about it to ensure we know what's happening in that space and how we can help them, and their employees improve the score in that area. Workleap Officevibe helps create this conversation.

Have you noticed changes in overall employee engagement since using the tool?

I think with Workleap Officevibe, the success you see depends on how you leverage the knowledge that's shared with you. You need to be the team that acts; people can give you feedback all day long, but if you don't close that feedback loop or action anything, you lose trust in the tool (and leadership), and people stop using it.

I think the reason why we've seen such consistently high engagement is that we do our best to create initiatives and programs around the feedback we receive.

Lauren Song, Senior People Partner at Rewind

We're also lucky that we have extremely engaged people leaders who take the time to reply to feedback in the tool and share knowledge to improve scores and metrics. Whenever we see a score start to slip, we try to get on top of it right away and reply to written employee concerns consistently so that people see they are being heard.

What's next for the employee experience journey at Rewind?

Our new Workleap Officevibe strategy is to better understand what these scores mean. We'll continue conducting monthly Pulse Surveys. From there, we'll examine which scores may have dipped and send out a more comprehensive custom survey to explore these topics further with questions that are a little bit more specific to Rewind practices. We're excited about this because we'll be able to get a wealth of knowledge to understand more precisely what we're doing well and what we can improve. We're doing well, and we're consistent, but we'd always like to keep bettering our engagement scores.

It's hard to maintain that human touch once your organization starts scaling, but Workleap Officevibe really helps us ensure that more personal one-to-one element, so it gives us a lot of insight and saves us a lot of time.