Success Stories

With Workleap Officevibe's help, Gorilla76 was able to boost happiness by 20%, engagement by 22%, and recognition by 60%. Watch Jon's testimonial video below for more insights on how his team achieved these stellar results.

Insights from a culture builder

Jon Franko, the founder of the industrial marketing agency, Gorilla76, told us he aimed to be the best coach and culture builder he could be for his company.

We asked him why, and his answer was simple: marketing agencies have been looking at culture partially wrong for decades. Sure, playing video games at work and having a beer fridge add sparkle to the experience, but these things often tackle culture superficially.

Jon’s goal was to make his team proud to work at the agency by making everyday work and interactions meaningful and unique to Gorilla76.

Cue: Workleap Officevibe, the employee engagement platform that helped Gorilla76 bring its culture to new heights. Hear it from Jon himself in our latest client testimonial video!

What you'll see in the video:

• Why workplace culture should happen organically
• How Gorilla76 maintained a great culture remotely
• Where their culture would be without Workleap Officevibe
• The business impact of implementing Workleap Officevibe

Without a doubt, Workleap Officevibe is the single most important tool. It has completely transformed the way we’ve looked at culture.

Jon Franko, Founder at Gorilla76

Gorilla76 and Workleap Officevibe: Elevating culture together since 2017

It all started over ramen and a basketball game. Jon was looking for a tool to help Gorilla76 gather insights from his team so that he could direct his attention to the right culture initiatives at the right time.

That's when a close friend of his introduced him to Workleap Officevibe, the people-first platform that offers a new approach to improving the employee experience.

It made sense for me to check out this tool as something to have in my arsenal. It was a low risk. So, it was a no-brainer to give it a shot.

Jon Franko, Founder at Gorilla76

It didn't stop at gathering insights and acting on them. Over the years, Gorilla76 has used Workleap Officevibe to drive employee engagement with the easy-to-use recognition, goal-setting, anonymous feedback, and one-on-one meeting tools.

The cherry on top of the sundae? With Workleap Officevibe’s reporting tools, not only was fostering a strong culture possible but so was measuring and improving it regularly. Since implementing the tool in 2017, Jon continuously reports engagement metrics on a weekly basis to Gorilla76’s strategic planning committee.

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After years of working for companies where the employee experience fell to the bottom of the list of corporate priorities, Jean-Philippe Dauphinais knew that there had to be a better way for organizations to remain successful without compromising the well-being of their employees.

Armed with a background in sales and entrepreneurship, coupled with a keen interest in the world of marketing, Dauphinais enlisted his long-time friend, Nicolas Rabouille, to explore ways in which they could help businesses grow through different digital transformation initiatives.

What began as a two-person operation in Dauphinais’ basement in 2016, has burgeoned into a flourishing web marketing agency, Rablab, specializing in search engine optimization, paid search strategies, social media marketing, and results-driven programmatic advertising with over 30 employees.

While the Montreal-based company keeps growing, Dauphinais and Rabouille’s commitment to providing their people with an exceptional employee experience has remained steadfast. We spoke to Dauphinais, Co-Founder, and CEO, about how Workleap Officevibe has helped Rablab build a culture rooted in employee engagement and well-being from the very beginning.  

When and why did you introduce Workleap Officevibe at Rablab?

When we started Rablab, we wanted every new hire to have a voice. We wanted to be transparent with our numbers and in everything we did, and we especially wanted our people to be along for the journey. We intended to have a tight-knit community from the get-go.

In 2018, we met and chatted with some of the team from Workleap Officevibe at a trade show. Back then, a tool for the employee experience was really “out there.” It made us realize that when we were asking our team how they were feeling, they weren’t giving us the full picture because employees don’t usually feel comfortable expressing their concerns and giving you the cold hard truth to your face.

After that event, we introduced Workleap Officevibe to start getting honest feedback from our team to see how we could improve their overall experience.

How did your employees react to having to use Workleap Officevibe?

Funny enough, it was not well-received at first. When we first introduced it, we were about six or eight people, and the team thought we were trying to “spy” on them, even though the surveys were anonymous. I think that’s a fear for many people because we went from speaking casually in meetings to having these scheduled surveys where we collected data.

To help ease their concerns, we sat down with our employees and asked them how they wanted us to implement Workleap Officevibe from that point on. We asked them how they would feel about doing a two-to-three-question weekly Pulse Survey and how it would affect their perception of the work we were doing together. We tried to be thoughtful about this when we first spoke to them.

We took the time to educate and inform our employees on how we use the tool. We would still have meetings, but we also needed to keep having these smaller touchpoints to help guide us and show us what we were doing well and what we could do better. We reinforced the notion that their information was secure and anonymous on the platform and that the data we collected from these surveys helped us make informed decisions to improve their day-to-day lives at work.

How has Workleap Officevibe helped address challenges at Rablab?

What helps shape our decision-making is the feedback section after the Pulse Survey questions. We look at two things in particular. First, we look at our scores for recognition, satisfaction, alignment, etc., across our different teams. We set a minimum score for ourselves so that we don’t fall below our standard. This data helps us look at things objectively and mathematically to see where we can make changes.  

We then take the time to really go through the individual comments and feedback that people leave. Our HR representative fills me in weekly, highlighting recurring questions or comments, and we flag what’s positive, negative, and constructive. Sometimes there’s a ton to discuss, and other times there’s less, but having these pillars of questions helps us identify what we should focus on.

Can you share some of the insights you’re most proud of?  

We’re really proud of our employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). Unfortunately, the digital marketing industry average is quite low, hovering around 24. That means that a lot of people are just logging in at their jobs and collecting their pay cheques, but their relationship with their company ends there. Rablab has a score of 88*, which means morale is high. We’re so happy to have people promoting the company like this and speaking highly of Rablab outside the organization.

Did the way you use Workleap Officevibe change with the shift to remote work?

There were so many things to manage in the early days of the pandemic that Workleap Officevibe wasn’t at the top of our priorities, but in hindsight, it should have been considering it helps you track if your people are happy.

We started doubling down on our Workleap Officevibe usage because we weren’t used to the fully remote context yet, and one of the only ways to see how our people were doing was through the Pulse Surveys feedback they left. We usually had high participation rates, but in the early stages of the pandemic, we were hitting 100% participation.

In the winter of 2020, our “relationship with manager” metric took a bit of a hit, but we are now at 9.3/10*. We’ve developed a strong and open communication channel between management and their employees, but in those uncertain early days, people were afraid and were not speaking to each other. Things have changed a lot since then.

What do you like best about Workleap Officevibe?  

The ease of usability. It’s really freaking easy to use. Workleap Officevibe can help you find pressure points, things that hurt the company or your people, or see comments you might not have seen before because now they’re anonymous.

As a manager, you only need to ensure that your people are filling in their surveys and engaging with the platform. Then, of course, respond to feedback with action. The integration with Slack also makes things smoother. I see Workleap Officevibe as an easy-to-use, low-cost, and highly efficient solution for our business. And from a manager’s standpoint, the dashboard is so intuitive. The analysis, comparisons, questionnaires, and feedback are all made simple for the user.

*As of June 2022

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Part of the Graham Allen Partners’ portfolio of companies, Aunalytics is a data platform company that helps enterprise and midsize companies through their digital transformations.  

Having undergone rapid growth through hiring and acquisitions in the last few years, Aunalytics knew that maintaining their culture would take care and attention. Aunalytics looked to Workleap Officevibe to improve their overall team member experience and quickly uncovered areas of concern along the way. With recognition being one of their lowest scoring metrics, Aunalytics partnered with Workleap Officevibe to beta test our new recognition tool, Good Vibes.

We sat down with Mary Jo Ogren, Head of Talent for Graham Allen Partners (working closely with Aunalytics), to map out the company’s journey towards building a culture of recognition.  

How long has Aunalytics been using Workleap Officevibe and what was the main driver behind its implementation?

Aunalytics was founded about 10 years ago, and we were a very small team up until 2018. Towards the end of that year, and through early 2019, Aunalytics acquired two other companies and started ramping up our hiring. Our team rapidly grew from 35 team members to 165 in a matter of months.

Integrating legacy companies into one new company can be very stressful for team members. There is a lot of uncertainty, which tends to lead to low morale. I was very much concerned about how this would impact the Aunalytics culture we had worked so hard to build. So, I went looking for a tool that would help me get a pulse on how our team was feeling and I found Workleap Officevibe. We were very excited to launch it as our employee engagement platform!

Since then, what is the biggest impact Workleap Officevibe has had on your organization?

When we first launched Workleap Officevibe, I set up subgroups for each legacy company we were integrating so that I could see how each group was feeling and adapting to life at Aunalytics. Almost immediately, it was clear that some groups were struggling, and morale was low.

We especially loved that with Workleap Officevibe, newly acquired team members who didn’t trust us quite yet could provide feedback anonymously when they needed help or when they were concerned about something.

On a more positive note, Workleap Officevibe also helped us gather insights and ideas, allowing us to merge the best parts of each legacy company’s culture.

As an HR professional, why do you think it’s important to recognize team members?

I was a teacher before I jumped into the world of HR and that influenced the way I now see team members at work. In my teaching days, I was really inspired by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is a motivational theory in psychology that studies human needs and how they shape our behaviors. According to this theory, after physiological needs (water, food, shelter) and safety needs (security, employment, health), humans are motivated by a sense of belonging.  

To me, the biggest drivers of belonging are feeling recognized, valued, and respected. I always keep this in the back of my mind at work now.  

For small to medium-sized companies, having a great culture, including one of recognition, can also really set you apart when hiring and retaining great talent. We can treat people in such a way that they know we value them, they feel like they’re part of a team, and they belong. This makes people want to come to work. And in the face of the Great Resignation, we hope that makes people want to stay.

How were employees recognizing each other when Workleap Officevibe first came along?

Through the regular Pulse Surveys, Workleap Officevibe helped us identify that our lowest performing metrics were wellness and recognition. Naturally, the state of the world at the time (early 2020) exacerbated both metrics.  

This was when our journey towards building a culture of recognition started. The first initiative I implemented thanks to our Workleap Officevibe findings was a Teams channel called “Aunstars”. The goal of this group was to give our team a platform to recognize each other for jobs well done.  Today I joke that Aunstars was my own made-up Good Vibes!

It caught on quickly and some people enjoyed posting kudos on there, especially when recognizing entire teams or groups of people. The main problems I noticed were that it was too public, it didn’t have any prompts, and you had to actively think about going on the channel. All these factors acted as barriers to post. On average, we had about 5-10 posts per month.

Aunalytics was one of our first clients to use our new Good Vibes tool. How has your culture of recognition been impacted since then?

Good Vibes was a game changer for us. It was the perfect tool to help us ramp up our cadence of recognition while making our team members feel truly valued.

With reminders at the end of our weekly Pulse Surveys, giving recognition has become a part of our weekly process at Aunalytics.  

In the last 30 days alone, our team sent out 72 Good Vibes, which is amazing to see as an HR professional!

Which metrics have been impacted most since this feature was implemented?

Since we started using Good Vibes, we’ve seen our recognition, feedback, and relationship with peers metrics go up. If you’re an HR professional, you know that moving the needle on these metrics is difficult and takes time. So, even if the changes are small, we’re really proud of the difference we made!

I’m also excited about the impact Good Vibes has had on our overall Workleap Officevibe participation rate. In just a few months, we increased it from 90% to 95%. I love that this feature drives our people to use the tool.

What do you like most about the Good Vibes tool?

I like how easy it is to use. The simplicity of the tool makes it effortless for anyone to give recognition. This makes it happen more often, and more people end up getting recognized. It creates a great cycle of recognition.

Would you recommend Workleap Officevibe to other HR professionals?

Absolutely! After using Workleap Officevibe at Aunalytics, we decided to implement it across Graham Allen Partners’ portfolio of companies. Every new company that we acquire also makes it a part of their people and culture toolkit.  

Personally, I also recommend it to my HR network because I think it’s so important to have a pulse on how your team members are feeling. The anonymity of feedback is also crucial because it gives people a safe space to give what they might consider to be hard feedback.

That’s all we have for today! Do you have any closing remarks before we wrap this off?

I would just say that the Workleap Officevibe team is incredible. Being a part of a beta test for Good Vibes, I had a chance to work closely and collaborate with the team.

I truly felt like my input was considered and I can even notice my contribution at play when I use the Good Vibes tool. This tells me that Workleap Officevibe cares about their client’s experience, but also the employee experience in general. They’re always looking to make their tools more functional for the end user.

We have been so happy with our partnership with Workleap Officevibe, and we look forward to what the future has in store!

Don’t just believe the hype.
Experience it yourself.

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Like many companies, Sharethrough had adapted to a hybrid way of working. This flexible model contributed to the company’s transformation and growth beyond its Montreal head office.

As a digital advertising technology company providing human-centric programmatic advertising, they now also employ great minds in Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and have recently expanded into Europe.

For Natacha Brind’Amour, former Vice President, People & Culture, this created a unique situation from an HR perspective. With 11 years of HR experience in various roles, Natacha knew what it took to create a great employee experience and build a culture that allowed and encouraged the company to grow. When she joined Sharethrough as the sole HR person, the company had 65 employees. Following a merger and a strong growth trajectory, the HR team now oversees 160 employees and counting.

As the architect of the HR framework, Natacha needed the right tools and processes to ensure that her team was happy, engaged, and growing, no matter where they were located. We chatted with her about how Workleap Officevibe played a role in recruiting and retaining great talent.

How did Sharethrough start using Workleap Officevibe?

Strong company culture and world-class employee experience are at the heart of our strategy to attract, retain, engage, and develop employees, so we knew we had to find a reliable tool that had the ability to measure in real-time what we were doing well and what we needed to improve, to ensure that every component of the employee journey was aligned with our employee needs.

In 2019, we welcomed a new Vice-President of Engineering who came to us from Workleap (formerly GSoft) and he was, of course, already a big believer in the Workleap Officevibe platform. It was an obvious decision that we would go ahead with Workleap Officevibe.

Want to learn more about Natacha’s experience with Workleap Officevibe? Check out the full interview here:

How did Workleap Officevibe help Sharethrough?

One thing that I’ve really noticed since 2019 is that when the Workleap Officevibe score improved, we had a better retention rate. So, Workleap Officevibe metrics became really insightful when it came time to establish our OKRs and helped us measure our progression toward our team goals during the year.

Also, showing our Workleap Officevibe data progression to the board or the Human Resources Compensation Committee (Board of Director sub-committee) was helpful in making them feel confident that we had the right vision and strategy to retain and attract talent.

We are proud to say we maintained a great turnover rate while sustaining above 30% annual year-over-year growth and completing a transformative merger that doubled the size of the company overnight in 2021. Not to mention this all took place in the middle of a pandemic.

The Workleap Officevibe matrix doesn’t lie, and it’s a great ally!

What is one of the biggest impacts Workleap Officevibe had on you?

One of the biggest impacts Workleap Officevibe has had at Sharethrough is that we were able to gather all the information we needed to help us continue our growth. When you’re a mature company that isn’t seeing a lot of change, and you have pretty stable teams with stable managers, people trust the manager and feel more able to share any feelings or feedback with them.

But when you’re a rapidly growing company like Sharethrough, you welcome new people onto your team every month. The difference is that those people may not feel as comfortable having those conversations with their managers immediately. Let’s say if like 30% to 40% of the team is new, you wouldn’t be getting the kind of detailed feedback that you can act on right away—especially if you don’t have anonymous feedback tools like the ones Workleap Officevibe has.

While we have been growing organically, we also acquired a business. The acquisition meant that there was a lot of reorganization. We welcomed new managers, new team members, and new peers, so there was a lot to learn about how they were feeling.

How has Workleap Officevibe helped your managers?

The best way to manage a team can be so ambiguous for a new manager. Sometimes they don’t know where to start or what to prioritize. Their team metrics provide them with insights they can use to prioritize what needs to be improved to engage and retain their team members.

Every quarter the managers of each department organized workshops with their teams to go deeper and understand their needs in relation to the Workleap Officevibe metrics. In these workshops, we encouraged employees to find solutions and lead initiatives so that together they could improve these metrics and the workplace.

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As an engagement specialist, Nellie Rousselle can appreciate the effect of looking out for employees’ well-being, especially during challenging times.

Her role at BioScript Solutions, an organization operating on the international level based in Moncton, New Brunswick, first meant building a recruitment strategy to help with growth, and a retention strategy to ensure teams are seen, heard, and taken care of.

Within her first year at the company providing specialty care to Canadian patients, BioScript grew exponentially by 250 new people. This growth allowed her to explore more deeply the best recruitment practices and coaching methods with leaders in the organization.

While they are based in Moncton, they also have teams across the country. When growth and team building was in full swing, the pandemic hit.

How did BioScript start using Workleap Officevibe?

In 2020, I transitioned into the role of engagement specialist. Part of my first task was to look at ways in which we could measure engagement and coach leaders on how to assess and improve our team members’ experience. So, I started researching various tools and processes. Workleap Officevibe was very easy to understand and assess what the platform offers. It was also something we could use frequently. From my experience in HR, including at BioScript, we were used to using more traditional methods of measuring engagement yearly with a 60-question survey. That also meant receiving the results months after survey completion.

Workleap Officevibe allowed us to see if there were trends throughout the year that our business was experiencing. Better understanding how our employees feel enables us to be more ready as a business to understand better how we could help.

How did BioScript help maintain employee wellness high during the pandemic?

We definitely increased communication and transparency with our team members. The cofounders and directing managers would host monthly town halls where all the employees were invited. They’d share what had been happening with the business, and what was coming, and really took the time to acknowledge that they understood that it was not an easy time. They took the opportunity to express how they appreciated that people showed up every day and did the work that they did.

They shared testimonials that our clients received from patients so they could really highlight what was happening every day and show team members how they were directly contributing and having an impact. We also added that layer of flexibility to the work environment. Depending on their role, employees could work either from home or from the office. We have a pool of team members working from home since the pandemic started and they haven’t returned since.

Some employees are doing hybrid work, where they’ll spend a few days in the office per week or month, then work from home the rest of the time. At the same time, we also have team members that must be present in some of our facilities because they provide care directly to patients. So, our nurses and pharmacy staff have been present in their locations since day one. It was really important for us to ensure that we supported them in their wellness and mental health journey. We added benefits and increased the budget for those benefits.

Want to learn more about Nellie’s experience with Workleap Officevibe? Check out the full interview here:

How did Workleap Officevibe contribute to that?

Workleap Officevibe enabled us to add that extra layer of sharing honest feedback and giving input in a way that we could collectively put together to see what our focal point should be, based on what our team members are sharing. We could analyze what we saw using the tool and prioritize from there.

When we launched the tool in 2020, wellness was one of our lowest metrics. I definitely encourage team leaders and managers to use the tool to check in regularly.

On the other hand, you can also look at your top metrics and celebrate them and say this is where we’re doing really well.

Now that you’ve been using Workleap Officevibe for a couple of years, what have you discovered? Is there anything that has surprised you?

It’s all more positive. I think when we implemented the tool, the initial reaction was that we needed to be ready and able to reply to and act on the feedback. This way, we could look at the information and plan around it. We have consistently high metrics since we launched Workleap Officevibe.

I know that my director and many members of the national team were a bit surprised that we maintained high metrics since we have experienced so much growth, change in structure, how we operate, and more.

That fear of being unable to maintain the culture that we had at the beginning didn’t last as team members are continuing to express that they still feel very much part of the BioScript team. We really see our values being embodied every day.

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How does lg2, the largest independent creative agency in Canada, manage to stay connected to their people and maintain exceptional employee retention amidst rapid growth? This success story reveals the challenges they faced and the solution they found in Workleap Officevibe.

Challenges

Staying connected to a growing remote team

As lg2 expanded, one of the key challenges they encountered was staying connected to their growing remote team.

David Legendre, the former partner and VP of account services production at lg2, highlighted the difficulty of getting a pulse on employees' needs and concerns in the new virtual work environment.

With minimal HR support, it was up to team managers to ensure employee morale and create a positive work culture for all.

Recognizing the need for a tool that would facilitate connection and enable managers to address issues effectively, lg2 turned to Workleap Officevibe, a people-first employee experience platform.

Workleap Officevibe provided a safe space for productive conversations, empowering managers to connect with their remote teams and make people-centric decisions effortlessly.

Solution

Maintaining open communication with Pulse Surveys

lg2 implemented Workleap Officevibe to help managers connect with their remote teams and make people-first decisions with ease. The team first started using the platform's Pulse Surveys to gather anonymous feedback from employees regularly.

This approach helped create a safe environment where team members felt comfortable sharing their thoughts and concerns.

The ability to express themselves openly without fear of repercussions allowed employees to voice their opinions and contribute to a collaborative work environment.

In fact, David shared that the tool’s anonymity made a huge difference in his team’s willingness to be candid when it was first implemented.

Understanding where the team stands

With Workleap Officevibe, lg2's managers are now able to identify team priorities and address issues such as workload management and process improvement.

The platform's dashboard provides a global perspective of team satisfaction, offering insights into collaboration levels and recognition. This visibility empowers managers to take proactive actions and implement solutions to enhance employee experience.

For example, managers can monitor when employees feel overwhelmed with their workloads or when there is mounting frustration with a certain process, like a handoff between teams.

Workleap Officevibe helps spot patterns so that managers and leaders can quickly course-correct. This visibility drives action, and to lg2, it’s what makes Workleap Officevibe so much more than just an employee satisfaction survey.

Making meetings matter

Workleap Officevibe's meetings tool have also facilitated structured and efficient one-on-one meetings by providing a centralized space to set agendas and track action items.

This streamlined approach ensures that objectives remain visible between meetings and that no issues were overlooked or forgotten. Ultimately, this makes meetings more valuable for both managers and employees.

Celebrating team efforts

Additionally, Workleap Officevibe's recognition tool, Good Vibes, encourages team members to celebrate and appreciate each other's efforts.

Manager-to-employee or peer-to-peer, the upbeat messages provide an instant lift to both the sender and receiver. And week-over-week, more people at lg2 continue to use it. David shared that they love showing each other appreciation.

The tool offers prompts like, “Who would you like to clone?” and, “Who can magically transform a nightmare project into a piece of cake?” Team members choose a recipient and add a personal note. It’s incredibly engaging and offers an easy way to brighten people’s day.

Results

Exceptional retention in a tough industry

The impact of Workleap Officevibe on lg2's employee retention has been remarkable. Despite rapid growth and a remote work setup, the agency's production team experienced exceptional retention rates.

With an annual turnover rate of less than 5%, well below the industry average, lg2 attributes its success to Workleap Officevibe's contribution to improving relationships and decision-making.

David Legendre acknowledged that Workleap Officevibe has become an integral part of lg2's employee culture. The platform's ability to gather anonymous feedback, keep team priorities in focus, and continuously evolve to boost engagement and satisfaction has solidified its importance within the organization.

To other managers facing similar challenges, David wholeheartedly recommends giving Workleap Officevibe a try. In the service industry, where the team's happiness is paramount, Workleap Officevibe ensures managers stay informed and maintain a happy and engaged workforce.

Learn more about how you can boost employee retention on your team with Workleap Officevibe's uncomplicated and intuitive features.

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For the last 30 years, Alithya has been guiding countless clients in achieving their business goals with the help of their innovative approaches and use of digital transformation. Founded in Quebec City, the company continues to grow thanks to a number of international acquisitions, with employees in the United States, France, and Morocco.

Francesca Lévesque, Advisor of Employee Programs and Human Capital, joined Alithya in 2018. As she so aptly put it, her role consists in arming employees company-wide around the world with the programs and certifications they need to thrive at work. And she’s well-equipped for the task at hand, having relied on Workleap Officevibe since the very beginning.

We chatted with Francesca, an eternal advocate for putting people first, who uses Workleap Officevibe to help her company engage and retain its employees.

When did the Alithya Human Capital add Workleap Officevibe to its arsenal of resources?

When I started working here, Workleap Officevibe was being pilot tested. The President had heard about it and felt that it was well-aligned with Alithya’s values: communication, passion, integrity, and employee well-being. As time went on, it became clear that the tool was meeting our expectations, so the pilot project was extended to Montreal, then Quebec City, etc. It all happened gradually, in tandem with our different acquisitions, if you will.

Could you tell us more about how you use Workleap Officevibe?

Alithya went from being a private company of 750 people to a public company with more than 2,000 employees based in several countries. It’s crucial that we know how our people are doing, like really know, regardless of their location.

I do an in-depth analysis of the results and other metrics, and I share a report every three months with my Human Capital teammates and also with the leadership. I want them to know exactly what’s happening on their teams and in the company in general. With that insight we can quickly establish plans of action to solve any challenge. I also take the time to read the feedback we receive to see if our solutions were well-received or should be revisited.

What are some of the metrics you track?

In the last two years, with the pandemic, we observed that our wellness metric was dipping. Sure, we had potential initiatives in mind, but for us it was extremely important to find out what our employees really needed during that period.

Thanks to Workleap Officevibe, we were able to get to the bottom of it, take action, and implement a number of concrete measures: we changed our insurance policy, we created a health portal, we were awarded the bronze level Parity Certification by Women in Governance, we hosted a doctor who spoke to us at length about COVID-19, etc. And our wellness metric went up by 0.4 points.

Something else we’re proud of is our “relationship with peers” and “relationship with manager” metrics which are extremely strong —it means we’re doing a good job at the human level!

What would you say is Workleap Officevibe’s greatest added value?

The data collected from the platform is used to produce reports, which are then transformed into initiatives. Employees are encouraged to actively take part in surveys, and they’re able to see that we’re doing things.

I take the time to analyze each response, by creating segments —age, place of residence, etc. —so that my reports are as accurate and as relevant as possible. We’re dealing with people here, with different wants and needs, and their voices matter.

What kind of impact has Workleap Officevibe had on employee engagement and retention at Alithya?

When you have a good relationship with your manager, when you know you can open up in confidence and engage in dialogue, that changes everything! We’re not numbers: our voices matter and we’re all in this together to find solutions. When an action is implemented, we monitor the feedback we receive to make sure the same mistake isn’t made again. It’s great for retention.

Also, we communicate everything we do, making sure to establish a clear link between Workleap Officevibe and the actions we’re implementing; it’s proof that employee activity on the platform can lead to great things.

How do you ensure your managers are making the most of the platform?

Our President is an excellent ambassador! For example, at the start of the pandemic, he created his own questionnaire to keep his finger on the pulse of our teams, to find out what our main concerns were, what questions we had… now that’s caring! But beyond that, I always explain to our managers during training that they can go on the platform whenever they want, to find out, for examples, what kind of consequences a certain action or decision had.

I observe the indicators very closely and I try to understand what motivates our managers to take action because I believe this allows us to address any challenges that may have repercussions across the company.

What do you appreciate the most about Workleap Officevibe?

The fact that communication is a two-way street, and that when used properly, we can achieve big things with high impact, very quickly. I believe that any employer who’s looking out for the well-being of their employees should use Workleap Officevibe. It helps on so many levels: trust, engagement, retention, alignment with the company’s vision… Our employees are in different countries, and in Canada we work remotely: with the distance, it’s crucial that we remain close to our employees and that we stay connected.

If you could describe Workleap Officevibe using one word, what would it be?

Personally, I would say that Officevibe is my baby [laughter]. More seriously, though, I would say “closeness.” We’re not much without our employees, and the platform allows us to get to know them better. We have conversations that matter. It’s that closeness that shows that our company is transparent and genuine.

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Kiran Gawde is the Director of Technology at Object Edge. With teams around the world, he oversees Workleap Officevibe for all of Object Edge and is responsible for their tech team.

Growing pains

Object Edge was built from the ground up. It had a close-knit culture that served the company well in its early years, when the whole team was together in a single office. In fact, their informal interactions were their strength – it was the basis of their success and helped them keep customers happy.

But when they began growing beyond one office, it became too difficult to transpose their informal culture elsewhere. They needed to see how employees in different locations were doing. That paved the way for Workleap Officevibe - and it’s greatly helped in that understanding. Best of all, their teams love it.

Bringing a company together – even when they aren’t in the same office

Six months into using Workleap Officevibe, Kiran noticed Object Edge’s overall engagement score was low, and not improving. He wasn’t about to sit around and let it worsen.

“We needed to improve our [Employee Net Promoter Score]. But the score alone was not sufficient information to work with. So we started tracking things and really diving in to Workleap Officevibe metrics. We pushed every manager to look at their teams’ reports. Workleap Officevibe really shows you the areas that you should be looking at - that’s where we started.”

That’s how he discovered the Alignment metric – and saw how it was impacting their performance.

Aligning from the top

His first initiative was to align the company’s leaders. Though the Company Vision and mission was long-established, Object Edge didn’t have a defined set of values.

“A company reflects what leadership is,” he says. “Object Edge had acquired the Brazil office by acquiring a company. The employees there had maintained the original business’ identity, and most of their tools weren’t integrated - they were more aligned with their former leader. It was the same thing with India - though it wasn’t a separate acquisition, the way people work in India isn’t the same as the way people work in the US. So to bring them together, we had to start with a leadership exercise to come to an understanding of our own mission and values.”

On top of monthly and leadership meetings, the company began sending out weekly values and behaviors emails to employees, reinforcing what it means to work at Object Edge, and helping their workforce feel like they were part of a greater whole.

Using Workleap Officevibe to unify

"It seems obvious, but we’ve grown from 10 people to 120 people since 1994. Some have been here 20 years or more. As we have an open-door policy, many of the tenured staff didn’t think we needed the companywide meetings. We talk to each other, lunch together, and so on. But with the offices in different regions, we needed these meetings - and they really helped. That’s when engagement started going up, and a bunch of our other metrics, too.”

Kiran’s bet on the Alignment metric paid off. Once they started focusing on aligning the company by responding to feedback within Workleap Officevibe and launching initiatives, all of their other metrics rose as a result.

Making managers stronger in their roles

Kiran also began to receive feedback about some of his managers.

Kiran pushed all of the managers to dive into their numbers but quickly understood that with new managers, the challenge wasn’t always in the numbers. Many of them had been promoted because of how good they were with technology and didn’t have any formal managerial training.

“With Workleap Officevibe, we could see exactly what was happening. We were able to take control of the situation and conduct manager training. I especially like all of the learning material that Workleap Officevibe presents, and how it gives articles to read to improve certain manager skills. I shared an article about Emotional Intelligence with the entire company.”

What’s next

With engagement up, metrics on the rise and a company that’s aligned on a single identity, Kiran says they’ve turned their sights to smaller but crucial metrics, like Wellness. Today, he says they’re talking about stress.

Creating space to focus on her career

Wise-Sync is a software company that builds integrations for syncing accounting data to the cloud – as their content manager, Eve is an important member of the team that makes those integrations shine on the market. She’s a hard worker who believes in the business as much as she believes in herself. That’s why Workleap Officevibe has been so crucial to her professional success - and growth - at the company this year.

Eve is part of a busy team and having a tool like Workleap Officevibe has been a game-changer for her. It has carved out the time for her to think about the important questions she doesn’t always get around to – questions pertaining to her personal development, her role within the business, and how she sees the company.

Workleap Officevibe’s role in Eve's career goes beyond the questions: it's a way to affirm that she is in the right role for the right reasons, helps her to track her challenges, and increases her desire to give Wise-Sync her all.

“When I get an email from Workleap Officevibe, it takes just a few minutes and pulls me out of my work to come back to myself and my place within the company. It’s phenomenal to be part of a company that cares about its people and how they feel, and by implementing Workleap Officevibe, it couldn’t be clearer that they care about us.”

Conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise

By leveraging her team’s Workleap Officevibe results, Eve feels empowered to work with her manager on their relationship. When they get a low score in one of the 10 Key Metrics of Engagement, it’s a chance for her to take the conversation about that metric offline.

“When you don’t have a tool like Workleap Officevibe within your company, you don’t feel safe to just go offline and have these conversations, because it can appear like it’s out of the blue. You don’t want to create drama. With Workleap Officevibe, you feel like you’ve already been placed within a safe environment that is willing to hear how you feel about the company, how you feel about your role and how you feel about your colleagues and your direct report - and I think that’s phenomenal.”

Eve says Workleap Officevibe gives her the courage to talk to her direct manager about what she would like from the company, and how that would help her happiness.

Working out solutions as a team  

Eve loves the survey’s fun design, its simplicity, and even the timing of the survey delivery email, which is a quick, welcome addition to her workweek– “like a friend asking you questions,” she says. But that’s not what really makes the tool stick with her: Eve loves how Workleap Officevibe has strengthened Wise-Sync from within.

“Having a tool like Workleap Officevibe is such a great reminder to track our progress and where we’re going. I think it’s really made us stronger as company because we’ve been discussing results together, and our management team has been speaking to all of us about how we can improve the culture.”

For instance, Workleap Officevibe revealed that the work-life balance in the sales and marketing teams needed some help, and already, her manager is taking steps to improve it.

With Wise-Sync's can-do management attitude, Eve says the conversations around improvements to be made have been productive and fruitful.

“Given the nature of small businesses, and especially the fast-paced nature of our day-to-day lives, we don’t always have time to nourish communication. A tool like Workleap Officevibe is what really plants the seed for that greater nourishment within your company.”

A desire to go further and to make sure all concerns were addressed prompted Tony Ticknor, Director of Technology at Minnesota-based ecommerce agency Irish Titan, to adopt Workleap Officevibe for 1-on-1s with his team.  

Ultimately, it felt like we’d sit down for a 1-on-1 and talk through some of those items - but we knew we weren’t getting to everything.

"Before Workleap Officevibe, 1-on-1s on my team were focused on whatever people could remember coming into the meeting, or notes they’d written on a piece of paper."

Keeping up performance while remote

When companies started going remote in the spring of 2020, there was a rush to target initiatives around connection and communication. Irish Titan, like the rest of us, launched Zoom happy hours, social Slack meetings, and even started a D&D group that meets (remotely) every Tuesday night. But Tony felt they were about to discover an even bigger challenge: keeping up performance at a distance, and he wanted to get ahead of it.  

“[Communication initiatives] are really good for team building and bringing people together, but you still have to drive that day-to-day performance. You still have to help people with goal-setting. You still have to build a productive team – there has to be a focus on that. With Workleap Officevibe [1-on-1s and goals], we’ve been able to stay focused on those items.”

Making 1-on-1s about goal-setting

That goal-oriented performance angle is exactly why Tony has stuck to doing his 1-on-1s with Workleap Officevibe. He says that face time is the perfect moment to look at how he can help his people progress in their roles and talk about what they want to accomplish. With Workleap Officevibe’s individual and team goal-setting features, he has an easier time focusing the conversation and keeping it productive when conversations get tough.

"[Goal-setting] been a great feature for us. I think with most teams, people goal-set, and then get around the corner a year later and pull out those goals and are like ‘Did you get there?’ Being mindful of having those goals and being able to check in on them and say, ‘How are we progressing towards them?’ makes goal-setting and goal-achieving not something we just do annually, and that has been really powerful.”

Finding the right one-on-one questions to ask & planning how to respond

To keep that continuous focus on goals – and to get important issues out into the open – it's been vital for Tony to make 1-on-1-planning a shared task. "The collaborative agenda in particular has really worked well for us,” he says of the shared 1-on-1 agendas that exist between a manager and each of their team members within Workleap Officevibe.  

Prior to the collaborative agenda, Tony’s team was using everything from Google Docs to Trello to post-its, trying to find a place where they could write things down. There wasn’t a consistent system across the team: everybody was using – or trying to use – something different.  

“We even tried to keep a record of what we wanted to discuss next time through Slack, and then we’d end up having to scroll through our Slack history to see what the topics were.”

The fact that Tony's team can now plan ahead with Workleap Officevibe has opened them up to deeper discussions during one-on-ones.  

"When you have a plan in advance, you have some time to invest in thinking about what you might say or what roads you might go down. That's definitely produced better and deeper discussions when we’ve actually been talking."

Conversations that flow naturally  

Collaborative planning ahead of their meetings is exactly what makes Tony’s 1-on-1 discussions less labor-intensive – while adding quality to the chat itself.  

It’s the act of planning out an agenda that he says works almost as well as keeping notes during the actual meeting - conversations feel more continuations; they pick up where they left off, instead of feeling like they’re starting fresh every time. And that’s not all: the agenda actually drives more involvement from his people.

“Since we started using Workleap Officevibe for 1-on-1s, I’ve seen more engagement in people planning what we’re going to talk about. I’ve seen people putting in items, coming prepared, ready to talk about their goals and ready to talk about whatever they've listed in the agenda. I think that speaks volumes to their thoughts about it.”

“Previous to Workleap Officevibe, I had more of an informal process for tracking my 1-on-1s,” says Kathryn Kellam, former VP of Sales and Marketing at Modern Marketing & Commerce (MMC), formerly Modern Marketing and Concepts. “I generally used Excel worksheets or OneNote. Sometimes, my notes would be in different places, and from call to call, I wasn’t always sure where they were.”  

Engaging employees with 1-on-1s

That all changed when MMC brought in Workleap Officevibe for its employee engagement surveys and anonymous feedback. The business wanted to look at how they were promoting employee health and morale and measure how well they were meeting the needs of their people.

But Kathryn didn't limit herself to the platform’s classic engagement tools – as an early adopter of Workleap Officevibe’s 1-on-1s, she jumped right in and started using the software to have more productive conversations with her people. MMC as a whole quickly followed suit.

On top of conveniently converting her paper processes, Kathryn says Workleap Officevibe’s 1-on-1s, in conjunction with its surveys and feedback, inspire topics of discussion and keep each conversation efficient. “Sharing the survey results with the team, on top of building them into how we work together, has significantly improved overall satisfaction.”  

Thanks to the collaborative 1-on-1 agenda, her team also contributes their own talking points.

One place for her most important conversations

“It works both ways. I add in agenda items throughout the week – especially if it’s something I don’t want to forget – and my team members also add in things they’d like to talk about,” she says. “It’s a great tool in particular when you’re remote and not seeing people on a regular basis - it helps us to stay aligned.”

The tool has significantly impacted both her team’s satisfaction and their performance within the business. With an engagement score of 9.4/10, they’re well above both their industry benchmark and that of the business.  

While Kathryn says the tool hasn’t saved her time yet (she says she looks forward to the time she’ll save planning year-end reviews, now that all of her notes are in one place), it has made the time she has with each team member more focused and productive.

A tried and true 1-on-1 formula

For Kathryn, a good 1-on-1 is all about transparency and feedback. Because she knows her team so well – they work closely together on a daily basis - her 1-on-1 questions tend to stay along the same lines from week to week.

She begins by asking about their lives outside of work, which is especially important with COVID, a time when Kathryn says employees’ individual situations require greater understanding and may present challenges. She then moves on to their priorities for the week, what they’re working on, and whether they need her help.  

From there, they head into Workleap Officevibe to log the Action Items that have come out of the conversation, assigning items to accomplish before their next 1-on-1.  

Making sure we have those specific deliverables laid out has allowed my team to meet expectations more than they were when it wasn’t being documented, because they have a list they can go back and reference prior to our meeting, and then throughout the week.

When they’ve repeated this formula for three months or so, Kathryn cycles in questions about professional development, making sure she knows where her people see themselves going and how she can help.

If both parties were able to discuss the things that needed addressing - positive and negative - and if their Action Items were completed, Kathryn’s happy. Add to that new Action Items and notes for next time, and she considers it done. And, with talking points, notes, and action items that carry over from week to week, she knows her next 1-on-1 is almost entirely mapped out for her already.

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.”

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.

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.