Empowering Employees While Driving Meaningful Culture Changes
THE BACKGROUND
Arctic IT had a wholly distributed workforce scattered across five time zones. Upon realizing they had no formal way to foster employee happiness, they sought out TINYpulse to capture feedback and improve recruitment and retention.
With employees working collaboratively over five different time zones and managing high customer expectations, it is never a dull moment at Arctic IT. As an IT-based professional services firm, there are always tremendous demands on employee talent. We are naturally reactive but always looking for ways to be proactive as well.
In October of 2013, a cross-functional leadership team was created to develop strategic goals for the organization to scale. In our first meeting, we realized we needed a way to impact employee happiness to yield stronger employee recruitment and retention numbers. TINYPulse was recommended by a hired facilitator and off we were on our quest for high Employee Happiness scores!.
“TINYpulse is the ultimate trio: accessible, easy, and quick.”
Sharon Miller, Senior RecruiterCREATING QUANTIFIABLE CULTURE IMPROVEMENTS
Arctic IT uses TINYpulse’s longitudinal happiness question to set management team goals for improving employee sentiment. Via survey feedback, the team realized employees wanted greater role clarity and implemented a variety of changes yielding a 20% increase in overall happiness.
One of our 2015 Fiscal Year strategic initiatives is to continue improving our bi-monthly happiness score by establishing specific score and participation goals. Our scores and participation rates have varied over time so it was important to create a stable benchmark to work towards. Our employees shared consistent feedback about wanting more clarity about their roles and functions. We heard comments like “I don’t know what my next step is at this company” or “Who do I go to for certain issues?” Our employees were confused about how to get the information they needed while spreading across the country.
We did a business unit realignment to make sure we had the right people in the right team to align skills, experience, and tactical focus. We also made sure we had job descriptions in place for everyone, including those who never had one. We wanted to bring clarity to each team member about their responsibilities and expectations. And now we’re focusing on opportunities for intra-office collaboration.
All of this has paid off. Our happiness scores has increased regularly since implementing these improvements.
We’re constantly evolving and looking to empower our employees to help set our strategy and focus our direction. Cheers for Peers tool and Custom questions have been great for this.
Sharon Miller, Senior RecruiterEMPOWERING EMPLOYEES & EMBRACING CHANGE
Seeking a collaborative decision-making process, the leadership team leverages TINYpulse's custom question and Cheers features to actively involve employees in major company evolutions and improvements.
We’re constantly evolving and looking to empower our employees to help set our strategy and focus our direction. Cheers for Peers tool and Custom questions have been great for this.
For instance, the leadership team recently released our Core Values, but we knew it couldn't be a top-down decision. Employees had to embrace them too. So, we announced the new values with a contest challenge. Employees were encouraged to give each other Cheers and describe how the behavior they were celebrating synced up with one of our values. We gave away gift cards through a drawing. It was a huge hit and got our values top-of-mind in no time.
TINYpulse has also been great to know which improvement areas to focus on. We used TINYpulse to identify four to five key trends impacting our workforce and then used a custom question to have our employees rate these trends from most to least important. Our leadership team will greatly factor in this feedback when setting priorities. We know when we collaboratively make decisions we'll have a more informed process and more buy-in across the board.
