Key challenges
Company culture is Exegy’s North Star – the thread that binds together everything they do. But as Exegy scaled, the HR team found it hard to maintain the same level of intimacy and communication. When you get bigger, it becomes harder to give feedback. Exegy needed to find a way to formalize feedback and still remain personal enough to build that foundation of trust.
Exegy needed a scalable solution to identify insights and ensure employees had the right resources to do their job effectively. Beyond the demands of growth, the COVID-19 pandemic presented a new set of challenges for the Exegy team to navigate.
As Exegy responds to these simultaneous hurdles, here’s how Sparkbay helps them make smarter and more efficient people decisions, while maintaining a highly personal approach.
Generalized approaches to employee engagement don’t work
Your employee engagement strategy won’t be successful if you just implement generalized initiatives, without fully understanding the issues that are relevant to your team.
This becomes increasingly important when you have offices split across several locations. Giving managers reliable data and tailored insights have helped Exegy to improve employee engagement across the company.
Areas of impact
Sparkbay enables the HR team to form educated hypotheses to create solutions around areas that need attention.
Exegy uses Sparkbay for pulse surveys. The resulting insights have been critical as Exegy works to drive engagement and performance in the face of ongoing change.
Great people professionals have a robust toolbox for driving people strategy and objectives. Sparkbay is a key tool in the toolbox of an effective people leader.
Scaling culture
Early engagement survey results surfaced a need for better communication. Sparkbay allows Exegy to identify specific drivers that can help move the needle.
Beyond the survey, the HR team found value in Sparkbay’s focus groups. These give managers the ability to tap into the employees' collective intelligence when they want to better understand the appropriate response to survey findings.
Reframing the manager experience
Data accessibility and ease of use have strengthened the relationship between HR and managers at Exegy.
The HR team is better able to identify areas where managers are struggling and add these development areas to their learning portfolio.
It’s challenging for anyone to receive negative feedback, but this data-driven approach enables managers to embrace feedback. Managers can see the data across a variety of dimensions and read the comments to understand the qualitative context.
Managers appreciate how the platform enables people to be frank about what’s working and what’s not. This let managers adopt more of a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset.
Giving managers the data to make a difference
A solid understanding of your company culture and clear action plans lie at the heart of every good engagement strategy. This can be difficult to achieve. That’s why the HR team makes extensive use of Sparkbay’s manager dashboards to provide leadership in each of their entities with an accurate overview of engagement in their teams.
This helps to break down the communication barriers that exist when feedback has to be passed back and forth between departments, and makes it easy for managers on the front line to identify and implement initiatives effectively.
The HR team at Exegy are now able to collaborate more efficiently with their managers, and the managers themselves feel more empowered to make the right decisions.
Taking action on results
Exegy doesn’t believe in taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach to employee engagement. Instead, the company uses real-time insights from their feedback to identify the primary causes of employee unhappiness, and creates tailored solutions.
Not only does this make it easy for the HR team to focus on the issues that matter, but when employees see that changes are being made in the organization as a direct result of feedback they’ve given, they feel more involved in the decision-making process.
The HR team uses insights from Sparkbay to inform meaningful action. Great people work is a marriage of data and gut. Sparkbay allows Exegy to get curious in an efficient way. When the HR team starts pulling on a thread in the data, it points them in the direction of a hypothesis.
Exegy uses the lowest scoring items to inform team OKRs. Because they know where to focus, it helps Exegy prioritize their key results and the HR team has already seen improvements in pulse survey scores around this objective.
Exegy’s leadership team appreciates this visibility into company-wide insights. Especially at the highest levels, people want to know what’s really going on in the organization. Exegy wants to see the hotspots, success stories, and teams that are thriving. It’s important to help leaders recognize that watching trends over time is critical.
Responding to COVID-19
The Sparkbay platform has been a key part of Exegy’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Having these structures in place allowed for a smoother response to the crisis.
Sparkbay allowed Exegy to get insights into what was going on with their employees and avoid making assumptions.
Exegy used Sparkbay to help pinpoint where particular groups of employees might need additional support.
Sparkbay has given Exegy the insight they need to keep employees across the business engaged, productive and ultimately, happy. That means Exegy can continue to focus on the success of the business, without having to worry about the risks of employee turnover.