Transcript for "Product Pulse Vol. 9: The Manager's View of Awardco Engage™": Hello, and welcome to today's episode of Product Pulse. My name is Bronson. I'm the director of content here, and I am joined by James Goodman, the in the intrepid James Goodman. Intrepid is great. Hey. Thanks for being here, James. We appreciate it. Of course. We're gonna learn all about AwardCo Engage and kinda set the stage a little bit. Before we do so, though, please feel free to hop into the chat. I'm actually watching it here, and I will be able to pose your questions directly to the product expert himself, James. So tell us first where you're viewing from. We always like to see where around the world some of our viewers are from. So pipe into the chat there, and let's get that warmed up. But as we begin today, I wanna set the stage. Last time in award co in award co product pulse, we talked about award co Engage. We introduced it. What is it? That kind of stuff. And you were there for that one as well, James. Yeah. Remind us, why you're here as far as that because you are the product expert. Right? You built this. Am I am I Yeah. So I am over the team that has built all of AwardCo Engage from the ground up for the last year. So I do know a lot of the ins and outs, I will say. Probably all the ins and outs if if we're being honest. All the secrets. All the secrets of AwardCo Engage. So we talked about that in our last product polls. Today, we're gonna talk about a little bit different view of AwardCo Engage. We're gonna talk about what it looks like in the hands of a manager because that can be a slightly different from a user or anything else like that. So engagement isn't just improved by dashboards. It's improved by leaders. Right? And we wanna talk about how you can do that, how you can get your managers in there, what it looks like, some of the tools you can use, some of the really neat things that you have built in a WordCo Engage. So let's step into that manager experience and tell us, James, a little bit about your thoughts about why AwardCo Engage matters in the hands of a manager. Yeah. That's a great question. So from the very beginning, one of our core objectives with AwardCo Engage was to ensure that we were building the manager experience first. We wanted to make sure that those insights were incredibly digestible by managers from the very beginning, and then we built out from there. The reason for that is that managers really own, you know, what's gonna drive change for their team. They're the ones that are in direct, you know, connection with the people that report right up to them. Yeah. When actions are pushed all the way from the top down, they don't really target maybe the individual needs of specific teams. If we can empower managers to, you know, get their hands on the data itself, we can really drive meaningful and actionable change in an organization. I really like that because the managers are the ones that are doing that day to day work. Right? And so an admin of the Workflow platform can help design and do all this stuff, but the the power is really in the hands of the manager. Exactly. So how does what does that look like in the hands of a manager? Yeah. Great question. So I've logged in here as Heather Jones who is a leader at this organization. So we're not even going to look at it from a super admin perspective. We're just going to look at it from what Heather Jones herself sees. So again, as she logs in, Heather might see a survey that she's been assigned to take. That's always going to be available if it is applicable to your managers, whoever is in the platform. But I'm going to jump into the surveys experience itself. So from here, Heather can see all of the surveys that she's been permissioned to see the results of. So the super admin set it up so Heather could see her entire downline. But the super admin might set it up so that Heather only sees the results for a specific department or a specific group. Once those results are available to Heather, she can click into all of them from this page. She may have quite a few. She may only have one or two depending on what her specific permissions are. Right. So a super admin view might show way more than this. Correct? Exactly. This is tailored for what was it? The Heather. We're we're Heather Jones. Heather Jones today. Great. So this is tailored directly for Heather, and that's great. So she can see what's applicable directly for her. Right? Yeah. Exactly. And remove all of the noise of anything else. Yeah. I like that. A couple things here too is Heather can see the response rate specific for her team. So if she has access to a survey while it's running, she can see, like, how many members of my team have responded. Do I need to reach out and ask my team to, get in and take that survey? So right now, about 39 people responded to this last survey. She's got a 70% response rate. So she knows that she's gonna have a good set of data to go in and look at. I like that. That brings up a question that I have about this, though, and maybe some of you viewing also have this question. Let me know if you do. But what if you need to if you're not getting the response rate that you want? That's a great question. How can you get more people to be involved to respond? You know? Yeah. So right within the platform. And because all of these surveys are closed, I'm not gonna be able to see exactly the, available, configuration option. But when a survey is open, I can, from this drop down, select an option that says send a reminder that will only send to users who have not yet responded to the survey. Right? So they won't get overwhelmed if they sent it, you know, answered it already. If I took it a week ago, first day, I'm not gonna be getting a barrage of responses. It's only if I haven't yet responded to the survey that I'll see that. I love that. It's intuitive, and it makes it easier for people to respond as well. So that's that's how you can get more responses from that. And then we're also looking at, you can see poll surveys. What else are we looking at here? Yeah. So we'll dive into the results at this point. So this survey is closed. Again, I have access to these results. The HR administrator can control when that access is available. So if they want to send it out as soon as the results close, they can release the results then. This one's been closed for a while, so as a manager, it's now my turn to kind of go in and digest the results that are available to me. From here, I get again an overview of how did my team perform on that survey. What is my response rate? How many responses did I get? And I can start to dig into the results that are specific to my team, so my overall engagement score. And this is where we really wanna highlight, for a manager, what feels most important. So from here, I can see which which themes are most influencing my overall engagement, and I can start to see where we've done really well and where we wanna celebrate. Right? Yeah. Because you don't only wanna highlight the the wrong stuff. Exactly. The challenges. The hard stuff. Right? Yeah. Yeah. We wanna make sure that you're still seeing, like, where are you successful, and not just where can I, you know, make improvements? And we celebrate wins here at award cost. So we want you to celebrate these wins. Yeah. So what wins does Heather have here? Fulfilling work? Yeah. So her team did really well on fulfilling work and an understanding of the standards of excellence of the organization. I like that. And you can go a level deeper on these if you want to see the specific questions that are associated with that theme, how they performed against the organization. But, generally, you know, these are the places you're doing really well within your department or on your team. That's really cool. I wanna I wanna highlight two things and ask a question about that. So you said you can compare it to the performance of the overall company, and that's kind of benchmarking. The other thing I wanna talk about is confidentiality. How does that work? You know? Because we wanna make sure that anyone who's taking this survey or, you know, whatever, it's a pull survey, a full on engagement survey, Anyone who's using a WorkCo Engage, we wanna make sure they feel confident that they're not gonna be called out for something. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. We always wanna protect the individuals. Again, confidentiality. We wanna respect that, you know, we don't want you to be able to easily identify a specific individual who responded a specific way on a survey. So I'm going to click into recognition, which is one of the areas where there's some opportunity for improvement for Heather Jones' team. Like I said, she can immediately see where she performs against the company average. So, the people who report up to me generally performed about 11 points lower than the overall company score for recognition. We we highlight that too on both the places you're doing really well and the places where you have some opportunity. So you can say, okay. I wanna get to where the company is. I'm not shooting for a 100%. But if the rest of the company is at this level and my team is falling below it, there's likely other examples in the organization of things that I could do to get up to that company level. So that's why we highlight that gap there. Alright. I can also like we said, if let's say I know that within the St. Louis area, my female AEs are having a little bit of trouble. I can filter down to that. But what you're going to see is because I don't have enough data from that response group, we are going to hide all of those results. So I don't have access to any of the information about those respondents because it's below that confidentiality threshold. Again, just ensuring that we're protecting those individuals who responded. That's really great. That's yeah. Confidentiality is huge in taking these. Because I I know that I've been asked before to take surveys, and I'm like, I don't know if this is gonna be, you know, anonymous. Not that I'm gonna, like, say anything Right. Egregious or anything like Is my manager, like, reading line by line what I said? And Yeah. Yeah. We don't allow that. You can't see it here. Okay. That's really great. So you could drill down with the with the metadata in here, and you can see location. What else can you see if you wanted to? So it's whichever metadata you that you have uploaded to your system. So there's a lot of flexibility here. It's dependent on what you want to know about users, what you want to report on Mhmm. And then what you want to make available for your managers to see. I'm going to remove a couple of these, and we'll look just maybe at that AE group that we were talking about. Again, I can see their overall scores. I can see that this group performed a little bit better than my whole team. They're at a 12%. And I could and I can also look at that specific response distribution. I'm gonna clear all of those filters now. Okay. So we can pull back out. Yeah. Let's take a let's take a picture at my whole team. Okay. I can also start to dig into the specific questions associated with recognition. What did we actually ask about recognition on this survey? You're also gonna see, again, some of those comparisons. So where are we at compared to the company average? And then is this a driver of engagement, which we see that it is? You can see that right down here. This this is really influencing your overall engagement score. And we see that it's an opportunity. We performed pretty low on this area. And then you can really start to see, okay, where is my gap? Where is my spread across all of those different responses? So that I can start to identify how I as a manager may want to make a change in the team that reports up to me. So this is like if you have any hotspots or something that you're aware of or even you may not be aware of, this can uncover those for you in terms of engagement or participation or something like that, and you can spot those risks early. And what what do you what can you do after that if you say, great. Here's an opportunity. What do you recommend, managers do when they see an opportunity like that? Yeah. That's a great question. One thing that we really wanna highlight is we wanna highlight, hey. This is a place that we can improve. Go back to your team. Understand, you know, what maybe they wanna see or the reasons behind the the the reasons that they aren't feeling recognized in their organization Yeah. And start to, get some ideas on what maybe they want to see you do as a team, whether that's, in this case, starting a peer to peer recognition program or Yeah. Or something in the Oracle platform. Right? We're talking about recognition. What do they not see in the Ordco platform that maybe we could work, with our HR department as manager to to launch and and set up? So if they're not feeling seen or if they're not feeling appreciated or or rewarded, you can get that sentiment, ask them that, and then spin up a recognition program or some other kind of program that you have. It doesn't necessarily have to be in a ward co. And then you can do you come back and then survey again? What what kind of recommendations do have? Yeah. That's a great question. So let's say in this case we launched a peer to peer recognition program for for this team, or maybe it's a employee of the month program that we want to highlight members of my downline win within. You can work with your HR admin to maybe set up another poll survey just for your team. Or if the HR admin feels comfortable, you can empower your managers to come in and create those surveys themselves. So Heather, for example, is able to create an engagement survey specific for her team. So we know recognition was an issue. Mhmm. Maybe she comes in and adds a couple of questions. I'm gonna back out of here. We had a little bit of a Hey. Good. Cool thing I like about this is that this was all developed based on research. This is this wasn't us just saying, well, this question looks good. You know? This probably measures that. We've done the research. Your team has done the research. And with our center of excellence, and we have organizational psychologists on on staff that have helped us develop this. So it's actually measuring what it says it's supposed to measure. That's something that's really cool that I personally find cool. I my undergrad was in psychology, so I love I kind of, you know, I love kind of talking about this kind stuff. Yeah. No. We worked directly with a member of our COE to ensure that all of the questions are designed specifically to measure engagement today, is something we talked about last time. Yeah. We want it to be modern. We want to measure how employees are feeling right now and not maybe how we measured it, you know, ten years ago. Oh, yeah. For sure. Because that that indicator can change dramatically. I mean, you think ten years ago in 2016, things were different. Yeah. Exactly. Things were quite different. So things are going to change. So you need to change, you know, how you're doing that. So coming back to this, if you want to resurvey someone, create a survey, ask a question, Heather's doing that right here, right, as part of this demo? So Heather can come in and ask specific questions maybe around recognition. It does look like Heather's manager has limited her availability Yeah. In the platform. So if she can only ask some of those simple basic surveys Yeah. She doesn't have access to the engagement programs. Again, it's that granularity of permissions. Mhmm. So maybe she needs to go back to her admin and have them set up that program, or the admin can give her those permissions to run the engagement program. And maybe the maybe you as the super admin, the our viewers here, don't want to give that permission to managers. You wanna have a little bit more, I don't wanna say oversight. That sounds scary. But, you know, like, input into what people are doing. Right? Exactly. Because sometimes if you give everybody access, that can be a little bit challenging. I'm sure a lot of our viewers know that. But if you would like to, you also can do that so that they can feel empowered to survey their own teams. Right? Exactly. So there's a flexibility in the platform depending on how much you wanna empower your managers with Uh-huh. Or what you wanna own yourself as a super admin. I like that. You still have access to all the surveys that are being run. So if I come back out and look at my overall survey page, as a super admin, I would see all of the surveys that Heather created if she were to go in and create them. So I still have that oversight, but I can empower managers to do that process themselves as well. One thing of among the many that I really like about a Workflow Engage is that it closes that feedback loop. How often have any of us taken a survey either, for things outside of work or even inside of work? And you hear things like you never hear back about it. Right? Mhmm. You take the survey. You give a lot of great info. You're saying this is this is an opportunity I think or I've struggled with this or anything. Never see God. Any improvement. Right? This is really cool because it empowers managers to come back and ask more questions and say, we noticed that there were some challenges on our team about this. Again, it's anonymous, so they can't tell who. But we've noticed some challenges, so we're gonna try and do something about that. And then they can see that either in a recognition program or something like that. Did you do that I mean, I I imagine you did, but did you do that purposefully as you were building this product? Absolutely. Yes. I mean, our goal is, like, if you're just surveying and you your employees aren't seeing the results of their survey, if they're just sending those out to to the great beyond, right, they respond and they never hear anything Yeah. We know that that impacts overall engagement. We know that that really makes employees feel undervalued, unheard. Yeah. And so we want to make sure those results are being surfaced across the org because then it gives managers the ability to go back and say, hey. As a team, I I know we're really struggling with feeling recognized. What can we, you know, what can we do about that? What would you as an employee base like to see? What what would you as my team wanna see happen in the organization to really, you know, make you feel better about the way you're being seen as an employee? That's great. And one thing that's I mean, this is an award co webinar, so you're gonna hear a lot about award co. We're talking about it, this product. One thing that I really think is different about this, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this ties engagement data into recognition data, which we already have in the platform, which is something that isn't done outside of award co where you can say, great. People are participating in this recognition program, but our engagement is low in this area. And it's a really powerful tool Mhmm. To be able to actually build culture, incentivize performance, all those kind of things we talk about a lot. Yeah. Marketing terms, you know. Well, you're moving data in one place. Right? Let's say I'm seeing low work life balance or something like that. And, you know, one thing you could do or one thing we've done here at AwardCo is we've launched a an earned program where you can get outside and take a hike and you get points for that. And then you can see the participation in that program the next time you survey. So whether that's your next annual engagement or like we've said a few times, you run another pulse program. You can start to see if that's having the difference you want to really make on work life balance, for example. I love that so much. As we're looking at this here, tell tell me more about action theme scores as we're looking at this. Yeah. So this is all of the potential different drivers of overall engagement. So if we talk about, like, our core 19 question set, which I think I mentioned last time Mhmm. That's measured to that's designed to measure the broad range of different things that we know highly impact overall engagement. Right. Yeah. And then as we do the analysis up here, which we talked about a little bit, we're saying for you, your group, your team, your organization, these are the things that are most correlated within your org that you can take action on. And that's our goal is that everything here feels really actionable. I can, again, build a recognition program to make people feel more recognized, or we can do some things to improve overall work life balance. And because we're seeing that maybe those are opportunities for my team or my org, we expect that those changes are going to drive your overall engagement up. I love that so much. We have a question in the chat that I'm gonna post to you here. So this is from Claude. He has an access permission question. What is your opinion on systematically giving the local HR site adviser access to all results from a company site and its teams in addition to the manager's access? Yeah. That's a great question. And ultimately, it's going to be unique for each and every organization. And it's about understanding the trust you have in those leaders and what you want to give them access to and see in the platform and then having a conversation with them about the types of results that they're going to see and what that might mean. And we encourage you to work with, if you do have AwardCo Engage, to work with your CSM as you are setting up the program and understanding what that access should be based on your specific organization. Yeah. Love that. Great question, Claude. Thank you for that. Please continue to ask more questions as we're kinda going through this, but I wanna say, what else would you like to show us here, if anything, as we're kind of diving through that? Yeah. Again, you know, you can get into that granularity as a manager, whether you're, really interested in the places that you want to improve, like we talked about opportunities. You can also just go through and see how you compare it across the board to the rest of the organization. Oh, this is really cool. I love that. But it doesn't tell you, like, specific team, like you versus this department or anything like that. Right? Right now, it's just you against the entire org. So if you apply a filter, it will refresh for that too. So if you wanted to break your team down into different groups and see what their comparisons are. Interesting. So could you say something like, I want to compare, our Saint Louis, location to our London one. Right? Something like that? So Can you see something like that? Right now, you cannot do that, but it is coming. That's my next question. Great. You you teed me up for We are actively working on, a solution to make some of those comparisons. Yeah. You could say, I wanna know how, maybe my AEs feel against a different job title or, like you said, like, how do my US based employees feel compared to my Europe employees. That's great. That so that leads me into the the following question. In addition to that, kind of comparing and contrasting, what else is on the road map for a Workflow Engage that you're really excited about? Yeah. So, again, those internal comparisons are coming up. We're really looking forward to that. We are working on a solution for all of those open comments you might get on a question. So how can we provide a deeper analyst, analysis using AI to surface some of that sentiment from that open response data? That's coming out, in a couple of months. And then we're also moving into looking at broad external benchmarks and how we compare organizations against one another. And there's a few questions that we wanna answer there, but we wanna make sure that you are able to, again, see that context as an organization. We talked a lot today about the manager context, so me against the organization. Mhmm. But as an organization as a whole, how do I get that context as well? And that's something that we're currently looking into. I love that. We're we're talking a lot about that all over internally, benchmarking. Because you can take this survey or you can send out an engagement survey, but without that comparison maybe to the overall industry or, like versus like, you know, your size and your location, that may not be as useful for you. So, we're looking into that to make it make it even better for you. We wanna tell you what the numbers mean. Right? Without some of that context, the numbers are numbers. But then you can really see, okay. How do I compare? Where can I look for some opportunities to improve? And, you know, how much should I expect to improve? Yeah. I love that. So I'm gonna ask you one final question here. It's gonna be super easy. But before I do that, everybody here in the chat, if you have any other questions, please let us know. I will be happy to ask them to and pose them to James. But while you're typing out any answers or questions you might have, James, what is one of your favorite things about WorkoEngage? I love everything about WorkoEngage. What I'm really excited about is how we've done those comparisons. I really showed I showed a lot of that today. Mhmm. And like I said like I said a few times is we built it with a manager's view in mind. We didn't want to make it so complex or so hard to understand that, like, someone couldn't just get in and start to get those insights out. So by focusing really heavily on, like, the manager's view and the manager's perspective, we've been able to really crystallize those insights, make them so easy for anyone to get into the platform, see what they need to do, and then take that information and drive real change in their organization. That's the perfect answer, I think. It was very Great. Yeah. And we we Perfect. We didn't rehearse that bit at all. Some of the others we have, as you can probably tell. But thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate your time. If you have any other additional questions about AwardCo Engage, reach out to your CSM or to us. You can connect with James or myself on LinkedIn. We would be happy to chat with you about this, just give you more insights and show you more about AtworkCo Engage. So, James, thank you for your time. We appreciate you being here. Yeah. Of course. Always happy to come. And thank you all for being here, and we hope you have a great day. Thank you.