Allegro’s mission is to build better businesses. The private equity investor specialises in turnaround, transformation and special situations. The team is packed with analytical investment professionals who crunch the numbers. But Allegro’s Human Capital Operating Partner Melita Swartz knows that success is not just about the financials. “It’s about the people. It’s about the culture, and it’s also about creating great places to work.” Allegro can only turn its companies around if it also gets the people strategy right. And that requires deep insight into what’s really going on for employees in each business.
Implementing Workday Peakon Employee Voice early in our investment creates value across our portfolio companies.
Human Capital Operating Partner
Harnessing data to increase the focus on people.
Allegro uses Workday Peakon Employee Voice as an ongoing listening and learning tool to get real-time understanding of employee sentiment in its portfolio companies. The platform tracks data on employee experience; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); and health and well-being. “It tells us how to motivate and reward people appropriately—and make sure engagement levels and culture are what they should be,” says Swartz.
The ability to bring evidence to the table is vital in a private equity firm. “When I’m talking to the business about people risks and challenges, I have to give them hard information,” Swartz says. “Since we invested in Workday Peakon Employee Voice, our directors have become much more focused on the people side—because they can’t ignore the data. Being able to show improvements in people data from when we buy to when we exit a business aligns with our mantra of building better businesses.”
Comments in the system give you rich data and so much insight into what people are really thinking and feeling.
Human Capital Operating Partner
Turning leaders into champions of employee engagement.
Swartz says that improving engagement requires input from the whole leadership team. “We extract Workday Peakon Employee Voice data to create leadership impact scorecards, ensuring each leader understands how they’re contributing to the engagement within their teams, the impact that they’re having, and what action to take.”
Swartz likes being able to tailor the platform to dig into specific areas. “The platform allows us to look at value creation from a people perspective across the whole investment cycle of Allegro’s investments. We can dive into segments of particular interest. When we’re interested in DEI, Workday Peakon Employee Voice allows us to hone in on the female segment or a particular age segment.”
Business leaders now understand the tangible actions they can take to improve engagement.
Human Capital Operating Partner
Linking improved employee sentiment with business value.
Allegro has made Workday Peakon Employee Voice part of its business-as-usual cadence, feeding an ongoing stream of data to inform and continually adapt its people and culture strategy to real-time changes in employee sentiment.
“Our next step is to align Workday Peakon Employee Voice data with other HR metrics, financial, customer and operational data,” Swartz explains. “When we can show the correlation between employee sentiment and business performance, it becomes very, very powerful for us.”