Findex is one of Australasia’s leading providers of integrated financial advisory and accounting services. Although it largely deals in numbers, it is built on the belief that every business has a story.
But what was the story of its almost 3,000 employees? What were its people really thinking, feeling, and experiencing when it came to working at Findex?
To uncover the answer to this question, the business decided it needed to amplify its focus on people. In 2019, it decided to be deliberate in the way it engaged with people to improve engagement and retention.
As the company began to dig into its data, it soon became apparent there was a significant gap in information. While the organization had access to reliable data on productivity, financial performance, and clients, Findex lacked robust insights about its people, particularly around engagement.
“We were using a pretty basic survey platform tool,” Jane Betts, Chief People Officer at Findex explained. “We had no sentiment analysis, there was no benchmarking available. Realistically, we were trying to look at the information and work out what we thought the right thing to do was, without any real science or structure behind it.”
It was clear to Betts and team that the information they were gathering wasn’t giving them the insights and the clear actions needed to improve engagement and retention.
“We had a lot of frustrated people, which is the perfect playing field to start to make some changes,” Jane said.
We sought independent advice from Gartner about the types of tools that might suit our needs. And it was clear that Workday Peakon Employee Voice was certainly seen as a leading provider in the market.
Chief People Officer
A trusted solution.
After evaluating a number of different platforms, Findex chose Workday Peakon Employee Voice to help better understand and engage its people. The tool captures real-time feedback across the organization using intelligent listening technology. It then delivers insights that correlate employee engagement and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) metrics to business KPIs so the organization can make informed decisions.
For Jane, the choice was easy. “I immediately fell in love with the features of the Workday Peakon Employee Voice platform; it had so much more than I’d seen in many other platforms that I’d experienced.”
Like many large corporations, however, the decision wasn’t Jane’s alone. To get organizational buy-in, Jane involved a number of senior leaders in the evaluation process.
They made it clear they were looking for a tool that would help them predict where attrition was likely to occur so they could get ahead of the curve and avoid the recruit-train-lose cycle that many organizations face. And Workday Peakon Employee Voice was a clear standout in this area.
“The real ‘aha’ moment was when our executives saw the retention and attrition prediction capability,” Jane explained.
From signature to survey in just 21 days.
Jane was pleasantly surprised with the level of support they received from the Workday Peakon Employee Voice team during the implementation phase.
“Our Workday implementation manager was absolutely outstanding from start to finish, and worked hard to understand what it was that we wanted to get out of the tool and was very practical when helping us to implement it.”
Jane was also extremely impressed with how quickly the Workday team got the tool up and running.
“From the time we signed up to when our first survey was sent out, it was three weeks,” Jane said. “I thought it was absolutely phenomenal that we could get a survey out in that amount of time. It really shows the responsiveness of the Workday team.”
Digging into data to uncover deeper truths.
Jane’s team was delighted with the newfound wealth of information on retention and attrition risk, and was also somewhat surprised by the information that was uncovered.
“Straight away, we had information that we never had before around attrition and retention risk. What was surprising was the information we were seeing debunked some people’s views on where the risk was,” Jane revealed.
While some employee engagement platforms rely heavily on a single data point—for example, a periodic one-way survey—intelligent listening surfaces the deeper employee experience truth through ongoing two-way conversations, and delivers an accurate view of engagement that’s always up to date and connected across the entire organization and employee lifecycle.
And this has helped Jane’s team pinpoint the real risk areas and understand where to take action.
What I love about the tool is that it doesn’t rely on the engagement score alone to tell you where there’s attrition risk. Behind it there’s a powerful engine that looks at all of the data.
Chief People Officer
Clear steps make it simple to move from insights to action.
Going from having very little information to suddenly having a lot can be overwhelming, and Jane admits it can be hard to know how and where to take action.
The fact that Workday provides clear, actionable steps on which actions will make the biggest impact helped Jane’s team move from insight to action much faster than expected.
“When you get your results, it’ll give you two or three drivers to start working on and provide practical ideas on how you can address that. And it even gives you a measure of how much impact it has on overall engagement,” Jane said.
Jane has seen firsthand the impact of making small, incremental changes has had on engagement levels.
“I’ve now got managers who are going to the source of where their problems are and focusing their attention on the right place. And we’ve started to see an overall improvement in engagement in those pockets where they’re doing it.”
Running a comprehensive listening strategy with a lean team.
Another critical aspect of an engagement tool for the Findex team was the level of support needed to get it working. Because the team is small, Jane needed a tool that would be easy to run without a lot of helping hands.
“I don’t have an army of people who can work on engagement,” Jane said. “Workday Peakon Employee Voice gave me the ability to run a very comprehensive listening strategy without a high overhead.”
Jane loved the “set and forget” nature of the tool as well as the automated way it delivers insights and actions to relevant people.
“Once you get it listening the way you need it to listen, it just does everything itself. It provides the information directly to the managers as soon as the survey closes, so it’s real time,” Jane said. “It gives managers not only insight into what people are saying, but also the tools that really help them to drive an engagement agenda to improve what needs to be actioned.”
A journey to engagement excellence.
For Jane’s team, the journey to improving engagement and reducing attrition has only just begun. After a phased rollout, all of Findex’s people leaders will soon be getting full access to the Workday Peakon Employee Voice dashboard, and based on initial feedback and high levels of engagement with the tool, Jane has high hopes for the future.
“We’ve already had some pockets of excellence: we’ve seen improvement in our reward scores and improvement in our autonomy scores as well. We know there’s much more for us to do, but we’re more confident going into the journey knowing we’ve got the right tool to tell us what we need to be focusing on,” Jane said.