Workato

The Problem

Initially, the team at Workato was looking for a survey tool to support them during a phase of rapid growth. They needed something that would allow employees to share their opinions anonymously, giving valuable honest feedback to the people team and leadership to help inform initiatives. As Jessalyn Klein, Head of Talent Management, and Jessie Martin, Senior Manager TA Programs and People Experience, recall, when the team was very small, employees had an easier time exchanging ideas and feedback. However, the company’s rapid growth brought new challenges, and they noticed that people were not freely commenting and contributing as they once did.

The Workato team did not want to lose valuable insights as the company grew, and they were keen to ensure that every single employee had a voice, so they decided to invest in an employee engagement platform.

Initially, they partnered with a different employee engagement vendor, but realized that it wasn’t the right fit for them, and they required a greater degree of customization from a tool. They needed to be able to customize survey questions rather than relying on a pre-determined catalog. They also wanted to choose their own frequency for running surveys, and importantly, they wanted to partner with a platform with fast and focused customer support.
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“Initially, we realized we needed a centralized place to collect employee feedback on different topics, and we also needed to have the option for people to be anonymous. Not everyone feels comfortable sharing their opinion, especially because we grew really fast, and the issues became more complex. 

At first, we tried out another survey platform, but it didn’t work well for us. It auto-calculated eNPS not to industry standard, and we were bound to use the standard set of questions and frequency of surveys they provided. We needed something customizable that would meet our needs and where we’re at as a company.

Leapsome was the right fit because it solved our initial need to listen to employee sentiment, but it also offered the customizability we were looking for.”

The Solution

The team evaluated a few different solutions, including Lattice and Qualtrics. Ultimately they came across Leapsome and, after evaluating the platform, realized that it could offer them the customization they needed. On top of that, Leapsome offered an all-in-one approach to people enablement and would give them the ability to eventually expand survey results into further action by including other modules such as goals and reviews.
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“We wanted a tool we could grow into. We liked the idea of it not being solely for surveys, and Leapsome had the option to expand into performance management, learning, and goal-setting. 

We’re actually anticipating to use these modules in the coming years. We wanted to make sure we didn’t have to change one product after another or have to buy five products when instead we could just have one.”

Ultimately Leapsome checked all the boxes for the Workato team, including

• A full suite of people enablement tools to expand into
• An intuitive and easy-to-use interface
• Comprehensive and customizable survey capabilities
• A package of tools that they actually had use for, at a fair price
• Dedicated customer support and a two-way partnership

Interconnected performance management & survey analytics

One aspect of the Leapsome platform that really appealed to the Workato team was the ability to categorize survey scores by performance metrics. When using the Leapsome Survey and Review module in combination, the survey heatmap can be segmented by performance quantiles. This allows people teams to view the average scores given by their high and low performers, enabling them to uncover the issues that the highest-performing employees care about and address reasons for inefficiencies or lower productivity in lower performers.
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“The ability to categorize responses from employees based on performance ratings while maintaining anonymity is a big deal for us.

The heatmap allows us to identify which feedback is coming from our high- versus low-performing employees or from more tenured versus brand-new employees. Every group is speaking from a different perspective, and we can identify what issues are important to our high-performers and what low-performers might be missing to be more productive. The performance management module in Leapsome gives additional context and adds a lot more insight to the feedback. ”

Gathering valuable feedback with culture and pulse surveys

Like many other companies in the SaaS space, Workato is facing the repercussions of current macroeconomic challenges, which reinforced the importance of listening to employee feedback, understanding how this climate impacts sentiment, and implementing measures focused on supporting the team and keeping up morale.

Jessalyn, Jessie, and the rest of the people team started the process by running a culture survey in Leapsome. They wanted to gain an understanding of how sentiment had changed over time and identify any emerging themes or trends.

They also conducted a pulse survey with Leapsome within the HR team. There had recently been rapid changes within that team — from new people joining to structural updates — so Jessalyn and Jessie, along with the Chief People Officer, wanted to specifically understand how that group was adapting to the changes and where they needed additional support.

The Result

With Leapsome, the Workato team has found a tool that fully meets their needs in terms of usability and customizability, and the team appreciates being able to build out a custom integration to their HRIS, Namely, via API.

A true partnership and support network

The Workato team wanted a provider that was both experienced in the market but also capable of giving individualized support to their customers.

"Leapsome has great customer service. They’ve been super responsive to the feedback and their functionality and support has helped us solve specific problems. We didn’t have that kind of partnership with our previous provider."

One of the features the Workato team really like is the ability for employees to leave anonymous comments, as this is the best way to get honest and transparent feedback. When they started working with Leapsome, this feature wasn’t available yet, and they used a workaround. Then Leapsome released the anonymous suggestion box, in part due to the feature requests from Workato and other customers. Jessie and Jessalyn are grateful for how responsive Leapsome was to their requests and are happy to have built such a trusted relationship with their CSM and the rest of the Leaspome team.

They now notice that employees are actively using the suggestion box, and they can source valuable insights and feedback from it while employees feel they can safely share anything on their minds.
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"Customer Service at Leapsome has been huge for us. They’ve been very responsive to our feedback. Even just beyond the customer support, the help center within the platform is quick and responsive, and the answers are accurate and clear.

Overall it’s been a very positive experience. Sometimes when you use a software product, the support can feel almost robotic; you’re almost not sure if you’re getting an answer from a person or an AI. With Leapsome, the feedback is very personalized; not only is my problem being resolved, but it’s also very specific to what I’m asking and looking for. I can’t speak more highly about the customer support at Leapsome."

What’s next for Workato and Leapsome?

The HR pulse survey has helped the team at Workato understand how people respond to the changes within their teams and roles. They identified some knowledge gaps in teams where managers or key people have left, and they also noticed that there needed to be more clarity in the teams on the overall vision and goal of the transformation. The survey served as an important discovery phase that helped them identify issues early on. They’re now able to work on initiatives to bring more clarity to people and fully enable them in their new roles. Running this survey after such a big structural change was essential to avoid future losses in productivity, employee engagement, and well-being.

"We’re still in the process of implementing some of the things that we were surveying for and trying to communicate to the team. As far as qualitative feedback, we’ve had really strong participation. People wanted to let us know where they stood in the organization and really leaned into the opportunity to let us know how they felt about the transformation. It also helped inform leadership that we need to slow down with our timeline for the HR transformation.”

Ad hoc surveys like the one Jessie and Jessalyn conducted within their team can be incredibly helpful guides when working on large projects as it allows the project managers to iterate on timelines and adjust plans accordingly to achieve optimal results.

In the future, they want to work on a new annual engagement survey that uses their own customized questions alongside Leapsome’s benchmarking ones. Ultimately the team wants to work towards using various different surveys to identify trends and source better data on turnover rates and eNPS. This also includes plans for onboarding and exit surveys to understand the employee experience and reasons people might have for leaving.

Apart from an overhaul of its survey and engagement strategy, Workato plans to roll out additional Leapsome modules, including Reviews and Goals.

They are continuously working on initiatives they’ve identified based on the feedback they’ve received. As the SaaS space is still experiencing challenging times, it is becoming more important than ever to listen to employees and give them the support they need to remain productive and engaged — not just for Workato.
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