What made you get Wotter?
We were at a stage as a business where we were collecting feedback and insight from our people on an ad hoc and organic basis, generally related to training or specific initiatives. We hadn’t asked our teams for a general ‘temperature check’ for just over a year and felt that now was the perfect time to look into whether there was an engagement platform that would work for Revere today, and as we evolve.
For us, Wotter appealed as it is an ‘always on’ employee pulse survey, allowing our people to be constantly providing us with feedback, not just at one moment in time, and giving us the ability to respond to these comments (whilst still allowing the provider to be anonymous); this is invaluable.
One of our key objectives for Wotter was to understand where Revere was with employee engagement, in terms of benchmarks, and just wanting a greater understanding of employee experience.
We’re a hybrid company with a work-anywhere policy, so another key thing for us was to open up the feedback channels more and make sure everybody sees feedback as a really positive thing. When you’re not having those corridor conversations, how can you make sure people can still provide feedback? Wotter helps to support us with that feedback strategy.
What do you like about Wotter?
Wotter allows us to understand how people are feeling day-to-day, whilst also providing us with trends and insights on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. One element that really drew us to Wotter was its use of AI – one of our business focus areas is to Lead on AI, and Wotter supports us in this mission.
Now, we know where we are with our engagement levels. We know the things that we need to work on. We know what’s going on with our actions, and those actions are all organic responses to the employee feedback.
With our previous platform, we would do the survey, we’d get a load of data through, we’d get out a massive spreadsheet, and then we’d have action planning sessions with each team and each department individually to talk to them about things that scored relatively low, and then ask them: “How can we improve this?” and “What does good look like for you?”
It was a lengthy process, and now with Wotter it’s just done straightaway. All our feedback now is on the pulse, live, every day. We’re able to respond live to people and embrace that feedback culture.
What do your teams like about Wotter?
Our teams love the thank you function. Especially for things that we would call ‘nano steps’ or ‘nano wins’ – those little things people do to help each other out or contribute to making their day better. This function has really helped to enhance our culture of feedback. This has really fed into our recognition strategy for peer-to-peer recognition, and we’ve recently gamified the function to provide rewards to those getting the most thanks each month.
People are not just using the function, but they’re going over the ‘thank yous’ they’ve received with their managers at performance check-ins. It means people can share all the comments they get about specific things they’ve been doing well.
Getting more feedback has really helped to bring our culture to life, but it’s also helped us see how people are doing during all the ups and downs of business. We can see the stats, see where people are and figure out what’s going on. And then we can use the action tracking to see the difference we’re making; for example with different social events, we can see whether these have caused people to feel more engaged. Being able to directly correlate those things is amazing.
So, has that data changed the way you do initiatives?
Yes, it has, the feedback we get has really changed our approach to be a bit more nimble and agile with what we are doing. It’s important to us that our people feel listened to and can see that we are acting on their feedback, so we’re always keen to learn from things like the comments that come through our Wotter suggestion box, this proves invaluable to us.
And what’s been the impact on your overall people strategy?
I think it’s changed a lot for us, now we’re more agile and organic with our comms to people. Gone are the days when you put a strategy in place and then just stick to it for the next 12 months. Now, we’re constantly developing our people strategy. There are still the main buckets, but we’ll be working a lot off the back of Wotter feedback and seeing what people want from us.
For instance, we’ve set up a library for our ‘Revere Reads’ after people were telling us they wanted more access to resources. We were recommending books to people, but with the cost of living crisis, we were seeing a lot of people send notes through Wotter saying it’d be really useful if Revere could pay for these books. So, we ran with it and set up a little library with its own checkout function.
What difference have you seen in the business since you started using Wotter?
I think the biggest impact has been on the little things, but they make such a big difference to people – and such a big difference to the culture.
It doesn’t have to be a massive initiative like a brand-new Diversity and Inclusion Policy. It’s about looking at the little steps that we can take to make people feel included and part of the team and our culture. And that’s the beauty of Wotter’s anonymous chat function; we can directly respond to people’s notes and say: “Tell us more about this. What would you like to see?”
We want to learn from our team members, especially if we’re already trying to take action on the subject they’re talking to us about – and Wotter allows us to have that conversation and find out what we could be doing better.
Is there an example of how that extra layer of feedback helps?
Yes, so with our previous platform, after we’d got the data and held our action-planning meetings with each team and each department, we saw that one of the areas people wanted Revere to work on was ‘giving something back’.
And in each individual meeting, we needed to raise the question: “What does giving something back mean to you?” Because knowing the score people had given us on this topic and knowing how they interpret it are two separate things. And it took a lot of time to just gather that bit of follow-up feedback from everybody.
Whereas with Wotter, we can ask that question directly to everybody in each team instantly, and then we can make an informed decision on how to take action – and we can provide people with the reasoning behind it.
Sometimes you need to dig a little deeper to find out what people want, and that’s something Wotter really helps us to do at Revere.
