Taking the Temperature on Your Employee Engagement

I recently sat down with Pierre Lindmark, Founder and CEO of Winningtemp to talk about the platform that they have developed and how it helps companies keep track of their employee engagement. Why do companies initially come to Winningtemp? The companies that come looking for a solution like Winningtemp are seeking a better way to stay in touch with how their workforce is feeling, to put it simply. Because employee well-being and engagement play a huge role in how effective, innovative, and successful they are able to be. But it’s rare they say the exact words, “I need an employee engagement platform”. Rather, they come with a specific need or pain. Many are tired of the workload that gets piled on by annual engagement surveys and the lack of insights they get from all the time invested, but they still want to survey employees for their important feedback.

More recently as a result of the pandemic, companies have been looking for a way to check in on the well-being of their remote employees, in a more regular and sustainable way. In April 2020, we saw that the usage of our product shot up 300% — Winningtemp was being used as a touchstone for companies to understand how employees were feeling, from a distance. Many companies have joined since for exactly this reason. And other companies might have a more advanced employee experience strategy, but they are seeking a measurement tool that can help them understand if their strategy is working and why — and what they can do to make it even better. What makes Winningtemp stand out from its competitors? Ease of use is at the top of the list. Our platform has a really advanced technical underbelly, and we are constantly sharpening our AI and engagement algorithms. But that’s not what our customers are actually interested in for their day-to-day work.

What they want is to understand, at a single glance, how their people are doing and what exactly they should focus on to improve everyone’s experience at work. Our temperature dashboard gives you this comprehensive overview in a split second. But we’ve gone 5 steps beyond this so you don’t even need to open the platform to understand how employees are feeling. Winningtemp distills “just in time” advice and sends it directly to you. So as a manager or leader you know exactly what you need to act on to provide support or course-correct if an issue is starting to arise. It’s this reduction in a leader’s “time to action” that makes Winningtemp unique. Another thing that makes us stand out is how easy Winningtemp customers find it to keep up a high survey response rate amongst their employees. People like engaging with our surveys and with our platform. Our AI tailors each pulse survey to individual employees, so the questions you get are extra relevant to your unique experience at work. And you know that when you see that first Winningtemp question in your inbox that you’ll be able to complete the rest of the survey in around 15 seconds. So thanks to all of this data, you get highly accurate and diverse information about employee well-being and performance. How are the results presented to organizations? We have both built a web-based platform and an app, where you can go and see the “temperature” of your workforce or your specific team on a scale of 1-10. We have 9 standard categories — which are the nine factors scientific research has found impact employee experience the most.

In your temperature dashboard, you can also see any custom categories that you’ve created. So for example, if you want to see how stressed everyone is feeling, you can look at your ‘Work Situation category’. “Look at that — it’s 6.8, that’s really low for us, people are stressed right now.” Why? You can go into responses, and you’ll maybe see a lot of red around the question ‘Do you feel that you have a reasonable workload?’ Then you know you need to work with your managers to see if they need support in re-prioritizing tasks for their teams. You can always check in on this overview, but you will also get the most important insights from the temperature data delivered to you automatically. In this instance, you would get a message saying the Work Situation with recommendations about the right next steps to take.

So Winningtemp suits both active and passive involvement in employee experience very well and thus can be used by a really wide range of organizations, with different capacities when it comes to HR. How can organizations utilize the data provided? Winningtemp does something that is quite remarkable if we compare it to where we were 10 years ago — it provides hard numbers for soft values that HR teams and leaders can really work with. You can use the data you’re getting to set targets for yourself and track progress. So, say your Leadership score is currently at 7.2 and you feel it’s worth the investment of resources to improve this score. You want to be at 8 by the end of the year. What are some initiatives you want to take to help you get there? Using Winningtemp’s Actions feature you can map out each of these initiatives and the people involved. As you go, you will get notifications about significant developments around leadership, or you can open up your Winningtemp app to check the real-time score. Will you hit your target, or do you need to add more coal to the fire?

Our platform lets you know exactly where you stand in relation to your goals for employee experience. And it sounds rather simple, but the anonymous text-based feedback you get from Winningtemp — which is to say the written comments from employees — is hugely impactful and powerful. Both for them to be able to express themselves openly and for your managers and HR team to read. Such honest information doesn’t always come through in one-to-one meetings. You can use this data to catch issues or concerns early before they snowball into bigger problems, or in the worst case, an employee might leave because of an issue you could have eliminated if you caught it earlier. Can you share a case study with us? Sure, let’s take the London-based practice Morrison Wealth. They really prioritized a collaborative and inclusive company culture, and they were offering regular feedback opportunities to their staff, but in a more manual way. The problem was that they were scaling, and their growth meant that they needed a more fit-for-purpose solution if they were to continue with their high-feedback, high-engagement culture. The solution was to start using a platform that would give them visibility into how everyone was feeling and an easy way to track the pulse of the business, as well as offer efficient channels for feedback. The result is that they’ve been able to grow while their employees report feeling supported and heard by management. 

They also mentioned that Winningtemp has been a big help for their line managers, as the data lets them have richer discussions in their one-to-ones with their team members. Start getting better data about how your employees are feeling — book a 1:1 walk-through of Winningtemp here.