BrassCraft, a subsidiary of Masco – a Fortune 500 company and a global leader in branded home improvement products – provides premium plumbing products engineered to the highest quality standard. Over the past 75 years, BrassCraft has built an international reputation in retail, wholesale, and OEM.
The Challenge
The “people” aspect of digital transformation
Being in business for the better part of a century makes a strong statement about leadership — and about valuing employees as a core organizational asset.
However, the world has changed considerably since BrassCraft's inception in 1946. While the products are perennial, the company wanted to up-level its customer and partner experience, which necessitated a shift in their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.
Yet upgrading the technology was only one aspect of their digital transformation. In order to successfully integrate the new technology, BrassCraft needed change management support to facilitate this sea of change in both people capabilities and culture.
People & Culture at BrassCraft
Adopting a data-informed approach
Enter Culturebie. Culturebie had partnered with Masco for several years to enhance their people analytics. BrassCraft Employee Experience Manager Helena Bardakjian says, ”At BrassCraft, our leaders care about data - and that’s true for both business and people issues. We wanted to build our talent analytics capabilities. We didn't have a clean system; the process was manual. I was pulling data from various sources to try to gain some insight."
BrassCraft was even able to do a comparative retroactive review, taking the same reports and populating them to see where the company was in 2018 and 2019, when they didn't have these tools available.
Solution
Leading people through change | Applying data rigor in change management
The BrassCraft team wanted to apply the same analytical rigor to its change management process as it did to its other people and culture processes. On prior occasions, BrassCraft had used Culturebie's people analytics platform to understand employee feedback and found it useful to get accelerated, quality insights about their people and culture.
For the digital transformation journey at hand, the team again looked at Culturebie's people analytics platform to measure employee experience and give quick and accurate insights about the key enablers and barriers to change. These insights would in turn help leadership plan the digital transformation more effectively.
Outcome
Visibility to employee feedback, at the fingertips
Bardakjian explains, "It's not just the statistics; it's a Story. Culturebie tells you your top result and shares the key takeaway in a way that’s easy to understand. For example, in the ERP change readiness survey, the application says, 'Okay, great work. 70% of your employees completed the survey. This means you can rest assured that your results are valid.” So, right off the bat, they're already telling me I'm in the right place.
"Then, Culturebie talks about people. While preserving employee data confidentiality, it pinpoints employee groups that may need more support and in specific ways. These results are not random. They are statistically valid, so we can rely on them. The Culturebie platform tells you exactly what's happening, and what to do next.”
Management finds it incredibly useful to have quick, accurate, and in-depth visibility to employee experience at their fingertips — which allows HR to be more responsive. Rather than spending time crunching data to extract something meaningful, HR can focus on solutions to issues the Culturebie dashboard highlights, already parsed with meaning in an intuitive, story-driven narrative everyone can understand and use.
The project’s change management lead, Wade Sutton appreciates the high level of fidelity Culturebie provides. Says Sutton, "As a user, I found the dashboard very forgiving. If I turn filters on and off in an Excel file, I'm afraid I'm going to break something. With Culturebie, I can go in and try to make my own connections or filter data, then very easily drop the filters and go back to the data set where I need to, without being afraid of ruining anything.”
Speaking of the quality of insights from the Culturebie platform, he says ”When I analyze employee survey data in-house, there is a risk that the outcomes are fraught with my own biases. The insights also don’t have the level of rigor Culturebie brings to it. The unbiased insights and easy interpretation of the analysis on the platform is very powerful, useful, and accessible.”
Plumbing the depths
The team agrees it's the perfect pairing: BrassCraft manufactures everything underneath the sink, and Culturebie provides HR intelligence that gives companies the equivalent of "the kitchen sink" in terms of informative feedback, elegantly delivered so that a company can make data-informed people and culture decisions.
With Culturebie, plumbing the depths of BrassCraft minds and hearts to improve employee experience has never been easier, more comprehensive — or more illuminating.
