The Challenge
It has long been a priority for Schechter Wealth to offer customized attention to help clients grow their wealth and, in recent years, they’ve realized the need to offer employees that same tailor-made approach to understanding their experiences.
Embarking on an employee listening survey was uncharted territory for Schechter Wealth. While their leadership knew they wanted to uncover important insights about what their employees were thinking and feeling, it was difficult to know where to start.
Solution
Schechter Wealth satisfied their need for guidance with Culturebie, to bring to the surface actionable, meaningful data-driven insights about their leadership, employee experience, and organizational culture.
Schechter Wealth and Culturebie worked together to identify a solution that would allow their leaders to gain profound insights into their leadership styles, the impact they have on the company, and the areas where they could improve.
This solution manifested in the form of a 360 feedback survey for the Schechter Wealth leadership team. This survey offers a comprehensive 360-degree analysis of employee capabilities through feedback from those around them - self, peers, direct reports, managers, and others.
"There is often a gap between how we think of ourselves and how others think of us. The use of 360 feedback helps leaders close that gap."
Nonetheless, the feedback collected through a 360 feedback tool is only as valuable as the questions that are asked of the raters, including the leaders themselves, their bosses, their direct reports, and other employees at the organization.
“The Culturebie team took the time to show us the system and walked us through the entire process,” says Kate Schultz, director of talent at Schechter Wealth. “They helped us design a survey with questions that would give us the insights we needed to take concrete actions.”
While Culturebie offers the flexibility for companies to completely design their feedback instrument on their own, Culturebie’s customer success team steps in with people science expertise to support customers when needed. The first-time administration of a feedback tool can be daunting, which is why Culturebie provides one-on-one support to ensure that customers have a seamless experience.
“Culturebie helped us test the survey and walked us through the implementation process step-by-step,” says Schultz. “Their customer success team was even on the phone with us when we first hit the ‘Launch’ button.”
Culturebie’s support at the design and implementation steps didn’t end there for Schechter Wealth. Culturebie continued to facilitate the success of the survey with its in-platform features of live response-rate tracking and automated reminders for employees to complete the survey. With these features, Culturebie guides customers on how to maximize their own productivity.
“Once we got the reports, leaders received invitations to view their results on the online platform,” says Schultz. “The Culturebie team ensured our access to important data-driven insights and provided recommendations of where to take additional action.”
The aggregated results for all the leaders were also available for Schechter Wealth’s management team to review. It summarized the health of each leadership team member and gave a score to indicate the team’s overall status. This data became a vital resource to present to the full team to illustrate strengths and focus areas for the leadership team.
Outcome
After the deployment of the survey, Schechter Wealth gained a much stronger understanding of leadership performance. Leaders were able to understand the details behind what they were doing well and what they could be doing better, and then, most importantly, take actionable steps to create a more open, receptive, and connected workplace.
“This survey gave people a chance to speak up,” says Schultz. “Based on their 360-degree review, each leader presented our CEO an action plan that addressed their survey results. And, I’ve noticed leaders making genuine attempts to be more receptive and open to the feedback they received.”
Not only did the 360 feedback help provide leaders with tangible takeaways and interpersonal goals, it also helped boost morale amongst the team.
“Some of our leadership only got positive reviews,” says Schultz. “I joked with them about it, but even the good news—keep doing it—is so valuable to hear.”
As their first time tackling an employee survey of this scale, Schechter Wealth has been incredibly encouraged by their results with Culturebie.
“Our goal is to work with Culturebie again,” says Schultz. “We want to do another 360-degree survey with all of our managers and possibly all of our teammates.”
With the guidance of Culturebie, Schechter Wealth was given the tools and expertise to create, develop, and implement an employee leadership survey. Through their efforts, they made it clear to all of their employees that their feedback was sought and valued.
“It was so valuable to have Culturebie’s system and overall support with question crafting, administration, and understanding insights,” says Schultz. “They truly care. They never threw their platform at us, but rather took the time to find out our goals so that they could make all of this technology uniquely work for us.”
