We believe that our remote community is our greatest strength. However, we’re mindful it comes with some challenges since we don’t always have the opportunity to meet and pick up on important topics slumbering below the surface.
Read the complete Staff Survey
Transparent culture
So, in order for our employees to give honest feedback, suggestions and hopefully some thumbs up, we’re organizing old-fashioned staff surveys on a regular basis. Apart from obviously acting upon some of the feedback, we take it one step further and also share in full detail the results of these surveys, not only internally with everyone, but we’re committed to publishing the results here on our website online for everyone to see and read what we’re about.
The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, it makes us publicly accountable as a company to act upon the points raised. Secondly, we want to create an open and transparent culture within and around WorkNomads. Giving everyone in or outside of our community a look into the soul of the company, even if the survey contains some ugly truths.
Surveys: friend or foe?
In today’s data-driven world, it might be more efficient to use the cool new machine-learning algorithms that crunch big data to measure employee engagement through email response times, network connections outside one’s core team, and tracking signals like how often employees update their resumes. However, we decided to go for a clunky, time-consuming survey. Why? Well, the purpose was not to measure the employee’s individual performance and forecast turnover risks. No, we wanted to get an insight into how our employees connect with WorkNomads as a brand, an employer, and how they see themselves contributing towards our vision: ‘A Nation without a country’.
Freedom & flexibility
WorkNomads is a young company with an ambitious vision that will be shaped by how our members work and live in our community. Understanding how our current employees value or not our proposition, will give us crucial insights to further develop or adjust the brand promise. First results showed that the overwhelming majority values the freedom and flexibility around our remote jobs the most. A close second is the vision of the company to create: ‘A Nation without a country’. These are great results confirming our value proposition. However, we must not be blinded by these responses, because there’s a lot to learn from the people that didn’t participate in the survey or in certain questions. The overall participation rate of the anonymous staff survey was over 50%, with an average of 94% answering rate. While the survey wasn’t mandatory, it would be great if more people would feel the need to share their views, good or bad.
Kinder Surprise eggs
Those who did share their opinion, made a lot of effort to give write-in comments and thus valuable insights. While not every idea can be adopted, turning insights into action will determine the future success and participation rate of our staff surveys. It will show input is valued no matter how big or little it might be. To demonstrate what we mean by this: more than 75% expressed interest in different project possibilities, roles or collaborating with colleagues across departments. As a reaction we launched the TalentTrek Academy: every six weeks, our engineers across all the disciplines present a client’s case study and discuss their work and bounce around ideas and solutions. On the other hand, one of the employees noted that having Kinder Surprise eggs during staff events might be a great treat and so it happened 🙂
Hopefully, showing that even cheeky suggestions might turn into reality, will lead to a continued mutual trust to share feedback and collaborate on building a nation without a country.
