Transforming the Culture at a Medical Technology Company

This Medical Technology company brings some of the most innovative medical and aesthetic products to hospitals and healthcare practitioners to help them transform the lives of their patients and clients.

Business Need

The business was preparing for a major reorganization and needed a better way to effectively measure the state of employee engagement to support the leaders in addressing key people challenges they were facing.

The Executive team didn’t want another “employee opinion” survey; they needed a science-based way to measure the emotional state and overall sentiment around the employees’ work experience as the company prepared for major organizational changes.

Like many technical companies, the business had traditionally promoted managers through technical skill and experience, rather than based on their experience of engaging and leading people. Understandably, there were some gaps in leadership knowledge, skills, and capabilities around the best ways to engage, retain and develop employees.

A preliminary HR audit showed that people liked their managers and respected their work-based knowledge. However, morale was declining as turnover was increasing. Top talent had begun to exit the business. Exit interviews revealed concerning themes of stalled career progress and people not feeling seen or heard by their leaders. There was an overall sentiment of people losing faith in the company’s ability to retain the critical people required to grow the business.

Spark’d Solution

The Spark’d Survey was a breath of fresh air compared to other traditional engagement surveys. It was just 6 minutes long with easy-to-understand language and immediately provided system generated action plans to every individual who completed the survey.

The Spark’d lens identified the emotional states of each person and every team in the company . It provided leaders with comprehensive strategies for shifting people to a more positive work experience. This in turn would would help them all generate higher engagement.

Meaning and Progress Diagram

The combination of 20 years of Spark’d research, as well as the science driven data, gave the Executive team exactly what they were looking for to guide the business change initiatives that would have a measurable and positive impact.

Leaders of the company finally had access to the concise insights they needed to know about how their employees were feeling and experiencing their work and careers. They were thrilled that the Spark’d solution also strategically placed ownership of everyone’s engagement into the hands of every person in the company.

Leaders felt empowered to meet with each employee to help transform their team and the company’s culture by focusing on each person’s own work experience from the ground up.

The Spark’d lens gave every employee an opportunity to see their own engagement level as compared to their team members, their company, and the Spark’d database of users globally.

This really helped people become more self-aware and motivated many employees to actively move toward increasing their own fulfilment and engagement levels.

The Executive Team now had a clear path, backed by solid data and science! Together, they began taking clear actions to remove the blockers to employee meaning and progress to drive more healthy engagement at work.

HR facilitated solution sessions with Leaders and Teams to connect people to their critical drivers of engagement to help them experience and sustain more passion at work. As one of the sales leaders put it, “Thank you for giving me a clear picture of the emotional state of my team with concise actions to take that will help us move the needle toward higher engagement”.

Results

After 18 months of running Spark’d surveys, meeting with teams to take immediate action on their input and training leaders to pay attention and respond to the 21 critical organizational drivers, the business results were phenomenal.

Employees reported that work was becoming a place where they could see themselves staying long term as they began to feel a sense of meaningful progress. Voluntary turnover reduced to less than 5% and the percentage of employees who would recommend a friend to work at the company increased by 40%.

Year over year retention of new hires rose to 100% with no regrettable losses. The employee participation rates rose to 95%, the highest ever recorded by Spark’d Engagement!

The Spark’d approach was key to this business transformation and provided leaders with the science backed data they needed to engage, retain and develop their team members. The CEO put it this way, “Spark’d changed the way we see our people, but even more powerfully, the way our people see and feel about themselves and our company”.

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What Is the Spark’d Lens™?

The Spark’d Lens is a ground-breaking discovery based on data and science – validated tens of thousands of times. Like a camera lens, it provides focus, using two important filters – Meaning and Progress; the key ingredients in creating passion at work.

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