In recent weeks, the novel coronavirus has forced many companies to shift entire teams to working remotely. For their part, HR teams are faced with the ongoing challenge of keeping employees as safe, healthy and productive as possible as they work from home in uncertain times.
Throughout the shift, tech tools have played an essential role in helping HR professionals understand how their teams are faring. For Anthony Onesto, a chief people officer with more than 20 years of experience, one such tool was an analytics software tool called Peakon.
“Using Peakon, we are able to customize survey questions around topics like our transition to a full work-from-home environment, the affects of COVID-19 and concerns our team members may have around this entire situation,” Onesto said.
But that’s just one tool that professionals can lean on. There’s an entire industry of tech-enabled software that HR leaders can use to monitor and maintain employee engagement. With that in mind, we caught up with Onesto to learn more about the tools his team’s using to stay connected.
What is your HR team doing differently in light of the COVID-19 crisis?
In making the decision to have the entire company work from home, we needed to rethink the common interactions that would be missed in the office. The first decision was to be as human and transparent as possible.
We moved our all-hands meeting to a weekly Zoom session where our CEO provides a message on the state of the company, department leaders give brief updates and feedback, and anonymous questions are encouraged via Slido. We have fostered increased connections with virtual happy hours and lunches, as well as leadership roundtables, all via Zoom. The people ops team also randomly checks in on team members via the calling features in Slack. And we continued our strategy of “surprise and delight” by sending work-from-home packages to team members with a note from our CEO.
Use feedback in real time to avoid assumptions in making strategic, people-based investments.”
What HR tools are you using to keep a pulse on how your team is doing?
We decided to use Peakon, which we implemented prior to us working from home, because we liked the user experience of their dashboards and their methodology around identifying areas of concern and engagement. The tool allows our people ops and leadership teams to respond to comments and have direct dialogue with team members, all while maintaining employee anonymity. Peakon also has advanced algorithms around identifying attrition risk and we love its integration with Slack.
How are you leveraging the information you collect from these tools to inform decision-making?
Taking a regular pulse of the company provides strong HR metrics. It allows us to use feedback in real time to avoid assumptions in making strategic, people-based investments across the organization.
In that data, we found that while our efforts were creating a positive impact, there were areas of loneliness and isolation that existed that we did not anticipate. We had team members provide suggestions on how to solve those issues, then we delegated those ideas back to them to lead. This strategy allows us to implement ideas quickly, empower our team members and expand our people operations reach with a small team.
