Case study
How a Teamspective Customer Increased Employee Lifetime Value Through Better Onboarding
This is an anonymized case study of a Teamspective customer. They started in the 2010s, selling b2b software solutions and now have more than 200 employees in Europe and the US. For the past two years, they've been growing fast, hiring 20 to 40 people each year. That means their team has been growing by more than 20% each year, a fantastic turn in their growth rate in the challenging financial environment. We’re keeping the company’s name a secret for now due to certain contractual obligations.
New employees became productive much faster than before - often being able to work independently after just 2 months, compared to 4 months which was the case earlier.
High turnover rate among new employees
The Company had already used Teamspective’s Engagement Surveys for over two years, to monitor their employee engagement. They had been able to ensure that employees were highly engaged, and quickly notice when any negative trends started to emerge. Now they have identified one specific problem area: new employees. It was taking considerably longer than expected for new employees to become fully onboarded, and too many new hires were leaving the company already during their first year.
The short tenure of new employees was hurting their business in several ways: many teams used a significant amount of time on repeating hiring and onboarding processes, while losing nice colleagues hurt their morale and handing over customers and product initiatives caused knowledge loss.
All this was hitting their top level success metric, employee lifetime value (ELTV). The company’s leadership team took it upon themselves to improve ELTV and decided to partner up with Teamspective to make it happen.
What is Employee Lifetime Value?
A metric that measures the total expected net value of the contributions an employee will make to an organization over the lifetime of their employment. Longer employment tenures and higher productivity lead to higher ELTV.
Automated Engagement Surveys and Network Analysis During Employee Onboarding
After identifying these issues, the company’s leadership worked with Teamspective to implement a simple, yet comprehensive set of actions to improve the new employee onboarding and overall experience.
1) Monitoring New Employee Engagement
The company’s automated Engagement surveys were sent to new employees on a continuous basis via Slack to anonymously check how they were doing. Integrating to the Company’s HRIS system HiBob, Teamspective automatically identified new employee results and produced insights targeted to improve new employee engagement.
The Company identified emerging issues for example in Teamwork and Leadership, and was able to plan improvements based on these insights. People team planned improvements to the Company’s onboarding process, and selected teams improved their ways of introducing the new employees to their teams and ways of working in a more empowering and supportive way.
The results were monitored monthly to follow the progress and spot further improvement opportunities in new employee experience. If any issues were spotted with new employees in the surveyed categories, they could be promptly addressed and proper support provided.
2) Automated Network Analysis
Understanding employee relationships was the last piece that completed the puzzle. In addition to measuring engagement, pace of learning and performance, the company wanted to further understand how the new hires interacted with others in the company. For example, were they efficiently building networks inside the company, and getting to know people whose cooperation would be essential to their success?
To gain these insights, the company used an automated version of Teamspective’s Organizational Network Analysis. It used the company’s pre-existing data from calendars, Slack and email to understand who the new hires interacted with, providing accurate understanding of their integration to the organization. This allowed leadership to clearly see if new employees were building essential networks fast enough and if any bottlenecks were emerging. With these insights it was easy to support the employees in relationship building before they got disengaged.
Higher ELTV With Faster, More Effective Onboarding for New Employees
The focus put into the new employee experience paid off big time. Using Teamspective’s solutions, the company was able to understand in detail how the employee onboarding process was working. That enabled them to make effective improvements, which significantly increased Employee Lifetime Value through two specific outcomes:
- New employees became productive much faster than before - often being able to work independently after just 2 months, compared to 4 months which was the case earlier.
- The average tenure of new employees started rising considerably. This meant that there was less employee churn, leading to higher productivity and lower cost of hiring and onboarding new employees.
The project was a resounding success, and is now running on a continuous basis.