Meaningful relationships are the lynchpin for authentic employee engagement. In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, we take a closer look at the challenges of connecting with others when it comes to the “distributed” workplace. Host Brandon Laws sits down with Shane Kovalsky, Co-Founder and CEO of Glue, to discuss how leaders can gain insight into employee sentiment and make data-informed decisions regarding connection.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Shane Kovalsky is the Co-Founder and CEO of Glue, an employee engagement platform that helps companies put ideas into action to support “the future of distributed work.”
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE IMPORTANCE OF CONNECTION
In this episode of the podcast, Shane Kovalsky, the Co-Founder and CEO of Glue (formerly known as Mystery) discussed the recent rebranding process and the company’s evolution. Initially, Mystery focused on being a virtual events marketplace, offering virtual team-building events for companies. However, over the years, Shane said the leadership realized “it wasn’t good enough” to put on a great event, so they spent over two years trying to figure out how to understand the ROI. “And what we learned,” Shane said, “is that we needed to understand the engagement problems of the company much more deeply than we had before.”
As it turns out, workplace connection was a key component. “We needed to know who was connected at an individual level, not at the team level. We needed to know who should be connected. And then the last piece, and this one’s really important, is who could be connected?” As a result, the company name “Glue” is a representation of what the product meant to those who used it. “A lot of people come to us and [say] that Mystery is like the glue that keeps their teams together, and we’re like, ‘Well, maybe that’s just a better name for what we do.’”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Fostering Relationships
“The average employee who’s onboarded in remote work first has 80% fewer meaningful connections six months in, and once you cement that, it’s really, really hard to break through. So it’s cross-team — it’s finding a best friend, sense of belonging, or connection to leadership. Those are the things that if you leave it to chance, they’re not gonna happen.”
Data-Informed Decision-Making
“Our VP of Data Science on the team, Shawn, is a former Harvard professor. She used data science to help do counterterrorism, and now she’s doing it to help actually solve connection to work, which is a funny analogy to make. But the team isn’t necessarily saying, ‘Here’s what we want, and how do we make the data shape and form our opinion?’ We’re looking for trends in the data and saying, ‘Wow, here’s where we can provide a lot of value.’”
The Limitations of Surveys
“What we found is that there are a few key limitations in survey data. […] The key limitations are, one, it’s only a point in time, and the average survey frequency is biannual because, you know, you don’t want to pepper your employees with surveys all the time. Of course, there’s continuous listening. There’s the daily pulse question. There are a lot of approaches to collecting this information, but the point being is it’s a point in time. It’s one representation from an employee base who might not feel like they can share openly and honestly about how they’re feeling, especially in an environment where they don’t wanna lose their job. But more important than that — than just being a point in time — is that it changes so, so quickly. […] The reality behind the scenes is every employee does not look like a straight line point-in-time trend.”
Being Proactive with Engagement
“The big difference between using observability and […] “the input data” versus just survey data is it allows you to be proactive instead of reactive. Instead of, ‘Oh, here’s the survey data. Here’s what we need to fix this year. This is all gonna suck.’ You can start saying, ‘Oh my gosh, look at all these early indicators. Let me take action immediately.’”
The Importance of the Follow-Through
“It’s not good enough just to help you understand. We need to go all the way through to action, to being able to actually automate a lot of these actions. And the question is, ‘How do you bring these teams together?’ Well, the answer’s pretty simple. So what are you already doing? The majority of the problem can be solved by just taking what you’re already doing and making slight adjustments.”
At the End of the Day
“When it comes down to it, what you’re trying to do is build a meaningful relationship for employees. And what does that mean? […] If you can build the right simplicity into the tools that you have, at the end of the day, it’s about converting similarity into familiarity.
That is all it is. It’s, ‘Hey, we have things in common. How do we find that out about each other? If we’re both metalheads, how do we figure that out about each other and start developing experiences that reinforce that over time?’ And vulnerability is a big part of it for sure. But vulnerability is just basically saying, ‘Oh, this is something I don’t often convert similarity to familiarity with someone over. And when I do, it’s really meaningful.’”
LEARN MORE
Check out GLUE’s new website here where you can learn how to foster the right connections and make the most of your resources today.