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For countless HR leaders and people managers, validating the impact of strategies that don't directly hit the financial KPIs can be an uphill battle. Consider initiatives like:
- Team restructures aimed at boosting cohesion and reducing friction
- Systems and process improvements to cut down employee frustration
- L&D programs to help your people thrive
- Onboarding initiatives to improve speed to competency
We get it. You can sense the positive ripples these initiatives create within the team, but that impact seems impossible to quantify. And the result? Potentially transformative ideas are either shelved or their true impact goes unrecognised.
Understanding Cause and Effect: A Foundation for Building Better Teams with Ploomo
After struggling to understand the true impact of our own people initiatives that helped shape teams, we developed Ploomo. Our platform is engineered to turn your intuitive sense of impact into data-backed insights. Our daily micro-data collection is the backbone of this platform. Seamlessly integrating with Slack or Teams, our approach allows us to collect perspectives from every team member with over 90% response rates. The data collected is used to calculate live sentiment across roles, relationships and cultures for each team member.
From Guesswork to Empirical Evidence: How Ploomo Makes the Difference
Using this data, you can start to understand and validate the impact of initiatives that are being rolled out across your team. With the data updating in real-time, you can also quickly adapt your strategy if unforeseen challenges emerge. This can be applied both to initiatives that impact all team members at a single point in time (e.g. team restructuring) and initiatives that impact team members across time (like optimised onboarding or leadership coaching).
Imagine a Talent manager rolling out a new onboarding program across the organisation. The change is designed to increase the way new hires connect with their team. Typically, a manager would have to keep an eye on a broad number like retention over an 8-12 month period to begin to understand the impact of their changes. This presents several challenges:
- Retention is impacted by a lot of different factors, making it hard to know which parts of any change can be attributed to the onboarding program.
- Getting meaningful feedback takes a long time, making it hard or impossible to make adjustments.
With Ploomo, since the Talent manager is targeting team connection with their onboarding change, they can compare new starters' "relationship sentiment" to quickly understand the impact of their change in just three steps.
- Create a benchmark from historical data - see how new joiners' relationship sentiment evolved in the first six months of employment before the manager rolled out the program.
- Real-time monitoring of new joiners - stay on top of how the new initiative impacts team members by comparing their live sentiment against the historical benchmark.
- Build a deeper understanding of the change to evolve your approach - compare how different groups within your team (e.g. roles or departments) are responding to the new initiative.
This is just one powerful application of the platform. In the coming posts, we'll explore different ways you can bring together this data to quantify impact across a number of areas.
