Traction on Demand: Winning the war on employee turnover
Employee retention is a challenge for any organization. Even the most successful companies can have a difficult time keeping their workforce engaged and satisfied. More than ever before, businesses are making employee health top of mind. In fact, Deloitte’s 2016 Global HR Trends Survey found that an overwhelming majority of those surveyed (85 percent) ranked employee engagement as a top 5 priority for their business.
Traction on Demand, a Salesforce consulting and application development firm, a Certinia partner and PSA customer, was recently featured in Diginomica for their unique use of technology to help keep their employees happy. The company has managed to keep talent turnover below an impressive 5% by making sure employees are at least 72% happy in their work. So how do they do it?
Introducing Traction Pulse
When it comes to battling employee turnover, companies try and implement all sorts of strategies – from extra perks and benefits, to expensive training programs. Traction on Demand has taken happiness into their own hands and created Traction Pulse, an internal data collection tool using Certinia PSA and Salesforce Wave.
How does it work? As described to Diginomica:
- Traction’s journey started with a small twist on an existing Certinia PSA application, which it was already using to manage team resources, project financials, billing, expenses, and so on. To create something that would add more value to the business and the individual, Traction’s team decided to add two simple drop-down questions to the timesheet interface:
- What mode of thinking were you in? (e.g. learning, teaching, executing, doing admin activities)
- How was it? (e.g. amazing, pretty good, mildly painful and brutal).
- From there they developed a small algorithm to calculate “percentage of happiness” and Traction Pulse was born.
The immediate impact was astounding. With Traction Pulse, executives are able to see the happiness of employees, as well as health of a project instantly, giving the team power to make fast decisions. If an employee is consistently rating a project or activity as painful or brutal, their manager can step in and diffuse any potential turnover warnings.
Traction on Demand’s CEO, Greg Malpass further explained:
When people are having a difficult time or working on a difficult project, rather than shy away from it or hope it works out, I’ll actually go grab people, bring them in the office and ask them what’s going on, what needs to change, and how can we help.
It’s facilitated incredible person-to-person discussions. People are surprised we actually look at the data. It’s driven some interesting career changes because we can see what people enjoy and what they don’t enjoy.
Traction’s innovative use of Certinia and Salesforce can be a lesson to us all. Solving turnover issues can be as simple as using technologies already in place to track sentiment and provide insight into what a workforce really needs to succeed. By using technology to listen and learn from employees, executives can quickly make changes and keep their workforce engaged.
Read Traction on Demand’s Diginomica profile to learn much more about their success with employee engagement.
