Real-time employee insights during accelerated growth

Groov: James, could you introduce yourself?

James Sampson: I'm the founder and CEO of FileInvite. So we're a secure document platform for requesting information that's sensitive of, of nature, often used in mortgage and financing applications to get all the documents that lenders and banks need to process loans.

How has getting real-time insights about your staff helped FileInvite so far?

James: So it allows me as a manager and a leader to check in on them from a health and wellbeing perspective as well as monitoring their workload. And, it can help adjust some of the management style based on what's going on for them personally and within the business. And in a wider context, it's been useful to get more aggregate results to see various things as, different events in the business happen. And you can check on the more aggregate health of, the employee base as a whole. The data is just fantastic to be able to see in real time what's going on both at an individual and a corporate level. 

Have the insights had an impact on how you, or your leaders, communicate?

James: ​Yeah, definitely on a, on a one to one basis as a manager, I find knowing the team members emotional state, you can, press in on, on specific areas during one on ones or, allow a little bit more space if need be, that's been really useful. Rather than having to probe around, you have a baseline of knowing, where they're at based, based on a daily check in. 

And on the more wider context as a company, it's been useful from a validating perspective. We've had a couple of high impact events go through the business and being able to, gauge after the fact, how people were feeling before, through, and after has been really useful and that can help you make adjustments for, the next time you're, you're going through, other high impact events in the business.

Talya, over to you!

Talya Avram: Hello, I'm Talya Avram and I am the director of people and culture at FileInvite.

What motivated your decision to partner with Groov?

Talya: We've been striving for a high performance culture and naturally that involves investing in our employees wellbeing and offering them the right level of support. So we've previously attempted different wellbeing platforms and unfortunately, they were great in terms of content, but in terms of adoption, they were really low.

And so what we were looking for and what motivated us in partnering with Groov was that it was embedded within the workflow, so it was more likely that employees would, engage with it on a day to day basis. And I also really liked how it offered data and insights because naturally when I'm talking to the board or talking to my senior leaders, having that information to help us gain further understanding, think about how we can create initiatives off the back of that is really valuable and sometimes quite hard to do, especially when you're talking about wellbeing.

What challenges were you looking to address?

Talya: So a huge part was around workplace culture and reinforcing some of that commitment that we've already communicated out to our employees. Another element, going back to the high performance culture, is thinking about productivity and how we can enable that productivity to happen. And I think the final one was also around our people managers.

 We have lots of people who we promote internally. It's a really cool thing about working at FileInvite that we want to stretch and develop our team members. So with that, looking at the tool and how it could actually support us in developing our leadership capabilities.

In what ways is Groov contributing to a more positive and productive environment within FileInvite?

Talya: I think it's done a good job of helping us continue to foster a safe environment. We want our employees to feel like they can bring their real selves to work and we want to be able to have transparent, open conversations. And I think through Groov, it is reinforcing our commitment to wellbeing. And it's also enabling our managers to have these conversations with our employees because they're able to see how employees are feeling in real time and being able to respond accordingly. And, as Sampson was saying earlier, adjust their conversation and their communication style to the individual.

How is the real-time data from the Check-In feature impacting FileInvite?

Talya: Those real time Check-Ins have been valuable. We recently had a change in how we were approaching our strategy and what that meant in terms of our employees. And we had, gone through a huge communication process and plan around how do we deliver that messaging and how do we bring our employees on the journey and what was so valuable was them being able to get that check in data and see how everybody was feeling. It was great because it actually did reinforce that a lot of the work that we'd done in the communication plan had been effective, but then the other thing that was great was that managers on a one to one level could see, oh, maybe where did the messaging not land? Where do we need to reinforce further? Because they were seeing how that employee morale was affecting individuals and could then address that on a one to one basis as well. So it was really valuable in that instance. 

How has the feedback from your employees been so far?

Talya: When we first launched Groov it was quite fun and exciting and it happened to be a day when we were all in the office or at least the Auckland team was all in the office and, everybody was kind of saying what their recharges were on the day and what they did to kind of engage and interact with it. So we all had a little bit of a laugh around some of the activities that we were doing. I think one of us had, you know, gotten up and did a little dance because that was what the recharge was. So I think it was also kind of boosting morale in that way of creating a bit of interaction and engagement.

How are you finding working with the Groov science team on FileInvite’s Workplace Science Strategy?

​Talya: I think what's great about it is that we're able to really customise our offering with Groov to FileInvite and create really tailored approaches to how we tackle people-related initiatives. 

What advice would you give to other organisations looking to implement a similar platform?

Talya: I think really treating it like a partnership, there's a lot of value that I've gotten out of working with Groov predominantly because of the transparency that I've given by being able to really talk through the challenges that we're facing as an organization. It's meant that Groov has been able to offer a solution that really helps us tackle that head on. So that would be my advice, definitely partner with Groov, as opposed to trying to launch it entirely without the valuable expertise within the platform.