Early Warning Drives Manager Effectiveness, Communication, and Success with Quantum Workplace

The Company

A leader in finance technology for more than 30 years, Early Warning builds the industry’s payments, risk, and fraud mitigations solutions.

With a rise in consumer reliance on digital banking and services, the company experienced rapid growth. The rapid expansion led to extensive change for the company and its employees. To ensure the business could continue to exceed the demands of the industry,  Early Warning knew it needed to engage employees in new and creative ways to boost performance and drive business success.

The Challenge

With a fast-paced growth trajectory, Early Warning knows the importance of utilizing Quantum Workplace's comprehensive employee engagement survey as a change management tool to help them quickly assess employee perceptions and focus the company's efforts where it matters most.

Survey results uncovered two areas in which the company needed to take action—manager effectiveness and communication. With the company’s rapid growth, leadership training needed to become a focus area. There was also clear evidence that employees were missing the “why” behind the occurring changes.

“We saw an opportunity to create an incredible company culture by communicating better, leading better, enhancing multi-directional feedback channels, aligning on purpose, and most importantly, ensuring that all employees feel like they own engagement as well,” said Natalie Schwimer, Chief Human Resource Officer. “The survey was instrumental in providing data-driven inputs for uncovering specific areas that would drive meaningful change.”

The Solution

Based on survey findings, Early Warning first focused on manager effectiveness initiatives to help build a long-term program designed for employee success. The company launched leadership development programs, using Quantum Workplace’s 360 Feedback solution to assess effectiveness. Other efforts included hosting its first-ever leadership conference, which was designed to reinforce company culture, values, shared priorities, and engagement efforts. And specially-designed training was delivered through different formats to equip leaders with skills and fundamentals to tackle everything from procedures to performance.

Next up was communication—a critical area to ensuring alignment on organizational goals and the company’s overall strategy. First, Early Warning created an Employee Engagement Panel, a cross-functional team that assessed progress on engagement efforts once a quarter and drove action planning. An outcome of their work was the launch of the company’s refreshed company values to support its strategic shift. And along the way, the company also adopted new communication formats and channels, focusing on providing timely updates which highlight the purpose of the change and impact on employees.

“In our employee engagement journey, we’ve learned that focusing on one or two areas of opportunity results in more impact and a more engaged workforce,” said Schwimer. “With Quantum Workplace’s software we were able to easily identify the areas where we should focus our efforts in order to achieve the results we wanted.”

In order to engage employees to boost performance and drive business success, Early Warning uses Quantum Workplace to:

• Collect employee feedback 
• Understand how employee perceptions change year over year
• Surface employee concerns and address them before they contribute to disengagement
• Build effective action plans by incorporating employee feedback