How MacLean-Fogg Built a Connected Talent Strategy with Quantum Workplace

The Challenge

In 2019, MacLean-Fogg had no formal way to gather employee feedback. Competition for labor was intense, and retention had become a strategic priority. Leaders knew they needed to hear from their people. Doing it well turned out to be the hard part.

Too big for shop floor walk-arounds 

Supervisors and leaders used to walk the shop floor and ask people how they were doing. That works for a small team. Across a company of MacLean-Fogg’s size, it can’t give executives the enterprise-wide picture they need to make decisions. 

“We’d just walk out on the shop floor and ask people how they were feeling,” recalls Nick Stauffer, Director of Organizational Development and Marketing. “But we needed to really make MacLean-Fogg a place people wanted to come to work.”  

Kristin Malbasa, Executive Vice President, saw that informality was no longer enough. “Frankly, we’re too big for that to be effective.” 

The company turned first to a widely recognized survey and analytics provider and brought in a third-party consultant to administer and prepare the surveys on its behalf. 

A survey process that got in its own way 

On paper, the arrangement covered the basics. In practice, it fell short almost everywhere. Surveys ran past 60 questions and took 30 to 40 minutes to finish. Completion hovered at 50% or below, and not because people didn’t care.  

The process itself kept them away. “It ended up being very disruptive,” Malbasa recalled. “People wanted to do it, but it was not without complaint.” Stauffer was more direct: “It was a pain in the [expletive].” 

The team also had to do heavy pre-work with the consultant and the vendor before a single employee could answer a question. And because the surveys were 90% vendor-created, MacLean-Fogg had little say over what was asked. Post-survey guidance came as a generic PDF playbook with broad recommendations and little help interpreting results or deciding what to do next. 

The data belonged to MacLean-Fogg. The insights didn’t. The company was paying a premium for a process it barely controlled, producing data it couldn’t fully rely on and completion rates that left half the workforce unheard. 

Data nobody could fully trust 

Trust was a deeper problem. The old survey was fully anonymous, and the details used to sort results, such as department and location, were self-reported through questions that weren’t always clear. Stauffer saw the gap right away.  

When leaders can’t trust the numbers, they hesitate to act on them. Employees were sharing how they felt about the work environment, and the organization struggled to respond in the right way. 

Reaching a deskless workforce

For manufacturers, an engaged and high-performing workforce drives output, retention and results. But frontline employees aren’t at a desk with steady access to email and the internet for a standard eight-hour day. That makes it harder to gather honest, high-quality feedback and to tackle turnover, culture and compliance. 

MacLean-Fogg faced all of this, and then some. Many employees have no company email address or employer-issued device. They work multiple shifts, including overnight, and the workforce is multilingual.

As Stauffer explained, sending a survey link via email “would be great in theory, but that’s not how it works in practice.” 

Managers waiting on HR 

Feedback only matters if it reaches the people who can act on it. Frontline managers were eager to support their teams, but with shifts running around the clock, they rarely had immediate access to results or clear guidance on what to do with them.

“In the past, HR drove everything. Managers had to wait for meetings to review results or create action plans, which made it difficult for them to respond quickly,” explains Stauffer.

The Solution

MacLean-Fogg’s goal was easy to say and hard to deliver: make the survey something people didn’t dread. As Stauffer put it, the team had gaps to fill. “We had a lot of gaps that we were trying to fill so that way when someone heard engagement survey at MacLean-Fogg, it wasn’t like a four-letter word.” 

The team ran a deliberate, thorough search and looked at Lattice, 15Five, Culture Amp, Dayforce (an incumbent HCM provider) and Qualtrics. They needed a platform that could reach people by email, text message and QR code, so employees could respond wherever they actually were. 

A recommendation from peers 

Quantum Workplace wasn’t on the original list. The introduction came through Malbasa’s membership in the Manufacturers Alliance peer network, where other members had used the platform for several years and spoke highly of it. Those recommendations stood out because they showed an understanding of the manufacturing environment.  

A sales process that respected their time

The way Quantum sold also caught the team’s attention. “A lot of the other vendors required you to do the discovery, and then you do a second call, and then it’s call four before you actually get to see the platform,” Stauffer noted. “That’s really frustrating.” 

Quantum didn’t work that way. The team arrived at the first meeting with an industry-relevant demo. The manufacturing experience behind it mattered, too.  

“The fact that they had manufacturing experience was a significant advantage. Having somebody who understands that is a way better idea.” 

Partnership over price 

For a family-owned business, the relationship is never an afterthought. “As a family-owned business, we look for vendors that cannot just get us the cheapest price or solve our problem,” Stauffer said.  

"Quantum’s partnership approach resonated right away. Quantum is such a terrific partner.”

— Kristin Malbasa, Executive Vice President, HR, MacLean-Fogg

One system for the whole employee lifecycle 

The decision looked past the survey. MacLean-Fogg wanted a partner it could grow with, and a system that matched the full employee lifecycle: engage people, set goals, review performance, give and get feedback. At the time, performance, succession planning and employee sentiment lived in separate Excel spreadsheets.

The demo made the case. Nick Stauffer remembers seeing succession planning and talent reviews in action. “Like many organizations, we manage all of that in Excel. And it was a very cumbersome process, and it took forever just from an administration standpoint.”

Getting everyone on board 

Buy-in turned out to be the easy part. Employees had been asking for a shorter survey for years. “One of the questions we got for years was, please, could you please shorten this, just make it a little bit shorter, a little bit easier,” said Malbasa.

Switching vendors was the company’s first visible step toward action. “We heard you, we are taking action, we are choosing a different vendor and we are going to make this a lot easier.”

Supportive leadership helped too, and so did the fact that the previous platform wasn’t popular. Replacing it with something significantly better was a simple conversation.

Implementation

MacLean-Fogg signed with Quantum in June 2024. Talent reviews and succession planning went live that August, and the first survey ran in September. Quantum’s onboarding specialist guided the team through a structured checklist, so the process felt organized and well supported rather than self-directed.

The Results

The results show up in the numbers, and in how people across MacLean-Fogg talk about their work. Surveys are easier to complete, data is easier to trust, and the insights now reach the people who can act on them. 

A survey employees want to complete 

The first change employees noticed was how easy the survey became. They can respond by email, text message or QR code, so nobody needs a company device or email address to be heard. The survey takes around 10 minutes, and a long way from the old 30 to 40.  

“We got a lot of feedback from people saying, ‘That was so much easier, it was shorter, it was so much better—thank you, we love this.”

— Kristin Malbasa, Executive Vice President, HR, MacLean-Fogg

The questions changed, too. The old questionnaire ran 55 to 65 questions, and many repeated the same idea for every layer of leadership. Employees weren’t always sure whether “senior leaders” meant one person or another. The new survey, built with Quantum’s Insights Analysts and grounded in validated science, asks fewer and clearer questions. MacLean-Fogg now compares results across locations and managers instead, which shows where experiences differ without anyone having to guess what a question meant.

MacLean-Fogg steers the agenda, with Quantum as a collaborator rather than the author. The survey reflects what the team actually wants to know, backed by Quantum’s analytical expertise. Real-time visibility into response rates by location also lets the team spot pockets of low participation and follow up before the survey window closes.

AI that helps leaders have better conversations

AI-powered suggestions help managers interpret survey data, understand what feedback means for their team and choose practical next steps. Even leaders without formal engagement training can respond with confidence. The AI prioritizes actions by site, department and leader, and it suggests talking points, including guidance for conversations that feel uncomfortable.

Data people can trust

MacLean-Fogg moved from a fully anonymous survey to a confidential one. Feedback is still reported in aggregate, and employees aren’t identified. Behind the scenes, though, the team can slice results reliably and know that no one submitted twice. “Now that we’re a couple of years into it, our teams are really seeing some improvements based on what they’re saying, and they also really believe in the confidentiality aspect of it,” said Stauffer.

Participation tells the story. Completion started at roughly 50% or less. It reached 70% in the first year with Quantum, climbed another 11 percentage points to 81% in 2025, and rose a further 5.7 points to 87% in 2026. Todd Pernichek, Principal Insights Analyst at Quantum Workplace, notes that this is well above the roughly 80% he would expect from an organization of similar size, and he points to trust as the reason. Employees can see that someone is doing something with their answers.

Stauffer is quick to credit the HR team, too. They run communication and marketing around every survey, work directly with managers to encourage participation, and often go around asking people whether they’ve completed it. Participation takes effort. The old process took effort and still earned a much lower response rate.

From data to action

Under the old arrangement, a generic PDF playbook arrived after each survey and left the team to work out the rest. Quantum gives MacLean-Fogg a layered approach to insight and action planning. “We used to just guess at what action to take based on the data,” said Malbasa. “Now we’re getting recommendations.”

Quantum’s Insights Analyst team walks MacLean-Fogg through the results, what they mean and the platform’s AI-generated focus areas, which are built on the company’s own data. “It’s giving data-driven ways that we can realistically start to approach action planning,” explained Stauffer. The platform also drills down to the site and leader level, so plant managers see feedback for their site without seeing anything that identifies an individual.

That shift from generic reporting to targeted recommendations has led to real change at the facility level: better lunch and locker rooms, employee recognition programs, accountability initiatives, and new leadership, skill and career development programs. Primary action plans live at the site level, where a site is a manufacturing facility.

Closing the loop with employees

MacLean-Fogg now responds quickly, usually within two days of the survey closing. The message is simple: “Here are the top three, here are the bottom three things that we heard from you.”

More communication follows in the weeks after, through town halls, emails, text messages and digital signage, all the way down to operators on the floor. The team shares where it stands, where it has improved, and where opportunities remain. It stops short of sharing individual comments.

Some requests can’t happen, whether because of cost, safety or something else. The team has focused on telling employees when that’s the case and why. Stauffer describes the aim this way: “If we can’t do something for whatever reason, being able to communicate that to the employee so there is follow-up communication as opposed to I shared this, nothing ever came about, I don’t know why.”

Managers who own engagement

Managers can now log in at any time to see their team’s results, view AI-driven suggestions and get guidance on what to do with feedback. Action planning used to sit with senior leaders and HR. Now managers are part of it, so plans cascade further than they ever could before. Permissions are set so managers see what they need without being able to filter down to individuals, which protects confidentiality.

“Our frontline leaders constantly ask, ‘I want to know what my people are saying.’ Now, they can access results instantly and take action without waiting for HR. That accessibility has had a huge impact for us,” says Stauffer. Malbasa adds that “HR is no longer a bottleneck.”

HR now supports the work instead of passing information down the line, and Stauffer sees ownership spreading: “We have engagement and ownership and involvement all the way down to our frontline leaders as opposed to this just being an HR activity.”

Keeping momentum between surveys

Good results mean little if energy fades once the survey closes. At MacLean-Fogg, leadership holds managers accountable for action plans. It’s a strategic priority, and the company sees it as a critical piece of keeping talented people.

Quantum also made it easy to add a pulse survey about four to six months after the main survey. It shows whether action plans are making progress and keeps the conversation going between annual surveys. MacLean-Fogg also moved its main survey from fall to spring. Q4 is busy, and spring gives teams room to act instead of losing momentum heading into the holidays and the new year.

Turnover down materially

Since MacLean-Fogg implemented Quantum Workplace’s Engagement Survey in 2024, total turnover has fallen from 36.6% in 2024 to 26.3% in 2025 and 21.1% YTD in 2026. That’s a 15.5 percentage point reduction, and both voluntary and involuntary turnover declined over the period.

MacLean-Fogg believes its sharper focus on employee listening, engagement and acting on feedback has contributed to this progress. The improvement has coincided with a broader effort to understand the employee experience and turn feedback into action.

The financial impact is meaningful. MacLean-Fogg recorded 206 fewer employee terminations in 2025 than in 2024. At an estimated turnover cost of $10,000 to $15,000 per employee, that represents approximately $2.1 million to $3.1 million in potential avoided costs. The company also estimates it is saving roughly 30 to 40% on what it previously spent on survey administration alone, even as the platform delivers far more.

From surveys to one connected talent platform

The relationship has grown well beyond its origins as a survey replacement. MacLean-Fogg now uses nine Quantum modules: 1-on-1s, Feedback, Goals, Growth, Reviews, Succession Planning, Surveys, Talent Reviews and Retention Radar. It added them one at a time, starting where the pain was greatest. “Our path has been alleviating the pain,” said Malbasa.

Talent reviews came first. The old Excel process scored people across nine to twelve behavioral competencies, ran mostly through the local senior leader and HR, and didn’t involve managers, which Stauffer calls a huge miss. Now a manager gets an email, shares feedback directly, and the results plot automatically on the back end. MacLean-Fogg uses the standard approach of performance, potential and intent to stay, so it can chart talent properly across the organization. Talent reviews are available to frontline employees too. Some leaders already run the same process for the shop floor, and the company is working to extend it to everyone.

Succession planning was the natural next step, because talent reviews feed into it. The old process lived in spreadsheets that were reviewed once a year. MacLean-Fogg now manages 180 critical positions in Quantum. Each fall, the executive team walks through the nine box talent grid with the CEO, and the conversations have changed.

Layering Growth on top of surveys produced a clear finding. Engagement is meaningfully higher among employees who start a development plan in Growth and share it with their manager. That’s why MacLean-Fogg encourages sharing.

It’s not about the score. “We’re very invested in how do we make sure the employee recognizes their manager cares, their employer cares about their development now and in the future,” said Stauffer. Viewing engagement across the nine box has been eye-opening, too, and it’s something the previous vendors never made possible.

Goals are next. Today the company tracks them in Excel and PowerPoint, and moving them into Quantum sets the stage for a more connected view of the business, one that links individual performance to team, site and company objectives. “We’re looking at being able to see if we’re getting improved performance by being able to tie goals to performance outcomes,” said Malbasa. Order matters here. “I think there’s a desire to skip goals and do performance first, but I think in this particular case, sequencing does matter.”

A strategic partner, not just a vendor

A recurring theme in MacLean-Fogg’s story is the quality of the relationship. Quantum’s advisory model fits how the team works. “Quantum realizes where we’re at,” said Stauffer. “There’s nothing worse than an advisor who’s trying to get you to move either way too fast, in the wrong direction, or onto something that doesn’t really align with the organization.”

An Industrial-Organizational Psychologist on Quantum’s team serves as MacLean-Fogg’s primary strategic contact. They’re involved across the survey lifecycle, from pre-survey question review through post-survey analysis, and they’re available to the team all year. Stauffer also values Quantum’s webinars, thought leadership and ongoing communication.

Stability matters, too, and it’s easy to overlook when you’re comparing vendors. “We’ve essentially had the same people since we started partnering with them,” Malbasa said, in contrast to the churn the team has seen elsewhere. Continuity means Quantum already knows MacLean-Fogg’s business, and nobody has to start over with a new customer success rep.

Future Plans

MacLean-Fogg’s experience shows what becomes possible when employee listening is treated as a strategic function instead of an administrative task. Employees on the shop floor, who once had few ways to share feedback and little confidence it would be heard, now take part at high rates. That produces better data and gives managers and leaders something to act on: targeted investments in performance, development and recognition that have moved the needle on retention. Leadership has a real-time picture of the organization that no number of shop floor walk-arounds could provide. 

The work isn’t finished, and the roadmap is clear. MacLean-Fogg is building a strategy that listens to frontline employees from the day they’re hired through retirement, pairing exit surveys with stay conversations and onboarding surveys so the company can predict and prevent regrettable turnover instead of reacting to it. “How can we make sure that our frontline employees who make up again a significant part of our business aren’t an afterthought, but truly prioritized in the talent development space,” said Stauffer. 

The team is also helping managers support the development plans employees create in Growth, using 1-on-1s to answer the “now what?” that follows. Goals will move into the platform next, with performance management to follow. Because the organization is highly decentralized, there’s no centralized performance management strategy yet, and Quantum is expected to support it. A strong partnership with the HRIS team, bringing in the data that supports each of these steps, is a priority too. 

For a family-owned manufacturer working on the persistent challenge of frontline retention, this has become more than a software decision. It’s how MacLean-Fogg is building a connected and aligned workforce that stays.