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For manufacturers, building a highly engaged and high-performing workforce is a business imperative. When both are strong, output, retention, and results follow.
However, hearing from and gathering feedback from this kind of workforce can be difficult since emloyees are not at a desk with consistent access to email and the internet for a standard 8-hour workday. This can make it challenging to obtain honest, anonymous, high-quality feedback, which in turn makes it harder to tackle issues related to turnover, culture, and compliance.
MacLean-Fogg, a family-owned precision manufacturing company with roughly 2,100 employees across multiple facilities, faced exactly this problem before partnering with Quantum Workplace. What followed was a vendor switch that triggered a wholesale transformation of the company’s approach to employee listening, data, insights, and strategy.
MacLean-Fogg is a family-owned manufacturer and supplier of engineered components, fasteners, and thread-rolling dies, with facilities across the United States. The company currently employs approximately 2,100 people, roughly two-thirds of whom work on the shop floor.
3Sixty Insights spoke with three members of the MacLean-Fogg leadership team: Duncan MacLean, President and CEO; Kristin Malbasa, Executive Vice President of Human Resources; and Nick Stauffer, Organizational Development Manager. Together, they drove the company’s decision to move to Quantum Workplace and have overseen its implementation and expansion across the organization.
MacLean-Fogg had no formal method for gathering employee feedback when they began their journey toward a more sophisticated employee listening strategy in 2019. At that time, MacLean-Fogg was in an intense competition for labor, and retention had become a strategic priority.
"We’d just walk out on the shop floor and ask people how they were feeling,” MacLean recalls. “But we needed to really make MacLean-Fogg a place people wanted to come to work.” To do that, leadership needed to understand what employees were actually experiencing.
The impetus for change came from Malbasa, who recognized that informality was no longer adequate for an organization of that scale. The company turned first to a widely recognized provider in survey and analytics software. It also engaged a third-party consultant to administer and prepare surveys on its behalf.
In theory, the arrangement covered their needs. In practice, it fell short in nearly every dimension.
The surveys MacLean-Fogg administered through the incumbent provider were long—often over 60 questions—and required 30 to 40 minutes to complete. Completion rates hovered at 50% or below, not because employees were indifferent, but because the process itself was a deterrent. “It ended up being very disruptive,” Malbasa recalled. “People wanted to do it, but it was not without complaint.” MacLean was more direct: “It was a pain in the [expletive].”
Their old platform also had a structural flaw that undermined confidence in the data. “We had no way to know if people were submitting multiple surveys,” said Stauffer. “We were looking for a tool that gave us more confidence in data integrity.”
With surveys that were 90% vendor-created, MacLean-Fogg also didn’t have the control and oversight it desired. Post-survey guidance offered only a generic PDF playbook with broad recommendations and little help with interpreting or acting on data.
Ultimately, while the data was MacLean-Fogg’s, the insights were not. MacLean-Fogg was paying a premium for a process it barely controlled, yielding data it couldn’t fully rely on an completion rates that left half the workforce unheard.
Reaching a frontline workforce is not straightforward, given that many employees lack company email addresses or employer-issued devices and work across multiple shifts, including overnight. MacLean-Fogg faced all this, with the additional nuance of a multilingual population. As Stauffer explained, sending a survey link via email “would be great in theory, but that’s not how it works in practice.” They needed a platform that offered multiple access methods—email, text messages, and QR codes—so employees could be reached where they actually were.
The team led a deliberate and thorough search, considering providers such as Lattice, 15Five, Culture Amp, Dayforce (an incumbent HCM provider), and Qualtrics.
The introduction to Quantum Workplace came through Malbasa’s membership in the Manufacturers Alliance peer network, where other members had been using the platform for several years and spoke highly of it. These recommendations set Quantum Workplace apart by demonstrating an understanding of the manufacturing environment.
Quantum Workplace’s sales process itself was also a differentiator and caught the attention of the MacLean-Fogg team. “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 Workplace did not operate that way and arrived at the first meeting prepared with an industry-relevant demo.
For a family-owned business like MacLean-Fogg, the relational dimension of the vendor selection was never incidental. “As a family-owned business, we look for vendors that can not just get us the cheapest price or solve our problem,” Stauffer said. “We want to have a good relationship with them.”
Quantum’s approach to partnership, rather than a purely transactional one, resonated immediately. MacLean added a more operational note: “The fact that they had manufacturing experience was a significant advantage. Having somebody who understands that is a way better idea.”
MacLean-Fogg signed with Quantum in June 2024 and administered their inaugural survey in September of that year. Quantum’s onboarding specialist guided the team through a structured checklist, making the process feel organized and well-supported rather than self-directed.
MacLean-Fogg’s gains with Quantum Workplace have been concrete and measurable: an 81% survey completion rate, turnover cut roughly in half, hundreds of thousands of dollars in implied savings from reduced attrition, and a talent management infrastructure that now spans succession planning, performance reviews, and goal setting.
The financial picture has also shifted. MacLean-Fogg estimates it is saving roughly 30 to 40% on what it previously spent on survey administration alone, even as it dramatically expands the scope of what the platform delivers.
The most immediate and visible result of switching to Quantum Workplace was a dramatic improvement in survey completion rates, driven by Quantum’s multi-channel access approach. Employees can now complete surveys via email, text message, or QR code, removing the dependence on company-issued devices or email addresses that had previously left a portion of the workforce unreachable.
Before Quantum, MacLean-Fogg was achieving roughly 50% completion or less. With Quantum, that figure climbed to 70% in the first year, then improved another 11 percentage points to 81% in 2025.
Time savings were also huge. MacLean-Fogg’s target was a 10-minute completion time, and Quantum’s survey reliably takes between 5 and 10 minutes, a sharp contrast to the prior 30-to-40-minute experience, which was not lost on employees. “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,’” said Malbasa.
Under MacLean-Fogg’s previous vendor, survey design was largely out of their hands, as were the questions being asked—that changed with Quantum. Today, MacLean-Fogg drives the survey agenda, with Quantum serving as a collaborator rather than the author. The result is surveys that reflect what MacLean-Fogg actually wants to know, backed by Quantum’s analytical expertise.
Quantum’s platform also gives MacLean-Fogg real-time visibility into response rates by location, allowing the team to identify and address pockets of low participation before the survey window closes.
MacLean was unambiguous about the positive impact on engagement and retention, with the company’s turnover rate effectively cut in half from approximately 30% to the mid-to-high teens.
The financial implications are not trivial, with MacLean-Fogg estimating the cost of losing a single employee at approximately $10,000 to $15,000. At a company that maintains a headcount of approximately 2,100 employees, that means roughly 260 fewer employees leave per year, saving the company over $3 million annually. By those turnover figures alone, the platform more than pays for itself, but there are also the indirect savings from avoiding lost productivity, offboarding administration, recruiting, interviewing time, and onboarding ramp.
The relationship with Quantum has grown well beyond its origins as a survey replacement, with MacLean-Fogg now using nine of Quantum’s modules, including 1-on-1s, Feedback, Goals, Growth, Reviews, Succession Planning, Surveys, Talent Reviews, and Retention Radar.
The expansion into succession planning has been particularly impactful. Previously, the process was entirely manual, conducted through spreadsheets that were reviewed once a year. MacLean-Fogg now actively manages 180 critical positions through the Quantum platform, with a far clearer view of the talent pipeline than was previously possible.
The introduction of goal planning is setting 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.
Under its previous arrangement, MacLean-Fogg received a generic PDF playbook after each survey cycle with broad, non-specific guidance that left the organization largely to its own devices when it came
to acting on results. Quantum’s platform provides 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.”
The Insights Analyst (IA) team from Quantum walks the MacLean-Fogg team through the results, their meaning, and the platform’s AI-generated focus areas, which are based on the company’s own data, offering concrete, evidence-based recommendations. “It’s giving data-driven ways that we can realistically start to approach action planning,” explained Stauffer.
The platform also enables drill-down to the site and leader level, allowing plant managers to access site-level, but not individually identifiable, feedback to take direct action with their teams.
“Now that we’re a couple of years into it, people really are seeing some improvements based on what they’re saying, and they also really believe in the confidentiality aspect of it,” MacLean said.
The shift from generic reporting to targeted recommendations has enabled MacLean-Fogg to take meaningful action at the facility level, including improving lunch and locker rooms, implementing employee recognition programs, accountability initiatives, and new leadership, skill, and career development programs.
A recurring theme in MacLean-Fogg’s experience with Quantum Workplace is the quality of the relationship itself. “As a family-owned business, we look for vendors that don’t just get us the cheapest price or solve our problem. We want to have a good relationship with them.”
Quantum’s advisory model also resonates with the team philosophically. “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.”
Central to that relationship is an Industrial-Organizational Psychologist on Quantum’s team who serves as MacLean-Fogg’s primary strategic contact and is involved throughout the entire survey lifecycle, from pre-survey question review through post-survey analysis, and is available to the team throughout the year.
Stauffer also cited Quantum’s broader engagement with its customer base—webinars, thought leadership content, and ongoing communication—as meaningful differentiators.
Malbasa also noted something that is often overlooked in vendor evaluations: the stability of Quantum’s team. “We’ve essentially had the same people since we started partnering with them,” she said, contrasting this with the churn they’ve seen at other vendors. Continuity of personnel means continuity of institutional knowledge about MacLean-Fogg’s business and eliminates the friction that comes with onboarding a new customer success rep who has to start from scratch.
MacLean-Fogg’s experience with Quantum Workplace illustrates what becomes possible when an organization treats employee listening as a genuine strategic function rather than an administrative checkbox.
Employees on the shop floor who previously had limited means to share their feedback and limited confidence that it would be heard now have high participation rates, which yield better data, and give managers and leadership something to act on: targeted investments in performance, development, and recognition that moved the needle on retention. Managers now have access to actionable site-level insights they can act on directly, and leadership has a real-time picture of the organization that no amount of shop floor walk-arounds could provide.
For a family-owned manufacturing company navigating the persistent challenge of frontline retention, that partnership has proven to be more than a software decision. It’s how MacLean-Fogg built a connected and aligned workforce that stays.
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