Empowering Managers, Driving Engagement, and Strengthening Performance

Results at a glance.

97%

Engagement survey response rate (up from 78%)

81%

Engagement favorability score

~100%

New hire and exit survey participation

+25 pts

Gain in one team's goal-clarity score

About: Unison is a mid-market technology company based in Tysons, Virginia, with 400 employees. Unison uses Quantum Workplace’s full-connected talent platform—engagement, performance, development and recognition—and has been a customer for five years.
Industry: AI federal government software and insights
Use Case: Engagement surveys, Talent Reviews, Goals, 1-on-1s, Recognition, and Insights Hub (beta)

For years, Unison's performance review process ran on a complex spreadsheet and was led by the managers. There was no employee input, no goal tracking below the executive level, and the same review template appeared quarter after quarter. Vice President of Talent Management Raelene Wagoner set out to change that.

Working with Quantum Workplace, Unison built a structured, data-informed talent strategy anchored in talent reviews, goals, and employee surveys—and used what they learned to brief its board, coach its managers, and open up clearer paths to growth across the organization.

Five years in, engagement scores are climbing, managers are able to analyse and act on the survey data, and Unison is now piloting Quantum Workplace's newest capability, Insights Hub, to push that momentum even further.

The Challenge

A review process with no structure and no voice for employees

Before partnering with Quantum Workplace, Unison had no real performance management process. Employee reviews were manager-driven, inconsistent, and built around the same simple template every quarter. Employees had no way to weigh in, and goal setting existed only at the executive level—there was no mechanism for tracking what individual employees or teams were working toward.

No visibility into manager effectiveness

That lack of structure created a second problem: Unison's leaders had no consistent way to see how well their managers were actually leading. Conversations about performance and trajectory happened, but without data behind them, they were hard to calibrate and easy to lose track of.

Left unaddressed, Wagoner knew these gaps would only compound as Unison grew—making it harder to spot disengagement, harder to develop future leaders, and harder to show the business the connection between their people strategy and performance.

The Solution: Choosing Quantum Workplace

Unison turned to Quantum Workplace to bring structure and visibility to its talent strategy. Talent Reviews gave Unison's leadership team a consistent way to calibrate performance and trajectory—first after competency reviews, again after year-end stay interviews, and finally in a December panel process where the CEO and executive team review every employee together. Goals extended accountability beyond the executive suite for the first time, and engagement surveys—paired with heat maps and Smart Slices—gave managers direct access to their own team's engagement data.

Rather than keeping engagement data with HR, Unison built a cascade: executives review results with their direct reports, those managers review with their own teams, and every level commits to one focus area for the year ahead—all supported by a shareable results deck managers use in team meetings, all-hands sessions, and board updates.

“The survey tool from Quantum Workplace is extraordinary, especially because of the power it puts in managers' hands. I give them heat map access, and they really can drill into the details.”

Raelene Wagoner

Vice President of Talent Management | Unison

Learn more about Quantum Workplace

The Results

Structured conversations that drive real coaching

Talent Reviews gave Unison's panel process a shared framework instead of an open-ended conversation. Leaders now walk through every employee's performance and trajectory on screen, spotting outliers and coaching managers in real time—including catching the instinct to rate a newly promoted employee's trajectory as high simply because their performance score was high.

“Using the talent review tool to structure those conversations has been extraordinary. It's an incredible way to guide the conversation.”

Raelene Wagoner, Vice President of Talent Management, Unison

A manager-led culture, powered by data

Because managers can see and act on their own team's survey results, recognition data, and 1-on-1 history, Quantum Workplace has become something employees look forward to rather than another HR requirement. The AI writing assistant has made employee reviews easier and better for managers companywide.

“I got feedback from managers across the board about Quantum’s AI writing assistant. Instead of struggling with what words to use, they can just type what's in their head and make it better—and it ends up being a stronger, faster review.”

Raelene Wagoner, Vice President of Talent Management, Unison

Clearer goals, stronger engagement

As individual teams began adopting Goals, Wagoner tracked the impact directly against engagement results. Teams that used Goals saw meaningful gains on the question "goals and accountabilities are clear to everyone on my team"—one team improved 14 points to reach 100%, and another improved 25 points, also reaching 100%. Company-wide, Unison's engagement survey response rate climbed from 78% to 97% year-over-year, with favorability reaching 81%, and lifecycle surveys for new hires and exits maintaining near-100% participation.

What's Next: Piloting Insights Hub

As an early beta participant, Unison is now piloting Insights Hub, Quantum Workplace's newest capability. Rather than using another dashboard to interpret the data, Insights Hub pulls together data across Surveys, 1-on-1s, performance reviews, and Talent Reviews to surface insights and recommend next steps—closing the loop between data and action. Unison configured its first tracked topic, manager effectiveness, and plans to add topics like top talent retention as it explores the tool further.

“It's not easy to connect data from different parts of the system on your own. What's interesting is marrying data from surveys with things like talent reviews to get a sense of your top performers — and especially marrying new hire, exit, and engagement data together."