Case Study: How’s Your WorkittUde?

Part I: Background info on organization

WorkittUde is an application that assesses workplace alignment. When the CEO, Ken Tucker, approached our team to discuss his new assessment tool, he and his team had been gathering and analyzing data manually. We knew that Tucker had decades of data gathering and analysis experience from organizations such as Gallup, had been a workplace consultant specializing in employee performance for over 30 years, and was keenly interested in using his performance toolset to help organizations across the nation reach their performance goals.

Ken explains WorkittUde as follows…

“Workittude is how you feel about work. And how you “feel” about work at any given moment is driven by how aligned the work is with your attitudes, talents, and skills. When we walk into work each day, what we bring What we bring first and foremost is ourselves. Who we are—our personality—is going to interact with the opportunities, challenges, and sense of connection to the organizational mission. What I want to measure is that snapshot of alignment, because that provides a goldmine of data for supervisors to course correct and drive performance.”

Up until he met with us, everything that Ken had been doing—all the data collection and analysis—was all done on paper.

Part I: The challenge they were facing

Ken had a great idea, as well as a stellar data capture and analysis methodology, but their process was not scalable because it relied on paper and manpower. His concept worked on paper and in person but could not grow and provide real time results for the number of companies who were becoming interested in it.

Ken says, “We had exceptional mad scientists on the data collection end and a fantastic mad scientist on the technical side from Cross & Crown who was an expert in algorithms and all that coding stuff. We knew we could use the brainpower of both entities to make a useful end product. Our question remained, however, how do you make numbers capture and translate effectively using technology?”

So the perfect combination of mad scientists went to work.

When our teams started working together, we had many moving parts. Within Ken’s model, there were 6 dimensions that were the scientific basis for the alignment measurement, 3 different metrics to be tracked, definitions around everything, and the database was on paper. It took more time for Ken’s team to explain the results to customers than to collect them. Our team wanted to help Ken figure out how to speed up the capture and analysis algorithms.

Both teams could see the real-time results of people being transformed from this information about their alignment (or misalignment at work). We needed a technology solution to help deliver information to clients in real-time in a palatable, digestible, way.

Part III: Our solution

We worked with Ken & Team to concept and build a system that was scaleable, easy to use for the clients, and provided a graphical representation of the data. This solution became a platform called WorkittUde. It allows individuals to test, track and monitor employee WorkittUdes using a series of proprietary testing and calculations.

The platform is a lightweight yet powerful web app that provides dynamic content to a tiered user-management system.

 

The dimensions we tracked to provide the data for the “feeling” of alignment (since we all know the efficacy of data relies on it being non-subjective) is based on years of Ken’s work around the 6 dimensions of your personality. Each of these are rated on a standard scale:

1. Brand  – what you are known to do well, and what you know yourself to do well. We own and recognize this as our brand, therefore we want to reinforce and demonstrate this at work.
2. Passion – what ignites within you, what gets you up in the morning, the passion that becomes a “cause” for you. Your core calling and how this fuels you. It isn’t simply tracking “do you like your job,” but rather the sense of calling or purpose individuals attach to their work. We began to track 3 individual metrics within this dimension:a) Level of nourishment each respondee receives from their work
   b) Level that people are giving into their work based on their state of mind about their workplace
   c) Amount they are gleaning from their work (level of meaning and purpose they are getting from their work and amount they are growing through their work)
3. Experience – defining moments in a career where your life changes, your approach changes, and your mind is bent in a different way because of those experiences.
4. Knowledge – Knowledge that is sticky for you but that you have invested time around developing. This is working within your sweet spot, doing what you are designed to do.
5. Skill – The demonstrable, observable tasks that you are expert at, as well as what you desire to be expert at. Not only what you are giving in your workplace, but what you want to become.
6. Talent – Recurring thought, feeling, behavior.

Tracking and measuring these dimensions on the app provided our team with a “snapshot” of each individual’s activation of work that we were able to track with technology. Ken used this snapshot with his leaders to guide performance and development conversations with staff members. Over time, several of these snapshots could be captured and tracked to identify trends with employee performance (both individually and corporately), and work to improve engagement within organizations.  

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Part IV: The Results

The traction this tool is already receiving is amazing with companies looking into how they can use this tool to keep an engaged workforce.

As a result of the scalability of the solution, Ken’s team has received more than 1000 respondents to the survey across all continents just within the first few months of being live. Because the results are no longer reliant on manpower for interpretation, they can be presented immediately to respondents.

On a call with our team recently, Ken told us that as a result of the scalable technology solution:

“My respondents are better understanding where they are and are not nourished at work. They can unlock the complete results and access specific training areas they can work on and see them in real time from month-to-month to track improvement. People are beginning to have specific and intentional conversations with their supervisors as a result of understanding their own needs more. Supervisors also are able to have more concrete conversations based on their own results with employees as they share their personal results with their staff a way to help others grow into their own WorkittUde. We’ve heard from leaders that the tool is increasing individual ownership of personal development, improving manager/employee conversations, and boosting internal communications.”