How Unifonic Boosted Productivity and Rebuilt Engagement with Culture Amp

Unifonic is a leading global AI-powered customer engagement platform provider, enabling businesses to communicate seamlessly with their customers through channels like WhatsApp and Chatbots. Unifonic experienced significant growth in just four years, scaling from 120 to 500 employees. However, the aftermath of black-swan events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to control costs due to an IPO, posed new challenges for the organisation, causing employee engagement to decrease.

To navigate these challenges, the company turned to Culture Amp to measure engagement, facilitate feedback, and foster meaningful conversations between leadership and employees.

Challenge: Insufficient infrastructure for effective employee engagement measurement

When Colin Christie, VP of People and Administration, joined Unifonic in 2020, the company's HR tools were limited. The HR team managed performance through spreadsheets, and there was no system for gathering real-time employee feedback, tracking engagement, or facilitating regular conversations with leadership.

"We didn't have any mechanism for assessing whether people were happy or sad, or whether that changed over time," Colin explained.

However, as Unifonic faced pressures from the IPO process and post-COVID adjustments, the absence of a robust employee feedback and performance system became more pressing.

Unifonic recognized the need for a solution to elicit continuous feedback, provide actionable insights, and create a framework for meaningful conversations that would rebuild trust and align employees with the company's long-term goals.

Solution: Implement continuous listening tools and strategic actions

Unifonic initially implemented an employee engagement platform from Workday Peakon, but when the provider stopped supporting customers in the region, Unifonic turned to Culture Amp. In addition to having a solid presence in the Middle East, Unifonic was attracted to Culture Amp’s ability to foster continuous listening, provide actionable insights, and enable deeper conversations that enhance leadership trust and employee engagement. Culture Amp also demonstrated highly customer focused engagement strategies which would help build trust within their organisation.

To advance its employee listening strategy, Unifonic turned to Culture Amp to assist with its employee engagement surveys and better understand its employees' sentiments. Surveys were created, sent via the platform, and analyzed in real-time, which aided HR and senior leadership in taking immediate action.

As anticipated, employee engagement rates decreased due to the organizational changes that came with the IPO processes and post-COVID adjustments, but the findings also showed some areas for improvement around leadership that needed immediate attention.

"We realized we needed to focus on trust in leadership and the promises we made to employees," Colin said.

With all the changes occurring across the organization, the overall consensus was that Unifonic’s employees were losing trust in leadership. However, being a global organization, Unifonic knew it had to understand each site and team’s sentiment to create targeted interventions for maximum efficiency.

Culture Amp’s heatmap tool proved particularly valuable in this process. Unifonic could visually compare engagement levels across its various global locations and teams, identifying trends and outliers to ensure targeted interventions where necessary.

"The graphical representations via the engagement heat map are amazing. Without that insight, I wouldn't have known, for example, that our Pakistani office was incredibly engaged." - Colin Christie, VP of People and Administration

Additionally, by utilizing the employee engagement surveys and supporting tools, they was also found that the HR team itself was experiencing a flux of disengagement.

“This was a real learning. The HR team had burnt itself out during the organizational changes because it was the one having all of the conversations; supporting the managers, the exiters, and making sure everybody's happy,” shared Colin.

With this information, Colin realized the extent to which the organizational changes impacted his own team. Based on these engagement insights, Unifonic put in place actionable steps to get its employee engagement back to a healthier levellol .

Building trust through meaningful conversations

While Unifonic has always been invested in facilitating meaningful conversations, the insights gained from Unifonic's engagement surveys highlighted the need for a deeper, more structured approach to regular conversations between managers and employees.

The company knew that if it was to build trust with employees, stand-alone traditional bi-annual performance reviews would no longer cut it. It needed to shift towards a continuous feedback model that would build trust and rapport between managers and their teams. Through Culture Amp Engage and Perform they were able to identify where focus was needed and begin implementing impactful changes.

This all boiled down to its leadership and management capabilities.

Unifonic implemented group and individual coaching for leaders, conducted offsites, and provided management training to help managers become more effective leaders, thereby improving their relationships with employees.

"We've done a tremendous amount of intervention work to ensure people are role modelling good behaviour," Colin said.

However, Unifonic knew that enhancing its leadership offering went beyond leadership training. It also needed to provide its management and leadership teams with tools to facilitate and track employee conversations. They turned to Culture Amp’s 1-on-1s tool to help. The tool promotes regular conversations and strengthens relationships between managers and their teams, helping them stay aligned with company objectives.

"What Culture Amp does quite nicely is give us a framework for 1-on-1s that isn’t overwhelming or time-consuming to administer," Colin explained.

Through these structured one-on-one meetings, Unifonic maintained a sense of cohesion and direction. Managers became more adept at addressing concerns early on and creating a space where employees felt comfortable sharing their challenges.

"Culture Amp gives us a winning framework to put that humanity back into a moment," Colin reflected.

The icing on the cake for Unifonic was Culture Amp’s goal-setting capabilities. This proved highly beneficial when facilitating goal-setting conversations between managers and their teams, helping to align employees with the company's overall vision and mission.

"Goal setting systems need to be simplistic, and they need to be fairly easy to monitor and track over time. I love that Culture Amp has sub-goals, and you can rate yourself against them. You can go back and look at what you had set yourself previously, and then see how far you've moved the needle. It is an absolute game-changer." - Colin Christie, VP of People and Administration

Results: Increased leadership trust, goal alignment, and sustained productivity

In addition to the employee engagement surveys, which Unifonic runs twice a year, the organization is now also using regular pulse surveys to track ongoing sentiment and engagement. This continuous listening approach at Unifonic has significantly increased the frequency and quality of conversations and initiatives that managers have with their teams.

"After each pulse survey, we'll sit down with the business partners and the managers and tell them what the survey data tells us, and then we will help them administer those interventions. But, we very much try to have the conversation that, look, it's for you to improve this, and it's for you to try and massage it in a way that's going in the right direction," shared Colin.  

This constant feedback loop, facilitated by Culture Amp, allowed Unifonic to adapt quickly to changes in employee sentiment and continue improving its leadership and engagement approach.

As a result, the organisation has achieved significant outcomes in:

• Employee Satisfaction: The ongoing use of pulse surveys and 1-on-1 conversations helped Unifonic improve employee satisfaction by 9% and trust in leadership rose by 6%
• Productivity gains: Using Culture Amp's performance module to facilitate more meaningful and strategic 1-on-1 conversations, Unifonic achieved a 30% increase in productivity, especially in departments like product development.
• Enhanced employee alignment: Using Culture Amp's goal-setting and performance management features, Unifonic ensured that individual goals aligned with broader company objectives.

Looking ahead to future

As Unifonic grows, Culture Amp will remain central to fostering ongoing employee engagement and facilitating leadership conversations. Beyond employee listening, performance management and goal setting, Unifonic is now expanding its use of Culture Amp for career development and mapping through Culture Amp Develop.  

"Working with Culture Amp has been incredibly helpful. Their tools, insights, and support have empowered us to take meaningful action and keep our people aligned and engaged. It’s not just about having a platform; it’s about having a partner who understands our needs and helps us navigate the complexities of our unique journey." - Colin Christie, VP of People and Administration

With Culture Amp, Unifonic has created a culture of trust and transparency where employees feel heard and valued. This has led to improvements in leadership development, productivity, and alignment and helped the organisation weather challenging times and come out stronger.

"Culture Amp helps us tell the story of where we are and where we're going. Because at the end of the day, it's all about storytelling— and getting people on board with the journey. It’s helped us get back to the truth of why we exist as a company and what we're really trying to achieve," Colin concludes.