Feedback and action from our employee pulse survey

Note: Before you read this article, if you haven't checked out my last post about how to do an eNPS, I would suggest you read that one first ?.

In my last post, I talked about doing an Employee Pulse Survey - or eNPS - where we asked our team for feedback & found common themes that could help us improve our experience at GoCo.

After collecting the survey, my role was combining these themes with programs that would both put our learnings into practice and add value to the company's culture.

Based on this objective, we decided to roll out a mental health awareness initiative.

The Mental Health Challenge

We had 2 main goals for the challenge:

1. To raise awareness for mental health issues by talking about them.

2. To create a more connected environment for each other, our new office, & our values, mission, and purpose - because as we found from our pulse survey - we like each other, have a great product and want to develop deeper connections with one another.

How the Challenge worked

Here are the different components of our mental health challenge:

• A month-long ‘bingo’ game where the activities were designed to enforce our values while incorporating wellness into employees' daily lives. Here is the card we used to gamify the process.

• A matching game to mix people up from the different departments to chat with each other. Here are the matching pieces. I cut them up and distributed them randomly on people's desks, & then each person had to find the best match to their piece around the office.

• Hosted Lunch & Learns where we talked about community resources and reminders on what our employee health benefits cover when it comes to mental health support.

• A Raffle at the end of the month. Once people completed the various activities, their names went into a raffle drawing and we picked three people who won a prize for completing the challenge ?.
  
  We are a pretty competitive group, so the raffle prizes definitely motivated people to join.

The Challenge results

We had a very positive outcome - about 30% of the team finished all the activities, and everyone in GoCo participated in at least one of them. Here is some feedback I received from some of our GoCoNuts:

• "I thought it was super neat and got people out of their comfort zone. It really helped you think about our core values and how so many team members exemplify them."

• "It was really great to see our HR team (of one) make an effort and prove they care about our mental health. I really enjoyed all the activities on the bingo and will look forward to it next year." 

• "Mental health is so important and it feels great to be a part of a company where that isn't overlooked. I never got around to filling out my bingo card, but I still really appreciated the concept and hope we can do more activities like it, to raise awareness and give employees tools to manage their mental health!"

We plan on continuing this and building on it every year. Also, we’re doing our pulse survey every six months along with our performance reviews, so I’ll get more feedback in about a month to see how people liked it - wish me luck!

If you're interested in doing a health awareness challenge at your organization, I included a couple of pdfs you can download with exactly what I did, or you can use this link to copy and edit your own documents on google sheets.  As always, I’d love to hear what you’re doing to take care of your own employees. You can email me here and we can chat!

Cheers!
Sarah