How CluneTech’s Employee Retention Rate Jumped 30% with Workvivo
CluneTech transformed their culture, and evolved in a way they didn’t even know was possible!
30%
Increase in Employee Retention
336%
Increase in Employee Referral Rates
91%
New joiners that said they were made to feel welcome
Providing cutting edge solutions that simplify global business
CluneTech is a suite of companies providing cutting edge solutions that simplify global business. Their technology streamlines business processes such as digital sales, global payroll, tax compliance, global VAT and cross-border payments, making business better for their customers worldwide.
Before choosing Workvivo, CluneTech’s company culture was very different from what it is now. Being spread across eight different companies in 30 countries gave employees few opportunities to connect, and relying on an outdated intranet didn’t help. People weren’t able to celebrate accomplishments, connect to their company’s values, and simply get to know each other. And as a result, employee experience and engagement fell short.
CluneTech officially chose Workvivo to start better engaging its 1,500+ employees in December 2019.
Here, the company’s Head of Employee Experience, Rachael Quinlan, shares how their Workvivo journey has helped boost the company’s culture and bring its teams – spread across eight companies in 30 countries – together, both during COVID and beyond.
People
1,500
Industry
Software Development
Location
Global (HQ in Ireland)
Category
Mid-Market
Workvivo has transformed our #OneTeam culture and at a time where it was truly tested, it enabled us to evolve in a way we didn’t even know was possible!
Rachael Quinlan
Head of Employee Experience at CluneTech
Employee retention jumped by 30%
With Workvivo at its side, CluneTech made huge strides in connecting its people. “In the remote space, we all talk about human connection, and that for us has been the biggest improvement.
Having Workvivo through all of that – it didn’t just maintain our culture, it actually improved it, and propelled it to somewhere I don’t think it would be if it wasn’t for the pandemic and having Workvivo.
And all of that is cemented by strong retention and referrals rates, which Rachael says wouldn’t have been possible to achieve without Workvivo. Leaver rates dropped from 14% in 2019 to 10% in 2021, an improvement of almost 30% despite CluneTech’s headcount growing by 16%.
This is a massive achievement at a time when companies across the globe are struggling with mass attrition and the Great Resignation, which could see up to 60% of people quit their jobs this year.
Employee referral rates skyrocketed by 336% at CluneTech with Workvivo
Employee referrals save a company time and money spent on recruitment and significantly boost the quality of new hires. It’s a surefire way of knowing you have the best people possible working for your business, but also that your employees love the company enough to recommend it to people they know.
“We have definitely noticed a positive increase in our employee referrals since implementing Workvivo,” Rachael said. “Our referral rates have more than quadrupled from 47 in 2020 to 205 in 2021!” This jump represented a 336% increase since onboarding Workvivo, a benefit that has saved the company hundreds of thousands of euro in recruitment fees.
In addition to regularly promoting our Refer a Friend program through Workvivo, we also have an easy-to-access information section in our Employee Benefits space.
During what Rachael described as the “huge cultural shift” in adapting to remote working, her team was able to maintain CluneTech’s “#OneTeam culture and morale”.
Workvivo had a large part to play in that.
CluneTech's 2022 Great Place to Work Stats
See how Workvivo had a direct return on investment for CluneTech
91%
New joiners are made to feel welcome
90%
Friendly place to work
83%
Pride in company's accomplishments
84%
People care about each other
CluneTech’s journey to connecting people within and across companies
Like most organizations, CluneTech was forced to embrace remote working when the pandemic struck. Its employees – working in 35 offices across 30 different countries – suddenly had to be moved from fully onsite to fully remote.
Even before COVID, the company’s widespread geography didn’t leave many opportunities for its people to connect. Silos were a major obstacle, and these weren’t helped by CluneTech’s in-house built intranet at the time, which Rachael likened to a “comic sans poster in your local supermarket”.
“Our approach to engagement, comms, and the overall employee experience was quite outdated, which was pretty embarrassing for a tech company,” Rachael explained. “Everyone was on site and the whole approach was completely localized.”
CluneTech’s old intranet received an average of between 12k and 15k unique visits each month with 2.7 pages per visit. It posed a number of problems, the biggest one being that instead of a social space for employees to connect and engage meaningfully, it was an outdated and transactional system that had become completely obsolete in the new world of work.
Rachael told us: “It’s important to note that our previous intranet featured no collaboration. It lacked an activity feed and employees were unable to post or share updates. For that reason, all of the visits would have been very much specific to a task. For example, an employee might have been looking for a certain policy or RSVPing to an event.”
Less stress on developers and IT
The company also relied heavily on its developers to update the intranet. One developer allocated as much as 6 to 8% of their time to its upkeep.
“In addition, myself and Kristina, who also looks after internal comms and engagement, would have to work with our design team who would create the graphics that our developers would then upload,” she explained. “When you consider the large amount of time, resources, and individuals required to upkeep the site, it was an incredibly costly asset that provided very little value to our people.”
CluneTech wanted a new experience for their employees that would provide everything their old intranet couldn’t. Rachael’s team was inspired to consider an employee experience app that would suit CluneTech’s specific needs, such as connecting each of its brands on the same platform.
Rachael knew CluneTech’s companies needed a solution with culture and open communications at its heart, not resources and productivity. Focusing on the employee experience above anything else would help engage people across the world, ultimately working as a catalyst for productivity and impact.
There had been options available for employee communication in general, but it was hard for CluneTech to find an app that would foster company-to-company communication specifically.
Tailoring was also important to her team. “We knew from the get-go that the suggestions and the feedback we were giving to Workvivo from day one were being taken on board, and we could see it in the product updates – that in itself is invaluable,” she said.
“Being an admin on Workvivo provides us with full control over making changes and updates to our platform. Tasks like changing the main activity feed banner or updating documents or policies can now be done in seconds and most importantly, by one person! From that perspective, Workvivo has freed up a lot of our time and enabled us to focus on more high-impact activities.”
Celebrating in style in a virtual working world
CluneTech’s aspirations to foster a cross-company culture among its brands were truly realized when they used Workvivo as part of their multi-platform virtual Christmas party in December 2020. As a global organization with many different sites, the company had never been able to organize a Christmas party that all their staff could attend. But having meaningful celebrations to help people unwind, connect and mark their achievements is a critical part of any great employee experience.
Using Workvivo, CluneTech could now invite every single employee to join the celebration without having to worry about the logistics of an in-person event.
In the lead-up to the party, an employee at CluneTech posted a video to Workvivo showing the rest of the company how to build their own Waldorf star and there was a huge response from colleagues posting their own.
The campaign was so successful that the Waldorf star was used as the Christmas party’s theme. “It was the first time everyone could attend and people were tuning into the live stream from their home offices with kids on their laps,” Rachael said.
For an umbrella company like CluneTech, trying to roll out new initiatives that bring different teams in different locations together can carry financial risk. “Workvivo makes it easy to trial these kinds of things and have meaningful conversations around them,” Rachael added.
“It takes away the risk of investing lots of time and money into something similar, and still allows you to achieve the high impact and then analyze it in a really easy way.”
Using an employee experience platform to bring such creative concepts to life for their different companies is something CluneTech has found invaluable.
“When the time came to work from home due to COVID, having Workvivo didn’t just maintain our culture, it improved it.”
Workvivo means we can bring our weird and wonderful ideas from conception to execution.
Rachael Quinlan
Head of Employee Experience at CluneTech
Making a cultural impact – inside and out
Investing in your company culture is critical for staff retention, but promoting it externally is key to recruiting the right people. Being recognized as a Great Place to Work is a sure-fire way to attract new hires, and Rachael highlighted the pivotal role Workvivo played in keeping CluneTech’s accolade.
Rachael’s team used Workvivo to demonstrate their vibrant company culture in their application. The platform provided a way to capture CluneTech’s spirit through photos, community groups, shout-outs, events, and more.
“Now, most of our culture audit document is probably screenshots and images being saved from what we’ve done,” Rachael explained. “From the external side, being able to show what we do without having to write paragraphs of information is really cool.”
With Workvivo at hand, CluneTech exceeded multiple industry benchmarks in corporate culture. The Great Place to Work review process looks at how welcoming a company is for new joiners, for example, as well as how friendly it is in general, whether its employees take pride in its accomplishments, and how much they care about each other.
CluneTech’s partnership with Workvivo meant it surpassed industry averages in every single one.
Getting the most out of your employee experience app
For companies that are considering an employee-centric platform, Rachael had some words of wisdom. The key points? Keep things simple, find a partner that shares your vision, look for a team that can become “an extension” of your own, and, most importantly, have fun.
Workvivo showed her that even small actions can speak volumes and have a positive, lasting impact on authenticity.
Individually, she said, such simple initiatives “aren’t going to make someone stay in a company” – but “as part of a much bigger picture, they can have such an impact” for both present and future employees.
For example, Workvivo has helped senior staff members at CluneTech, including CEOs, to become comfortable with having more personal and meaningful conversations with their teams, whether it’s chatting about their favourite book or sharing the advice they’d give to their younger selves.
The recordings of these conversations formed a ‘Meet the CEO’ video series at CluneTech and were “something we were not only able to share with people that joined during COVID,” Rachael said, “but through Workvivo Spaces too”. In fact, they have now become part of CluneTech’s official onboarding process for new staff.
“When you post something on Workvivo, it’s there forever and you can search for it easily,” she said. “But being able to repurpose it creates value – it isn’t just disappearing into the abyss.
“When you start a new job, you get your email and you get your login, but being able to look back on the stories is really important.
“Workvivo hasn’t just been about maintaining our culture – it’s allowed us to evolve our culture.”
