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August 12, 2023

Sage improves retention 30% with employee listening powered by Viva Glint and Viva Insights

Sharon Oley, Customer Services Director at Sage, oversees 500 colleagues who maintain the great customer support that the payroll, HR, and finance software provider has become known for. “We’re very focused on giving the customer great access and a great experience,” she says. Key to that standout customer experience is a frontline workforce of engaged employees who buy into Sage’s people-focused, supportive workplace culture. For a global business operating in a hybrid world, however, keeping a finger on the pulse of organizational culture can be a challenge. “We use Microsoft Viva Glint and Viva Insights to gain real-time insights into how employees are feeling and workplace behaviors,” says Oley. “We understand the importance of listening to employees.”

Sage

An uptick in attrition demands immediate action

Case in point: when Oley and her team noticed an unusual attrition rate among remote employees in customer service roles, they used Viva Glint to better understand this group’s experience. The spike in attrition required immediate attention from leadership to understand the root causes of the issue and take corrective actions to stabilize this key business function. “With the help of a Viva Glint survey, we were able to understand and focus on the areas of the onboarding experience that needed to change,” she says. “We’ve now successfully reduced attrition from 40 percent down to 10 percent among these employees.”

It’s a turnaround that saves resources and time and signals to employees that the company cares. “It was an incredibly positive outcome based on the sentiments we uncovered in a Viva Glint survey,” says Oley. “It proves the business value of listening to employees and acting on their insights.”

“With the help of a Viva Glint survey, we were able to understand and focus on the areas of the onboarding experience that needed to change. We’ve now successfully reduced attrition from 40 percent down to 10 percent among these employees.”

Sharon Oley, Customer Services Director, Sage

Gaining a deeper understanding of employees and customers

When Jenny Johnstone, Sage’s Senior Director of Culture, Colleague Experience and Engagement, began her career at the company, she was part of a two-person team dedicated to listening to colleagues. In three and a half years, her team has expanded to seven people, and her role has also expanded, which is a testament to the importance that Sage places on understanding the employee experience. “When I began my career at Sage, it was the first time I’d seen the Viva Glint platform,” says Johnstone. “I was blown away.” So too was Sage’s executive leadership, who turned to Johnstone’s team and the insights they gained from the Viva Glint platform to better understand the employee experience and to create a window into the customer experience. “Our executive leaders really engaged with Viva Glint, because all of a sudden, they had a link to colleagues around the world and could understand how they were feeling at any given moment,” says Johnstone. “We realized that those sentiments also probably translated to how customers were feeling.” Soon, Sage added Viva Insights to the tool set it uses to create a more efficient, engaged workplace. “Now, we can combine data with employee sentiments to create a holistic view of what is happening across the organization,” says Johnstone.

Sage’s first Viva Glint survey garnered 3,000 comments from employees overnight. It was a big improvement from the company’s previous method of hiring an external company to run yearly surveys. “We used to have to wait for survey results to be shared with us—very different to the instant access that we have today with Viva Glint,” says Johnstone. Sage managers also take advantage of the action plans provided by Viva Glint. “Managers receive automated action plans,” shares Johnstone. “Viva Glint streamlines the process of responding to surveys and makes it easy to put together a plan to improve colleagues’ experiences.” For example, in response to the feedback from early surveys, the company began hosting regular town halls dedicated to listening to employees. “Because our chief executive responded the way he did based on the results of our Viva Glint surveys, Sage won a Glassdoor award for most popular CEO through the pandemic,” says Johnstone.

“Now, we can combine data with employee sentiments to create a holistic view of what is happening across the organization.”

Jenny Johnstone, Senior Director of Culture, Colleague Experience and Engagement, Sage

Reacting to employee sentiment improves engagement and performance

Using Viva Glint survey results in conjunction with customer satisfaction scores, Sage uncovered a link between highly engaged teams and productivity. “Focusing on our customer service teams, we were able to see from the Viva Glint survey data and corresponding customer satisfaction scores that teams with positive engagement scores could take more customer calls and still maintain a high level of customer satisfaction,” says Johnstone. For a company that routinely achieves customer satisfaction scores of 96 percent and first-time contact resolution of 92 percent, an improvement in employee performance means bringing leading-edge experiences to more customers and perpetuating stellar customer service that makes the brand stand out in a competitive market. “We’ve seen some employees achieve a 10 percent uplift in their performance, and we can link those improvements to Viva Glint scores that prove the link between engaged employees and fantastic customer service results,” says Oley. “Improving employee engagement through a holistic employee listening program with Microsoft Viva Glint and Viva Insights is great for Sage but also great for customers and colleagues.”

Sage executives also use Viva Glint as a barometer of manager performance and refer to survey results to help guide managers to more effective ways of working. “Our Chief People Officer meets individually or sends notes to managers who get really high scores and also people who have areas to improve upon,” says Johnstone. Offering guidance to managers at critical points has paid off. “We can see from our manager reports that 5 of our lowest-performing managers are now in the top 10 of highest-performing managers after six months, all as a result of coaching that was offered based on information gleaned from Viva Glint.”

Gary Charlton, Customer Success Director at Sage, finds it easy to visualize responses and identify focus areas using the heat map and word cloud features in Viva Glint. The anonymity of the surveys also creates a sense of openness that uncovers surprising insights, as Charlton discovered when a survey respondent identified a roadblock in career development that the business had previously missed. “We have great internal development in our department,” he says. “But what we discovered based on the comments in a recent survey was that the path for promotion into a new department was less clear.” Informed by those career development insights, Sage began a series of career fairs to showcase a range of business units. “The uncovered employee sentiment caused us to look much wider at our talent and development matrix,” says Charlton. Adds Oley, “We would rather keep people in the company than lose them externally. Recruiting new talent requires time, effort, and costs, so it’s in our interests to keep engagement high and support colleagues’ career development.”

Overall, the ability to identify and respond to sentiments has helped Sage create a sense of trust among employees. “Five years ago, people filled out surveys because they felt obligated to,” says Charlton. “Now, colleagues see that we’re responding to their comments.”

“We’ve seen some employees achieve a 10 percent uplift in their performance, and we can link those improvements to Viva Glint scores that prove the link between engaged employees and fantastic customer service results.”

Sharon Oley, Customer Services Director, Sage

A fruitful partnership between HR and IT

Rishi Kotecha, Vice President of IT Infrastructure & Operations at Sage, also works as the IT business partner for the company’s HR function, a role that brings both business units together around a common set of goals. “One of the challenges that I wanted to address in partnership with HR was using the reach of technology to give each and every individual around the organization a voice that can be heard,” he says. “Both the IT and HR teams understand that employee experience is so important to retaining talent at Sage. Together, we use Viva Glint to better understand employee sentiments about workplace technology and recognize the link between the IT function and HR.”

Kotecha and his team were also instrumental in implementing Viva Insights at Sage, a development that helped both HR and IT teams improve their understanding of work patterns at the company. “We needed something that was going to give us an accurate and consistent view of how our people work,” he says. “To make the right decisions, we needed data that we were absolutely certain would give us a true reflection of what was happening across the organization.” Not only did Viva Insights stand out for its ease of deployment, but Sage employees already do most of their collaboration and productivity through Microsoft applications, helping ensure that Viva Insights would reflect the reality of daily work. “Staying in the trusted partner ecosystem with Viva Insights was easy for us,” says Kotecha. “One of the main benefits of Viva Insights is that we could forgo various niche tools and enable adoption quickly.”

Kotecha and his team experienced firsthand the power of combining Viva Glint surveys with information derived from Viva Insights when they used comments from a Viva Glint survey to gain a more holistic picture of meeting attendance data. “In one case, we learned that employees who attended meetings with their managers didn’t feel empowered to make decisions,” says Kotecha. As a result, managers were encouraged to give employees more independence to attend meetings alone. “It wasn’t an obvious connection and not one reflected through employee comments and suggestions, so we wouldn’t have taken the same action without the holistic understanding that we gained with Viva Insights and Viva Glint combined,” he adds. And, by looking at Viva Insights data, Kotecha and his team identified that 30 percent of meetings in the IT engineering team were status updates, something that the team was able to reduce to 20 percent and replace with recurring, scheduled status meetings. These actions improved meeting effectiveness by 33 percent. “We now know that our colleagues have a more predictable workday and more effective meetings, enabling more focused time for engineering activities,” says Kotecha.

Today, Sage is experiencing some of its highest response rates to surveys. “We’ve jumped from 50 percent to 87 percent response rate for our ‘Your Voice’ Pulse survey,” says Johnstone. “That shows the confidence employees have that we’re listening to their feedback and acting on the information they share.” Fittingly, Oley and Charlton have seen their teams’ Net Promoter Score (NPS) improve because of listening to their employees. “When we first started using Viva Glint, our NPS was 65, but now it’s 73—a considerable improvement.”

Find out more about Sage on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

“Both the IT and HR teams understand that employee experience is so important to retaining talent at Sage. Together, we use Viva Glint to better understand employee sentiments about workplace technology and recognize the link between the IT function and HR.”

Rishi Kotecha, Vice President of IT Infrastructure & Operations, Sage

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