How Mott Improved Engagement and
Culture Across a Diverse Workforce

The Situation

As a manufacturer, Mott employs a largely deskless workforce across a sprawling facility in Farmington, Connecticut. Employees range from manual laborers to remote salespeople, with lots of highly specialized engineers accustomed to and desirous of effective processes. Breaks in communication or misunderstandings can create dangerous work environments or throw off project timelines which can sometimes have implications of international importance.

For Ross Green, VP of Execution Excellence, the key to improving the flow of communication throughout the company was letting people know that leadership was actively interested in making things better. For employees, simply knowing that their concerns were being considered could help depressurize stressful situations and inspire them to apply the same level of analytical rigor to suggesting communication improvements as they do for manufacturing ones.

To accomplish these two objectives—improving leadership’s visibility and responsiveness and thereby improving communication—Green needed to analyze how engaged everyone was, no matter where they were working.

The Challenge

Mott’s challenge was that while leadership was accustomed to email, most employees only had sporadic access to it throughout the day. Response rates were low because what time people did spend on work email, they spent trying to clear their inbox.

In addition, the company ran a big, annual culture survey, but it was cumbersome. It took a long time for HR to produce it, and much of what came from it was a retrospective look at issues that should have been dealt with much sooner.

What Green needed was an effective way to sample employee perceptions on an ongoing basis, and a survey format that’d be accessible to all. Only then would he and his team have the data they needed to identify safety or engagement issues and address them in the moment.

The Action

Mott evaluated Betterworks Engage and found the system could provide them the ability to send frequent pulse surveys and allow employees to respond or their mobile phones, in addition to responding on desktop. Those pulse surveys could occur as often as management liked, allowing managers to measure engagement on individual projects.

• A mostly deskless workforce → Accessible surveys on laptop or mobile
• Highly specialized functional groups → Customizable surveys
• Constantly changing projects → Frequent polls
• Potential for high risk incidents → In-depth surveys for exploring identified issues
• Rapidly evolving employee needs → Platform for employees to voice opinions

The Outcome

After evaluating several competitors, Mott found that none fit its situation better than Betterworks. Green’s team launched it, and now use it to deploy surveys for every aspect of the employee experience. Messages go out via SMS and email. Employees can respond right there from the text, or from the mobile app or their desktop browser.

In-between surveys, employees get polls, to help management identify trends, or hot-button issues. Mott also gave employees open-forum style functionality it branded internally as “Employee Voice:” an internal online community for crowdsourcing ideas and opinions in real time.

The Impact

The first result was that responses on management surveys leapt 20% to a near complete 98% response rate. Employee satisfaction rose as a result of Employee Voice, which gave front-line workers direct access to the CEO. They can use a virtual suggestion box to task leadership with responding to suggestions, and leadership can manage those requests using Betterworks Engage’s action planning features.

Most important, Green now has his data. The Polls identify patterns, and his team can analyze segments of employees by location, function, manager, or custom variables to identify satisfaction, engagement, or sentiment. This data is used to review everything down to meetings, so they know how to improve them. As a happy byproduct of more engaged people, Mott has measurably improved its operations, safety, and security.

“Betterworks Engage is insight. Plain and simple. It makes it really easy for our people to tell us what they’re thinking, and for our team to act,” says Green. “It’s become hard to imagine life without it.”