Caroline O'Dowd
Chief People Officer
A supportive work environment and user-friendly software tools are key for high-performing, dispersed teams at Openmind Networks
"Giving praise is something we want to actively encourage, so the fact that Frankli asks, 'Do you want to give praise?' and provides a really easy way of doing it, is really useful. It reminds you to quickly say, 'I thought you were great doing this,' or, 'This was a real standout moment for me.' That functionality actually is really brilliant because it's different. It's unique and it's what people want."
“There's a really genuine respect for work-life balance here. And that comes from the top. Our CEO went on holiday last summer and he said, ‘I'm not looking at my email for 2 weeks’, and I had never worked in a company before where the CEO had done that. I worked for a company where my boss was always emailing me on her vacation. Then I'd feel a bit sheepish about asking for my own vacation time. There's none of that here.”
“I've been working in HR for a long time and usually you get a bit of pushback from managers around performance reviews and there’s been none of that with Frankli. I really think that was worth its weight in gold.”
“I recently asked everyone in the company to fill out a short feedback survey on their manager. And we're going to have them do it again in a couple of months, after a period of manager training, to see whether the scores go up. I will say that the scores were really high to begin with, which was great. But the survey actually did surface an issue that a particular employee was having with their manager. So that was another huge benefit.”