DecisionWise: Moving HR Beyond Employee Engagement

Tracy Maylett, CEO, DecisionWiseTracy Maylett, CEO
One of the most prominent trends in corporate culture is built on a clear movement away from the singular aspect of an employee’s contribution to a business to the more comprehensive employee experience. Within an organization, how an employee feels in connection with the work he or she is performing, and how that meshes with the overarching organizational mission is a critical component of highly successful companies. With data through survey responses being the lynchpin in providing employers the details necessary to understand employee experiences, DecisionWise offers the framework to take that data to the next level.

Built on a 20-year history of delivering top-of-the-line data analytics to organizations in need, DecisionWise offers a robust solution for understanding not just employee engagement, but the all-encompassing employee experience in the workplace. The company’s CEO, Tracy Maylett, and COO, Matthew Wride, explain the shift in gathering feedback regarding employee experience over the last two decades. Wride states, “We’ve moved past the days of the suggestion box in organizations, and DecisionWise was one of the first companies to provide feedback through an online platform.” The company’s purpose, Maylett explains, is to first provide a medium for employee feedback and then to utilize that data to diagnose an organization. Maylett states, “Yes, we have a technology solution, but we help clients take that technology and the data derived from it to create a strategy for actionable change within an organization.”

DecisionWise matches the widely-used technology of engagement surveys with expertise in understanding and effecting change in employee experiences. The company is able to achieve this comprehensive task through the MAGIC methodology: survey questions designed around dissecting an employee’s experience in terms of meaning, autonomy, growth, impact, and connection.
Matthew Wride, COO, DecisionWiseMatthew Wride, COO

Clients of DecisionWise also have the opportunity to create customized surveys to dig deeper into engagement, but the power lies more in the consulting aspect of the company’s service married with strategic data.

Wride states, “Our survey is the initial step in the process, but each organization has different outcome needs. That may be a training intervention or leadership effectiveness assessments.” The company’s unique passion for bettering organizations can be seen with one of its large healthcare clients. The employee engagement survey is completed by DecisionWise each year—a complex task given the various departments and staffing hierarchies throughout the organization. More importantly, though, was the need of the organization to understand its employees’ experiences, specifically with patient care. While the company scored high marks in how well employees felt they provided care, a closer look at the data revealed that patients were not satisfied. DecisionWise had the tools and expertise to evaluate both sets of data, compare, and provide a workable strategy to move forward in an effective way.

Both Wride and Maylett see a rapid growth for the company, focused on putting feet on the ground in seven different countries in the upcoming years. DecisionWise already offers employee experience surveys in more than 30 languages throughout 70 countries and has more than 24 million employee survey responses in its database. Wride explains, “In 2017, we’re focusing efforts on sharing our expert insight on how to analyze employee engagement data based on our vast number of survey responses.”The company plans to continue being a thought leader in the space of employee experiences by improving its capabilities for integrative data with payroll, onboarding, and exits, and by boosting its online action planning tool to help clients leverage feedback in a more robust, powerful method.