CUSTOMER STORY
YES Communities boosts employee engagement and retention
Learn why YES Communities ditched Qualtrics and how it relies on SurveyMonkey to set data-driven retention goals.
HEADQUARTERS
Denver, CO
COMPANY SIZE
1,300+
INDUSTRY
Real estate
USE CASE
Employee engagement
Training and onboarding
Candidate experience
Exit interviews
OVERVIEW
YES Communities owns and operates nearly 300 manufactured housing communities across the US, providing affordable, thoughtfully-designed neighborhoods and a path to home ownership. Its employees are fundamental to its success, and when the company wanted to improve their experience, it made collecting feedback a priority. Moving from Qualtrics to SurveyMonkey has helped YES connect with its geographically-dispersed team, address retention, and more.
500 responses within 24 hours
93% completion rate
500% increase in average employee retention
THE CHALLENGE
Support and retain employees
YES Communities recognizes that employee feedback is critical to its business, especially when it comes to increasing retention and engagement for its more than 1,300 employees. But from recruitment surveys to exit interviews, its feedback program needed an upgrade—and so did its feedback platform.
“We were using Qualtrics, but it’s very expensive and quite complex,” said Vice President of Human Resources Jean Gonzales. “After seeing the demo of SurveyMonkey Enterprise, we felt it was easy to use and would get us the information we needed.” With SurveyMonkey, YES Communities began to reimagine how it collects feedback throughout the employee journey and how it could optimize its extensive engagement survey to get better results.
“We were using Qualtrics previously, but it’s a very expensive tool and so complex that we had to get an IT person involved to build surveys and get our data. SurveyMonkey is just user-friendly. We were working to understand Qualtrics and honestly, we feel like SurveyMonkey works for us.”
Jean Gonzales
Vice President of Human Resources
THE ANSWER
Partner with the right platform for employee feedback
YES Communities aimed to gather valuable employee insights and improve its 60% turnover rate. Culture Ambassador Patrice Mitchell started with the company’s exit surveys. Previously conducted in-person by managers, these surveys often didn’t produce useful responses, as employees felt uncomfortable sharing feedback with their bosses. SurveyMonkey made it easy to update the questions and e-mail the survey to departing employees, paving the way for more candid feedback.
SurveyMonkey was also infused throughout the employee experience with hiring satisfaction surveys for both applicants and hiring managers, new hire orientation surveys, learning and development (L&D) surveys, scheduled pulse checks, and even ad hoc surveys to collect preferences for team-building activities. “Building a survey is almost effortless,” said Mitchell. “I can do branching, data filtering, and I can quickly pull surveys for all the different departments I work with.”
Mitchell relied on SurveyMonkey professional services for help optimizing YES Communities’ company-wide employee engagement and ensuring the anonymous data collected would support YES goals.
“SurveyMonkey professional services really helped us make sure that our survey data was actionable,” said Mitchell. “And we’ve already made some huge changes for our team.”
“SurveyMonkey professional services provided amazing guidance on survey length and question wording for our employee engagement survey. As a result, we achieved 93% participation and got a clear view of our areas of improvement. Addressing these areas is adding significant value for both our team members and the company.”
Patrice Mitchell
Culture Ambassador
YES Communities
THE RESULTS
A 93% survey completion rate and actionable insights
Exit surveys revealed that the top driver behind turnover wasn’t compensation. Surprisingly, employees said the bigger factor was that expectations for their role weren’t accurately reflected in the hiring process.
So the YES talent team has been working to transform recruiting: they shadowed employees to better understand specific roles, modified job descriptions, and encouraged interviewers to have open conversations with candidates about a role’s challenges and opportunities. Exit survey feedback also sparked major L&D improvements, including new training for YES salespeople.
In the past, YES Communities’ employee engagement survey had a 60% completion rate. After revamping it with SurveyMonkey professional services, and incentivizing employees to respond, the survey saw 500 responses within the first 24 hours and a stellar 93% completion rate.
As a direct result of engagement insights, YES is considering adjustments to its 401K program, assessing a new insurance carrier, increasing bereavement leave, exploring parental leave options, and forming focus groups to follow up on key topics. It’s also hiring a compensation analyst and director of talent, who will focus on retention and finding trends and patterns in engagement data.
As Gonzales noted, “improving retention is a marathon, not a sprint,” but so far YES has seen average retention go from about 90 days to a year and a half—a roughly 500% increase. “With our employee engagement survey, the lightbulb really went on for us,” said Gonzales. “Those results gave us data to develop a retention strategy and improve experiences. And employees are very appreciative that we’re asking for their candid feedback.”
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