Engineering Company Case Study

How an engineering company eliminated silos and improved team performance.

“Working with Vivo Team gave our leadership visibility into the intricacies of relationships within their teams so they could take action and make improvements.”

—Chief Executive Officer, Engineering Company

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Founded in 2004, the engineering company provides specialized services to the Canadian electrical utility industry. In 2017, the company successfully added telecommunication design services to its portfolio and has since worked with many multinational telecom corporations.

Industry:
Engineering

Solution:
People Analytics: Vital Statistics Report
Team Development Program
Group Coaching Sessions

CHALLENGES

To meet the various needs of its customers, the engineering company operates in seven functional areas: engineering, ops/drafting, civil engineering, asbestos removal, transmission/ crossings, pole renewal, and project management. Like in many organizations, each area functioned as a separate silo, which troubled the executive team. They were concerned about having poor customer communications, losing business opportunities, and dealing with the fallout from miscommunication between teams.

“To break down the silos, we knew we needed to build management and interpersonal skills within our teams,” said the engineering company’s CEO. “We’re a bunch of engineers who spend all day doing practical work. Most of us lack the soft skills to create an impactful corporate culture that supports productivity and growth.”

The CEO aspired to create a culture where team members and their leaders would interact more freely to best serve customers. To achieve this, the CEO turned to Vivo Team.

“The entire team had a noticeable improvement in performance, and I attribute that partly to Vivo Team’s training.”

—Chief Executive Officer, Engineering Company

APPROACH

Vivo Team offers a full-spectrum learning methodology that develops competence, motivation, and collaboration among organizational leaders and teams through targeted live online training, coaching, and people analytics.

Once engaged, Vivo Team assessed teams and leaders to elicit responses to a detailed series of statements related to the six key indicators of high performance: communication, interactive feedback, accountability, emotional intelligence, structures, and cohesion. The assessment identified areas with room for productivity improvement.

VITAL STATISTICS REPORT (VSR)

The result of the assessment was a Vital Statistics Report (VSR) that used analytics to diagnose, predict, and evaluate team behaviors. In addition to measuring team members’ individual contributions to the efficacy of their team, the VSR also measured the team’s effectiveness and cost of lost productivity in dollars to identify and evaluate performance improvements.

The results of the VSR were analyzed, and findings were reported to team leads and management. Teams were then placed into targeted training streams focused on communication and structures.

The VSR was also used to facilitate developmental conversations with learners in one-to-four coaching sessions. The program also included access to Vivo Team’s learning experience platform. Throughout the training, participants had any-time access to the platform, which contained micro-learnings, learning models, curated and custom video content, leaderboard and completion tracking, and recorded sessions.

“Vivo Team was great to work with. They were very knowledgeable in their space, and the program was quite successful.”

—Chief Executive Officer, Engineering Company

TEAM HIGHLIGHTS

All six key indicators showed improvements, with structures showing the most significant gain.

• Improvement in Structures: 64% to 71%
• Improvement in Communication: 69% to 71%
• Improvement in Interactive Feedback: 65% to 69%
• Improvement in Accountability: 70% to 74%
• Improvement in Emotional Intelligence: 69% to 74%
• Improvement in Cohesion: 72% to 76%

“What interested me most was talking to the employees and seeing actual improvement that flowed from the training and the implementation of new company practices.”

—Chief Executive Officer, Engineering Company

RESULTS

IMPROVED TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

The engineering company saw a 7 percent performance improvement in overall team effectiveness, moving from 64 percent effective to 73 percent effective. A score of 80 percent indicates a highly effective team.

ENHANCED PERFORMANCE

“What interested me most was talking to the employees and seeing actual improvement that flowed from the training and the implementation of new company practices,” said the CEO.

DECREASED COST OF LOST PRODUCTIVITY

The cost of lost productivity was calculated in VSR 1 before the start of the program. VSR 2 was deployed after training and showed a decrease in the cost of lost productivity of $65,068.