How EqualTo uses transparency to increase employee engagement among remote workers

EqualTo is a commission platform for modern teams - redefining commission management, empowering both business and technical teams to drive value through incentives. 

Like many businesses that began during the pandemic, EqualTo is a fully remote company with employees across different cities in Europe. 

“It is important that we find ways to keep the company culture alive," says Dmitri Kemenev, VP of Finance and Operations.

So in December 2021, they rolled out Howamigoing to the ~30 employees in their business with the aim of building a highly engaged, remote workforce. 

Almost a year on, EqualTo are seeing the compounding benefits of that decision.

"Culture check" pulse survey

One of the first things EqualTo did was utilize Howamigoing's "culture check" pulse survey.  

This is a short, sharp set of psychologist-vetted questions that help leaders quickly identify any cultural cracks. It also gives employees a voice - a safe space to recommend some simple actions that can be taken.

"Transparency is a core value at EqualTo - we have developed software that makes the commission process more transparent for teams," says Diarmuid Glynn, EqualTo's CEO.

But transparency is also core to their internal operations.

"That's one of the reasons we love Howamigoing - it gives another way for our employees to be transparent to the company about their thoughts and feelings and send questions anonymously to myself and others on the senior leadership team. We especially value seeing the trends reported from the pulse surveys." continues Diarmuid.

360 feedback

A few months after EqualTo's initial pulse survey, they kicked off their first 360 feedback process.

"We want to make sure people have a way to learn from peers how they can leverage their strengths to have the most impact." - says Dmitri.

Every employee was free to choose 3-5 colleagues (in addition to their manager) to answer some simple yet powerful questions related to:

• Strengths
• Communication
• Teamwork
• Leadership
• Culture

Some of these questions can be seen below:

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Responses were returned anonymously, providing psychological safety to those giving feedback.

"We love how Howamigoing is very user-friendly: it is easy to use, fun, and motivating, our teams always enjoy taking part and it doesn't seem like a task but an exciting, team-building activity." - says Eloise Osborne, Marketing Manager at EqualTo.

Good vibes

Built into many of Howamigoing's 360 feedback templates are questions related to recognising strengths and recent wins.

But great work happens every week at EqualTo and 360 feedback only comes around every 3-6 months.

As a result, many employees took it upon themselves to praise teammates using Howamigoing's Good vibes tool.  

Good vibes is like a Facebook wall, but for public recognition.  You can see who's doing a good job for whom, and you can engage with posts.  Everything is synced with Slack to help slot into EqualTo's remote ways of working.

"One of the things we found useful with Howamigoing is that it's a great way to gauge the morale of our team when we don't get to often see them together face-to-face." - says Diarmuid.

Ask me anything

The Ask me anything part of Howamigoing's platform is the core channel for EqualTo employees to proactively raise issues or ask questions anonymously. Leaders respond to some questions live on calls, for everyone to hear, or they respond privately inside of the Howamigoing platform if the questions required a confidential response. 

“It’s a great way for employees to flat anything they may not want to mention in person. It’s like an always available suggestion box, super helpful and anonymous.” - Dmitri.

Upward and onward

What's next for EqualTo in their quest to scale their business and maintain strong engagement amongst remote workers? 

“As well as Howamigoing, we also organize in-person employee engagement events, which are times when we get the whole company together either Berlin or Warsaw (where most of our teams are based) or on an offsite like our last one in Crete.” - Dmitri

If you'd like to get a demo of the EqualTo's innovative commission management platform, click here.

And if you'd like a free 3-month trial of Howamigoing, you can create an account here.

‍"What I really like about Howamigoing is that it’s really clean - really easy to test and try it out.  We looked at many other platforms, but Howamigoing won because of the UX/UI, that’s important for this area– and being integrated with Personio is a real bonus." Says Dmitri.

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