RMS Builds a Great Culture with Real-Time Employee Engagement

“ Thymometrics offered features that no other vendor came close to. ”

Cheryl Van - Head of Learning and Development
Cheryl Van - Head of Learning and Development
Company: RMS
Industry: Computer Software
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Risk Management Solutions (RMS),headquartered in Newark, CA, is a company with a long history of helping enterprises manage risks caused by natural catastrophes. Founded in 1988, by a small dedicated team of Stanford University colleagues, RMS is known for being the pioneer of the modern day catastrophe risk modeling that helps global insurers, financial markets, corporations and public agencies evaluate and manage catastrophe risks throughout the world.

The RMS mission is to create a more resilient and sustainable global society through a better understanding of catastrophic events. And it’s important to note that being a data-driven entity themselves, they understand the value in working with another leader in the real-time data space.

RMS employs over 1,100 employees in 10 countries around the globe, serving more than 400 insurers, reinsurers, trading companies, and other financial institutions. They rely on RMS products to better understand and manage the risks of natural and humanmade catastrophes, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, terrorism, and pandemics.

The Challenges of an Outdated Survey

Naturally, RMS is a progressive company that puts its employees first. With a largely dispersed workforce measuring engagement is important. The traditional, yet outdated engagement survey included some 70 questions and took a long time to complete. Equally frustrating was the amount of time to get any meaningful results in a reasonable timeframe.

The concern with such a time lag between survey and results was that the findings could be out of date by the time they were presented and any consequential action plan agreed. With a lack of immediacy and ease of use, the decision was made to look for a new solution.

As Cheryl Van, Head of Learning and Development, and Bridgette Glin, Sr. Learning and Development Manager put it, “We wanted to administer an engagement survey that was simple, without a lot of questions, and that engendered the ease of use of Social Media.”

Frustrated with the lack of any real data value with the traditional format survey, RMS decided to reach out to a number of engagement survey companies to find a solution that would help them gain a deeper insight into how employees feel about RMS.

Their search would take them far and wide as they reached out to multiple high level engagement survey vendors around the globe, with none actually having the customized solution that RMS needed to complete their objective. It wasn’t until RMS contacted Thymometrics that the realization of what a modern-day employee engagement platform can provide became clear. It was like stepping into the future.

Thymometrics Offers a Real-Time, Custom Data Solution

The RMS focus was to find a survey that was both simple to use and provided real-time actionable results. After approaching several high-level engagement vendors and not finding the combination that they were looking for, the RMS L&D team found Thymometrics’ cloud-based solution – that offered the features that no other vendor can come close to in the market today. RMS was instantly impressed with the immediacy of the solution and “the ease of use, the deep analytics, always open and with the ability to track changes over time.” In fact, on first viewing Thymometrics, Cheryl described the whole experience as “mind-blowing”!

After conducting a limited initial roll-out, the true depth of the findings were revealed across the organization. RMS states, “At first there was concern that the simple survey and sliders would not produce the necessary depth of analytics we needed, but after we conducted a pilot we determined that the Thymometrics platform would indeed produce what we needed – much deeper data for our engagement program.” Following the pilot, RMS decided to roll it out globally to their entire workforce, with outstanding results.

Cheryl continues, “We have been able to quickly administer follow up surveys, backed up by the instant analytics, which has been very helpful. Our employees know that their individual opinions matter and that they will be acted upon promptly”.

Peer-to-Peer and Employee-to-Manager Feedback at RMS

Since first using the survey tool to gauge employee engagement, RMS approached the Thymometrics team to look into ways of extending the tool to allow employees to provide input on their own Manager’s performance as well as ‘Peer to Peer’ input.

Since they are a data company, RMS appreciated the ability to access a wealth of employee opinion data that they can dice, slice and dissect themselves.

As a result of the collaboration, RMS and Thymometrics built an entirely new solution that provides a whole new depth of insight into relationships between fellow workers and managers within the organization. This entirely anonymous feedback can be used in a number of ways, from supporting team building to regular one on one meetings between employees and managers. Using Thymometrics real-time engagement, RMS employees know that their opinions count.

Getting the Right Results

With the instant nature of the surveys and increased visibility now available to the teams at RMS, Cheryl concludes that “Thymometrics’ solution save us both time and money. It saves us time with it’s easy to administer format, there’s no more mathematical gymnastics associated with creating the desired analytics, and the always-on capability makes for easy follow up.” RMS describes their experience as very freeing. The use of Thymometrics solutions have created a much stronger corporate culture at RMS, even among its widely dispersed workforce. The impact of this additional tool has been a positive force for building a company that will continue to stand the test of time.


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