An inspiring employee experience that goes off the beaten path
What if an organization's best ascent ran through the voice of its teams?
For over 40 years, Rocky Mountain has shared its love of mountain biking. The organization builds premium, high-performance bikes — for the youngest riders and pros alike — on an international scale.
An ambitious, results-driven team, it aims to design the best mountain bikes there are and change the face of this unique sport, all while building a welcoming community of "riders."
A marked route to the summit
In fall 2022, Rocky Mountain set out on an employee engagement initiative with Amélio. Here are the milestones of that ascent.
"The results we get with Amélio influence our decision-making."
Measuring satisfaction, across borders
It was in North Vancouver, home to mountain biking's most legendary trails, that Rocky Mountain's journey began. Although the head office is now located in Saint-Georges, in the Beauce region of Quebec, its employees and points of sale are found around the globe.
Rocky Mountain was then looking for a bilingual, international, easy-to-use tool to measure employee satisfaction at work anonymously and confidentially. That's how they chose to launch an employee engagement initiative, through an organizational diagnostic, with the Amélio platform in fall 2022.
This diagnostic led to several initiatives and changes within the organization. Let's explore it all here.
Getting to know each other, even from a distance
According to the Talent, Culture and Organizational Development advisor at Rocky Mountain, one of the main findings is that employees would like to develop their relationships with one another more.
This is explained by the organization's multi-site reality and by the fact that the team has grown significantly in recent years. Remote work has also taken on a bigger and bigger role, bringing certain challenges — particularly when it comes to forming informal connections or ties between departments.
Since the initiative aimed to identify action priorities, various initiatives were then developed to give teams opportunities to get to know each other better.
Creating an engagement committee
A diverse and inclusive engagement committee, bringing together employees from various departments and hierarchical levels, was set up to propose activities that would address the areas for improvement that had been identified.
One of the original actions suggested by this committee is to design employee cards, in the style of hockey cards. Employees are introduced through personal and professional details. These cards are shared in the internal newsletter.
Lunch & Learns are also organized to raise awareness of the various departments and to share technical know-how.
Organizing a large-scale event
Still with the goal of deepening connections between employees, Rocky Mountain chose to hold, for the first time in its history, a large-scale event bringing all staff together in the same place at the same time.
"It's a lot of money and a lot of time, but the Amélio survey helped us decide it was important to hold this event. Even though it requires a big investment, we can see that this is what our teams need — to be able to connect."
Of course, the engagement survey also highlights what the organization does well. At Rocky Mountain, the family spirit is particularly appreciated. That's why actions that support it are maintained and help radiate a welcoming, inclusive employer brand.
Redefining ourselves as an organization
An employee engagement initiative with Amélio makes it possible to objectively support decision-making around every facet of the organization.
As another example, seeing employees' wish to better understand the organization's mission, vision and values, the Vision project was launched to better define the organization's direction — based on the input provided by the teams.
The answers gathered in the survey also helped define the place the employee experience will hold in strategic planning over the coming year.
"An initiative like this lets us gradually redefine ourselves as an organization, in terms of values and vision. It's strongly inspired by the answers gathered in the survey. The results we get with Amélio also influence our decision-making — for example, when it comes to changes in our procedures and our performance-evaluation model."
A remarkable participation rate
Finally, one of the points of pride around the engagement initiative at Rocky Mountain is the excellent participation rate. More than 95% of employees answered the survey!
a summit rarely reached!According to the Talent, Culture and Organizational Development advisor at Rocky Mountain, this success is attributable to the collaboration between the organization and Amélio. Indeed, thanks to the communication tools provided by Amélio, she and her team were able to explain the goals and benefits of the initiative for employees as well as for managers. That certainly contributed to their exemplary participation.
The ease of use of the Amélio platform also allowed Rocky Mountain's teams to answer the survey with ease.
Going off the beaten path, together
With a flexible, effective and intuitive tool like the Amélio platform, Rocky Mountain was able to identify what makes its employer brand strong, while prioritizing the changes to make.
Rocky Mountain clearly shows that by focusing on collaboration and involving employees in strategic planning, the employee experience becomes an essential gear for taking on every challenge of growth and going off the beaten path.
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