At the start of this 12 months, Fresh Tracks Canada had a 2.1 (out of 5) ranking on the nameless assessment website Glassdoor, that means most staff reported feeling “dissatisfied” working on the firm. By late November, the Vancouver-based tour operator had improved it to 4.6, changing into the top-rated Canadian journey firm on the employer-rating platform.
How did they do it? By treating their Glassdoor ranking not as an remoted drawback to be solved, however a symptom of deeper points that wanted to be tackled head on. “For me, it was extra a couple of want for a cultural transformation,” says Sushant Trivedi, Recent Tracks Canada’s CEO. “The Glassdoor ranking was only a reflection of that.”
Trivedi, who got here onboard in January, first got here throughout the detrimental evaluations when he visited the corporate’s Glassdoor web page himself, doing the standard due diligence many people do after we’re entertaining a job provide. A put up from June 2021 mentioned “Even after expressing extreme burn out, nothing was executed to assist those that have labored so exhausting on preserving the corporate alive in a pandemic.” (It was accompanied by a 1 star ranking, the bottom you can provide.) One other, posted a month earlier, warned “keep away” and blamed administration for “doing a very good job of guaranteeing the corporate is non-existent by December.”
“Journey is inherently a human enterprise, and FreshTracks prides itself on being a human-centric firm—but it surely was evident that what was being serviced to the skin world wasn’t being serviced contained in the group,” says Trivedi. Staff had been feeling overworked and unappreciated.
When Trivedi joined the corporate, Recent Tracks was rising from what he calls “the existential disaster of Covid.” Restrictions and closures meant bookings had been down by 50 per cent, and because of this Recent Books had to scale back their headcount by about 40 per cent. Trivedi introduced on assist to flip issues round post-pandemic and knew that these Glassdoor scores and feedback can be essential knowledge factors as he labored to remodel the corporate’s tradition into a spot the place each worker felt like that they had an impression on the corporate’s success.
It was no small process. One of many first adjustments was easy however significant: He renamed the “folks and tradition” division to “folks operations” so as to create a better sense of collective accountability for tradition throughout the firm. “I don’t imagine tradition ought to relaxation within the palms of 1 particular person or workforce,” says Trivedi. So he flattened the management construction, and moved autonomy over choices and budgets down to particular person groups to handle. “Fairly than top-down, I made it a bottom-up firm,” he says. “Everybody now has extra empowerment and a better sense of possession.” This, he says, has helped bridge a perceived distance between management and staff on the bottom—mirrored in the truth that “administration” hasn’t been referred to as out negatively on Glassdoor because the adjustments had been made.
Key to all of that is what Trivedi calls “creating an atmosphere of psychological security,” which implies creating the sort of place the place an worker can name out the great and the unhealthy with out concern of repercussion, and with a way that it’s really going to be taken severely. The summer season was a chaotic time to be in journey—pent-up demand, delays everywhere, an acute labour shortage—and it was difficult, to say the least, for Recent Tracks’ groups to navigate. So Trivedi made positive that each assembly included time for him to ask “what does assist seem like?” so he may present sensible options to no matter employees had been combating. “Each Thursday, the operations workforce and I sat and ate lunch collectively, taking the time to join and chat by way of ache factors,” he says. “And that collaboration really wound up contributing to a double-digits improve in repeat enterprise in contrast to pre-pandemic ranges.”
Whereas there are all types of guides on the Web about how to enhance your Glassdoor ranking, touting hacks like asking your staff to go away good evaluations to re-balance the ranking algorithm, Trivedi by no means as soon as entertained these. “With the quantity of effort it takes to go and persuade somebody to write a assessment, you might take that point, power and assets to perceive the issues and collectively discover options,” he says. “You’ll really drive organizational outcomes, and the Glassdoor numbers will comply with.”
And whereas the detrimental evaluations can really feel like they’re crucial, Trivedi believes the constructive evaluations will be simply as helpful. “Typically determining what you’re doing properly, and doubling down on that, has a far better impression than being obsessive about fixing issues,” he says. “As a result of we had been ready to monitor, be taught and act, it actually helped us to begin a constructive flywheel.”
And it was ahead momentum that benefited extra than simply their Glassdoor ranking. This 12 months, Recent Tracks grew from 50 to 100 staff and, thanks partly to its tradition of open communication and collaborative teamwork, didn’t battle with hiring like many different corporations. They’ve booked their highest variety of travellers ever this 12 months, and are on monitor for document income in 2022.
“Anybody who appears to be like at worker well being and happiness as an unbiased a part of the enterprise won’t ever discover sustainable progress,” concludes Trivedi. “Making Recent Tracks a rewarding place to work is a part of our company technique. It’s inherently baked into each single factor.”
