How Yettel Kept Engagement High During Crisis

The Challenge

The first COVID-19 pandemic wave forced Yettel, just like many other businesses, to deploy a full-scale remote operating model practically overnight. Putting their people in completely new ways of working during a time of crisis, Yettel leadership was well aware that they might lose the daily touch and perspectives of their already stressed & rattled workforce.

The Solution

To stay on top of the crisis and to respond to any developments immediately, Yettel needed real-time data & insights into many aspects of the circumstances, including crisis management, and remote working. At the same time, they did not want to put any burden on their employees with cumbersome surveys.

By choosing LutherOne's continuous listening solution, they could get all that and more. Thanks to smart question distribution (our proprietary algorithm that rotates over 100 customizable questions), Yettel could map dozens of crucial areas with just 6 questions a week.

With real-time dashboards, predictions & personalized recommendations, they could see that they were much closer to the actual root causes behind employee engagement shifts right after the very first survey run.

Results

Tracking trends and seeing the impacts of their decisions immediately helped Yettel’s managers and leadership understand how to better manage the situation.

“In such a crisis, you cannot wait weeks after the survey for results. The big advantage of LutherOne is thus their real-time interactive & self-service dashboards that allow for immediate insight, easy trend tracking and comparing engagement levels of different organizational units with very user friendly cross-tabs & filtering,” - Zsolt Bratinka , Senior Organization Development Consultant at Yettel.

Opening a dialogue based on the results, and due to Yettel’s proactive approach, they kept their engagement levels above market average throughout the crisis while uncovering some long underlying issues. “In some specific cases, the survey even indicated some serious line manager problems, giving us data and grounds to act accordingly,” added Zsolt Bratinka.

Yettel acted quickly once uncovering the problems with line management and, with the help of LutherOne's people-science recommendations, course corrected in real-time, leading to scores above the average during a time of serious worry and uncertainty.

Overall, engagement surveys mediated effects of the crisis, with both engagement and managerial perceptions outperforming their competitors consistently throughout the pandemic. Moreso, Yettel committed to their people, creating a culture that can withstand any crisis.