SEEK

As a market leader in online employment marketplaces, SEEK is consistently recognised as one of the best places to work in technology across the APAC region.

This recognition stems from SEEK’s unwavering commitment to its “people-first” philosophy, a core value that has helped the company maintain its market leadership for decades.

This comes as no surprise to us at Teamgage. In fact during a recent visit to an Agile Malaysia event, we posted about how passionately SEEK CTOs James Ross and Shen Tham talked about “putting people first” and the need to “build the people systems as well as the technological ones.”  

Existing tools  

To fulfill their commitment to “people-first”, a Team Health working group was created, led by Engineering Practices and senior leaders in Engineering. The group decided to start their work by conducting an analysis of what was already capturing employee feedback within SEEK.

They found that, while tools were set up to capture insights regularly for individuals, there was a gap at team-level, that the teams had tried to plug by adopting a variety of different feedback methods, which implies manual work to extract key insights across Engineering.  

The Team Health Working Group decided there had to be a better way.  

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The requirements  

Following their findings, the Team Health Working Group decided they wanted a best practice approach to gaining team feedback and insights.  

To streamline this process, they identified several requirements for a new feedback tool:

• A single tool for easy collaboration and action  
• Simple, relevant questions for their teams  
• Access to historical data and trends  
• The ability to identify trends and patterns across teams, to be tackled at higher levels  
• Demographic data to identify how results differ e.g. across locations, role types  
• Integration with Slack and their existing meeting rhythms  

It was decided that Teamgage met all these needs.  

Customised for success  

The Teamgage platform works by regularly asking each employee for their anonymous feedback on a small set of custom questions. This would normally take about 20 seconds to complete, with results going into a real-time team report.  

We worked with SEEK to understand the needs of the Engineering teams and the demands they would be under and what insights should be prioritised to ensure success.  

It was then decided that the focus of the team health metrics should be on:  

• Communication – to ensure all elements of the project continued to be well communicated within each team  
• Sustainable Pace – to ensure people were staying on top of the project and their workload  
• Clarity and Purpose – to ensure that each person’s specific role and team goals were always understood  

Teams were also able to add their own questions, to further increase engagement and relevancy.  

Aligned with existing meeting rhythms  

For most Engineering teams, this employee feedback was gathered every two weeks to align with the existing SEEK team sprint retros.  

It was at these retros that any improvements or issues could be flagged in the team’s Teamgage results, discussed further and actions created.  

The results  

By adopting this cycle of continuous visibility and improvement, SEEK's Engineering teams were able to maintain at a high response rate, with thousands of report views by their team managers and dozens of actions created by teams.  

Reports from these teams suggested that Teamgage:  

• created a safe space for deep discussions on team health and performance  
• was successful in uncovering ways to communicate better  
• had helped teams feel more empowered to make decisions  
• enabled team leaders to start team conversations using Teamgage data  
• has given senior leaders the ability to pick out trends and act on them

By gaining such excellent levels of visibility and engagement, SEEK is able to act on people-related issues and ensure their values are supported by actions.  

Off the back of this success, SEEK have now expanded their use of Teamgage across even more teams as part of their business-as-usual team activity.  

What They Say  

“Teamgage takes less than 60 seconds to complete and has maintained very high response rates in our Engineering teams.  

I’ve found that people have openness and trust when using the platform, with comments updated in real-time and surfacing issues that might not appear in our regular retrospectives.  

It’s this kind of visibility that has meant that we’ve been able to identify issues early and ensure action is targeted at the right demographic and areas.”  

Andreea Visanoiu  ‍

SEEK Team Health Working Group  

Engineering Practices Lead

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