Stone & Chalk

Stone & Chalk is Australia’s largest innovation community, with hubs in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide that allow emerging tech companies to grow.

As the team puts it: we help founders go further faster.

And they’ve done a great job, with over $4.5 billion in capital raised by their residents and alumni!

Staying on the pulse

Stone & Chalk's South Australia team is small and close-knit, split across operations and startup success roles. Staff work a mix of full-time, part-time, and work-from-home arrangements, so clear, consistent internal communication is essential to keeping service quality high for all of their residents.

For Bec Nitschke, the South Australia Hub Operations Manager at Stone & Chalk, staying aligned and spotting pressure early really matters:

"We need to keep our finger on the pulse each and every day. The founders working out of our hubs will always be our first priority,  and that means making sure everyone on our team feels included and is working well together.”

Moving beyond an annual survey

Like many organisations, Stone & Chalk had relied on an annual survey to gain an understanding of their people. Bec explains how the timing created a recurring problem:

"We did our engagement survey every 12 months and the results wouldn't come out for a few months after that. By the time they'd landed, there was a feeling we may have missed the boat on many of the things that were impacting how we’re working."

For a community built around innovation and inclusion, waiting that amount of time for their people data didn't sit right. So with a Managing Director that had previous experience of Teamgage, the South Australian hub decided to introduce our ongoing pulse check of 7 key survey questions. 

It only takes about one minute to complete, making it easy for Stone & Chalk to use the platform to ask their team for feedback every fortnight.

While other Teamgage customers may run their pulse checks weekly, monthly, or at a cadence that suits their team best, Bec felt that for a small, collaborative team, the fortnightly cadence "hit the sweet spot" of being just frequent enough to keep a finger on the pulse and act while issues were still small and relevant.

Measuring what matters

Working with our team of experts, Stone & Chalk selected their small set of core survey questions that best reflected how the hub operates and the areas that could affect the founder experience.

These core questions focused on areas like:

• Energy
• Workload
• Communication
• Trust

The team also decided it would be useful to rotate through an additional question each period, revisiting themes that surfaced in their annual survey as areas requiring greater focus.

Recent rotating focus questions have included:

• Team Connection
• Recognition

Team Connection, for example, allowed leaders to explore whether people felt truly united across Stone & Chalk's multiple national hubs. Rather than waiting another year to revisit this annual survey theme again, bringing it into Teamgage created some further insights, welcome reassurance and action where required.

Reflecting on the value of additional visibility, Bec notes:

“Rather than waiting 12 months for the next yearly survey, Teamgage creates those ongoing insights, and at a far more granular level. It allows us to take action on areas that otherwise could have drifted."

A safe, constructive feedback loop

Like any new rhythm, there was a learning curve early on; both for the team in how they wrote comments, and for leaders in how they responded. This is important to note, as quite often leaders feel they need to get everything perfect immediately, as opposed to starting a journey together with their people and teams.

For example, Stone & Chalk found that acknowledging positive feedback as well as the challenges, made the process feel more balanced and reinforced a culture of recognition. Bec is keen to highlight this:

"It's easy to just focus on what needs fixing and quickly move past the positive comments. But positive Teamgage feedback is always worth highlighting too. That recognition piece of celebrating what the team is doing well really helps to build balance and trust."

An increase in trust

On the subject of building trust around feedback, Stone & Chalk feel this increased as the team became more comfortable in regularly being asked to have a voice. Bec has seen this shift play out directly:

"As we've gone on, the trust and engagement have really grown. Team members are speaking up more, owning their anonymous responses, and putting their hand up to add further context to the insights we're all seeing."

And remember, for those organisations that aren't able to gain further context around Teamgage responses in this way, leaders can still hit reply on any individual idea or insight to open up a safe and secure communication channel with that anonymous employee.

A real game-changing new feature within the Teamgage platform!

Sharing team results

So what does the process actually look like after the latest round of survey submissions at Stone & Chalk?

As part of business-as-usual, every fortnight, the hub reviews their latest real-time survey results together, providing the opportunity for true visibility in the team.

Using the share functionality built into Teamgage, everyone attending these catch-ups can see the team results beforehand, so they have the opportunity to digest the key insights.

Then with trust already high within the group and having now developed in the Teamgage platform, people then feel prepared and comfortable speaking to the areas needed and what should happen next.

Best practice for taking action

By using questions that are focused and relevant to the team, these survey results are intrinsically more action-oriented, making it easier for the team to agree on what should happen next, assign an action owner, and then track them with a due date.

Bec is clear that keeping actions tight and time-bound is central to how the team operates:

"We ensure that the actions we take off the back of our survey results are tangible and at a level where we can give somebody a couple of weeks to close them out. We don't want to be coming up with actions that will sit there forever."

From there, trust builds in the whole feedback process, as not only is there visibility on results, but clear and obvious action taking place too. To ensure that’s maintained, a status update on current open actions is always covered when the team catch-up to discuss their survey results too.

On keeping that accountability loop alive, Bec explains:

"We always follow up on our action items, to not only ask if it's been done and have we been accountable, but also how do we all feel about their effectiveness and impact?"

If and when any larger insights come up that can't be tackled in this way, they'll be acknowledged and then senior leaders will consider the best course of action after drilling in deeper.

A more data-driven environment

And what about those leaders; what difference have they seen?

For leaders at Stone & Chalk, the burden of uncovering insights and creating action plans alone has shifted to a more collaborative, business-as-usual approach.

Teamgage has helped to deepen their data-driven culture so they can actually measure what's working, what isn't, and where the gaps lie.

For Bec, this shift away from gut feeling is what makes leading their team conversations land slightly differently:

"It's not leaders calling things out based on an abstract feeling. We can actually point to the results we've all contributed to and say, 'here's what our data shows.' That makes it so much easier to raise what we need to and it also builds real trust and credibility in what's being said within the team."

With an average 93% monthly participation in their Teamgage pulse checks, and key areas like team energy and workload management improving by at least 14 percentage points since launch, the data and participation reflect a small, close-knit team that takes internal culture seriously.

What they say

"If you're looking for something that gives you regular, actionable insights into your team, Teamgage will do that in a really easy way. It's that fast feedback loop that's so different to waiting for a set of survey results you get once a year and then responding when it's too late. It allows you to listen, respond and take action with your team on the things that matter to your organisation in a timely way."

Bec Nitschke
‍Hub Operations Manager, South Australia, Stone & Chalk