April 2024

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Is There Hope for Toxic Workplaces?

The remarkable transformation at Westcomm Pump offers a blueprint for turning around workplaces with depleted morale and trust issues.

The first in-person gathering I went to focused on emotional intelligence at work was EQCON in San Diego, California, back in 2018. It was there that I first heard the story of the remarkable cultural transformation at Westcomm Pump, and it’s stuck with me ever since. Today I want to share that story as a way to demonstrate the power of measuring an organization’s climate with the Vital Signs assessments – and what’s possible when people buy in, especially senior executives, and take action on the data.

1. ‘It just hit differently to see the graph’

Things weren’t going very well at Westcomm. 

Based in Calgary, Canada, Westcomm Pump is an engineering company. They design large and complex fluid transportation systems for the oil and gas industry. In 2014, CEO Jeff Shen took over for his father, who had founded the company. By his own admission, Jeff struggled in his first executive role and company morale and performance suffered. In an attempt to turn things around, Jeff hired Hanley Brite, Founder and Principal with Authentic Connections, Inc. (ACI), a consulting firm dedicated to enhancing leadership and organizational vitality (and at the time, a Six Seconds Preferred Partner).

They decided to administer a Team Vital Signs (TVS) assessment to get clear data on the current climate at Westcomm. When the results came back, it shocked the leaders, including Jeff. 

The TVS provides a macro look at employee engagement, with each employee scored as Engaged, Neutral or Disengaged. In the initial assessment, zero employees scored as Engaged. Zero. Not even the leaders themselves scored as Engaged. A near majority (40%) scored in the Disengaged category, signaling widespread discontent. That’s a hard place to do high quality work.

Brite relayed the leaders’ reactions years later while presenting at EQCON: “We knew it was bad,” Shen told Brite and the rest of the leadership team. “But it hits different when you see it on a graph like that.”

Here’s a Team Vital Signs sample report if you’re interested in what it looks like.

2. Taking ownership at the top

Shen and the leadership team didn’t hide from the data. They committed to changing the culture and increasing engagement through honest dialogue and hard work – starting with themselves.

Each of the three leaders on the leadership team took the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence assessment (SEI) and participated in weekly coaching sessions on their strengths and challenges. They also did group coaching about their patterns and modeling as a leadership team, and worked together with Brite to implement strategies and actions identified in the TVS report.

The two lowest items in the TVS survey were “I get feedback effectively” and “The team takes responsibility for work.” Teams met off-site to address these issues directly. This led to many important conversations within the team that had not happened before but were critical. 

(Side note: For data nerds like me, this is probably the coolest part of the Vital Signs assessments. It gives you not only the macro view of the climate, but also data on the underlying reasons. Is it a culture of micromanaging? Low accountability? Lacking joy? It’s one thing to know things are bad. It’s way more helpful to know what behaviors or patterns to change to make things better, and that’s what the TVS does).

3. A company transformed

Eight months later, Westcomm felt like a different company. In the post-assessment, 1 in 5 employees ((22%) scored as Engaged – nearly matching Gallup’s global average. That’s not necessarily a high performing organization, but it’s a significant improvement. The percentage of Disengaged employees had dropped from 40% to 11%. 

As one participant noted, “We have become a much more cohesive unit in the past 6 months.”

But the most powerful testimonial came from Jeff:

“The TVS process helped the organization as a whole by bringing in measurable results and allowing a discussion on the topic. We are able to look at ourselves and each other and be brutally honest and provide meaningful feedback. People take ownership of their roles and actions, and it promotes leadership throughout the company. Most important for me personally, it holds me as a leader accountable to my team and helps me to take ownership of my role.”

As Joshua Freedman has told me many times, “You get what you measure, so measure what matters.”