Always Ready to Adapt: Michigan Virtual Employees Lead the Way to Improvement

Michigan Virtual is a nonprofit, K-12 education services provider. It’s an organization that believes in the power of big ideas, and its leaders know that students depend on their ability to adapt to a world of rapid change.

Following this call to stay agile, the board and leadership at Michigan Virtual decided last year to try something new: an Employee Happiness Conversation with Amazing Workplace — an automated system to gather employee detailed feedback and keep responses anonymous. It’s called a “Happiness Conversation” because it feels more like a talk between two people than a traditional, form-type survey, and it uses a unique feeling verification technology to capture how employees really feel.

Celebrating Employee Happiness®

As Michigan Virtual’s results came in, there was a lot to celebrate. 94% of full-time employees and 75% of part-time employees participated.  Nearly all participating employees (97% and 98% respectively) said that they were satisfied, happy, or very happy working at Michigan Virtual.  These impressive results make Michigan Virtual a Certified Amazing Workplace for the second year in a row. Happiness was particularly high in topics covering Safety, Belonging, Empowerment, and Enjoyment. Employees widely praised their helpful coworkers, supportive leaders, and “people-first” culture.

Pursuing Continuous Improvement

While the leaders, board, and employees were excited to celebrate their successes, they were even more motivated to identify real opportunities for improvement. The last time Michigan Virtual sought employee feedback, they used a traditional survey from another provider. With that survey, participating employees felt the process was clunky and limited qualitative feedback. Meanwhile, leaders and the board were unenthusiastic about the results from the survey, which were hard to interpret, not very detailed, and didn’t point clearly toward next steps.

With Amazing Workplace, staff and leaders loved the Conversation process (95% of feedback on the system itself was positive), and the top reason they loved it was the clear emphasis on asking them what they’d like to see improved.

Giving relatable, usable feedback on each aspect of their work life made employees “feel like they were part of making their workplace better,” said Alicia Ganaway, Senior Human Resources Director at Michigan Virtual.

Meanwhile, leaders and board members loved the clarity and directness in the results shown in the Amazing Workplace Platform. “They immediately got it,” said Ganaway, “We definitely prefer this tool and look forward to using it again.”

Focused on What’s Next

Celebrating positive results and finding areas to improve is just the beginning. Michigan Virtual is focused on action, planning targeted actions to address things employees brought up in their responses. They’ve set their sights on continuing to increase Employee Happiness, keeping their valuable employees on the team, supported, empowered, and engaged in their mission: Maximizing learning and teaching by bringing together the best in people and technology.