A little girl defiantly staring down a bull? A masked man in a cape? How about someone who solves the tough everyday challenges at work with aplomb?
At SurveyMonkey, we realized the people we looked up to most were the ones who tackled the gnarliest business issues that organizations face, making life better for their coworkers, customers, and more.
Real everyday heroes can stare down a problem that seems insurmountable and come up with a way to address it that really works. How? By getting good data to support—or develop—a sound strategy and then executing that strategy flawlessly.
To prove it’s possible, we’ve highlighted three impossibly large challenges that nearly all businesses face every day and matched them with three everyday heroes who have used data to carve their own path to overcoming them.
Be the hero at your organization
Find out how you can meet the challenges of today's business environment and save the day with survey data.
51% of employees would take another job if offered.
Employee turnover in the big-rig trucking industry is shockingly high.
Even the high wages the labor-strapped industry commands isn’t always enough to make up for long hours alone on the road, away from friends and family. The American Trucking Association estimates that the largest trucking companies in the US have annualized employee turnover rates at around 94%—and it’s only getting worse.
Indianapolis-based Celadon Trucking is one of the 10 largest truckload carriers in the US and they face the same headwinds shared by the rest of their industry.
“We worked hard to achieve a better-than-average retention rate, but a significant amount of drivers were still quitting within their first 90 days,” said Whitney Boyer, Celadon’s vice president of marketing.
Keeping drivers happy during those first 90 days became a critical focus to Celadon, and they began using surveys to ensure the process was running as smoothly as possible.
With the learnings they got from their onboarding surveys, along with biannual check-ins, the company was able to achieve a 68% improvement in driver retention.
How can you be an HR hero for your organization?
Research from SurveyMonkey shows that staying in tune with what your employees want is the surest path to keeping them around. Try keeping track of how included they feel in your company culture and ensuring they have the tools to develop in their career.
95% of product launches fail.
Companies are being pushed harder than ever to move quickly.
Increased competition and the ever-growing pace of business have shrunk the average product life cycle, not only narrowing the window for a product to thrive in the market, but making it even more challenging to ensure it’s been developed thoughtfully.
But innovative development frameworks and flexible tools have left room for the savviest companies to find their niche.
Take Helix Sleep, a New York-based bedding company aiming to upend the industry with personalized, custom-made mattresses. The tricky thing about making personalized products is understanding exactly what consumers need. That means market research, which is often outsourced, making it expensive and sluggish to meet the demands of modern product development.
Helix Sleep found a better way, by using SurveyMonkey Audience to run their own market research at nearly every stage of their product development life cycle. That allowed them to get critical insights that truly changed the way they developed their products and ran their business.
Surveys helped them come up with new product ideas, decide on pricing, create demand forecasts for their manufacturer—and do it fast, cutting their product development cycle by 50%.
How can you take a product to market like a hero?
The companies at the forefront of product design, development, and marketing are making the transition to Agile Market Research, where every team can feel empowered to run their own research to make sure they’re meeting consumers’ needs. Can you conduct your own market research to stay ahead of the competition?
45% of employees say they share passwords.
The average security breach cost affected US enterprises $1.3 million in 2017, and stolen or weak passwords were responsible for 81% of the breaches that year.
But poor password hygiene can be a symptom of some of the larger, systemic issues that IT administrators grapple with every day. How do you get something that’s scalable enough to adapt to growth, but is implemented in a way that lets people use it for everyday work without falling into bad habits?
Take the University of Ottawa. Scale is certainly an issue for them: With more than 40,000 enrollees and a roster that sheds and gains 1000s of people a year, keeping track of who’s using which program is extremely challenging. It’s even more difficult to ensure they’re all using them safely.
So when Marc Alary, an IT manager at uOttawa, set out to bring a survey platform to the university, he knew he needed something that would be secure, and work for everyone—from students to faculty.
SurveyMonkey Enterprise fit the bill. With centralized administration of all university accounts, he could be sure everyone was using the same, secure platform to gather feedback. With everyone’s data securely stored in the same place, the IT department didn’t have to worry about critical information getting lost in the university’s constant churn of entering and exiting students.
Plus, single sign-on capabilities meant anyone logging in from a uOttawa account gets automatically directed to their enterprise survey platform. What’s that mean? No shared passwords, better security hygiene, and better control over sensitive data.
How can you be an IT hero?
Enterprise platforms can help you build a flexible infrastructure that makes it convenient for employees to be security-conscious, but sometimes you need more than that. SurveyMonkey research shows many employees have bad security & compliance habits, which might be putting your company at risk. Even worse, many don’t know how to escalate a security issue even if they spotted one. How strong is your security culture, and how can you keep your data safe?
